For Lust of Knowing (3 page)

The Persians
by Aeschylus was first staged in 472 BC, seven years after the withdrawal of the Persian army from mainland Greece. Both the author and his audience were veterans of that war. Aeschylus's brother was killed in the aftermath of Marathon. His hand was cut off as he was hanging on to a Persian ship. Aeschylus's play commemorates the triumph of Greek arms against vastly superior forces. However, as Lewis has indicated, it seeks to do this from the Persian point of view. The play, which is set in Persia, opens with a chorus of Persians anxiously speculating about the fate of Xerxes's expedition. Atossa, the emperor's mother, has had ominous dreams. Then a messenger arrives with a detailed report of the disaster of Salamis. (In Greek terms, this was a
peripeteia
, a surprising turn of events.) The chorus summons up the ghost of Xerxes's father, Darius, and the ghost declares the disaster to have been brought about through the hubris of Xerxes and predicts the defeat at Plataea. Darius is presented as a capable and heroic figure. With the arrival of Xerxes himself, lamentations are redoubled at the court. It is important to bear in mind that the play really is a tragedy, even though the Greeks are not its victims.
⁷

Voltaire thought that history began with Herodotus's history of the Graeco-Persian war. Much of the
History
written by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (
c.
490–425 BC) was based on first-hand experience, for the author had travelled widely in Asia Minor, Scythia, Egypt, Babylon and elsewhere. Moreover, so far as his information on Persia was concerned, much of this is likely to have come from Greek mercenaries who had served in the Persian armies. Greek-speaking Persians may also have served as Herodotus's informants. It has been suggested that the Persian wars served as the original stimulus for the writing of the book and that Herodotus's account of those wars was written first, with the other parts on Egypt and elsewhere being written later.
The
History
opens with a preface on the legendary origins of the hostility between the Europeans and the Asiatics. Thus Herodotus narrates the stories of the rapes of Io, Europa and Medea, before proceeding on to the Trojan War. Although he stresses the antiquity of the quarrel between the East and the West, there is absolutely no hint in his
History
that the Trojans are in any sense inferior to the Greeks. Real history in Herodotus's book begins not with the legends that make up the story of the Trojan War but with the career of the last king of Lydia, Croesus, and his defeat by the Persians and their conquest of the Lydians. More generally, Herodotus was especially interested in the victims of Persian imperialism: Lydians, Egyptians, Scythians and Libyans.

Herodotus seems to have been singularly free of racial prejudice and because of his open-minded interest in other cultures he was known as the ‘barbarophile'. He wrote an admiring account of the achievements of the Egyptian pharaohs and he harped on the grandeur of Egypt and Lydia before those lands fell to the Persians. As for the Persians, Herodotus tended to focus on the ways in which the Persians differed from the Greeks – in their tradition of despotic rule, their practice of polygamy, in their birthday celebrations and other matters. However, these were specific differences and there is no sense in Herodotus of some overarching Otherness. Incidentally, one thing that struck him about the Persians was their racism: ‘After their own nation they hold their nearest neighbours most in honour, then the nearest but one – and so on, their respect decreasing as the distance grows, and the most remote being the most despised. Themselves they consider in every way superior to everyone else in the world, and allow other nations a share of good qualities decreasing according to distance, the furthest off being in their view the worst.'
⁸
He consistently stressed the importance of
nomoi
, or traditional behavioural norms, forming social customs. He thought that long-established custom could make anything seem normal and the strange ways of the Persians merely furnished proofs of Herodotus's way of thinking. Moreover, though he enumerated the ways in which foreign cultures differed from Greek culture, this did not imply the superiority of Greek culture, and Herodotus repeatedly acknowledged Greece's various debts to other cultures, particularly those of Egypt and Phoenicia.
Indeed, he believed that Greece had been originally colonized from the East and that the Spartans were the descendants of the Egyptians. Certainly the Persians were far less alien in his eyes than the Scythians. According to Said, Herodotus conquered the Orient by visiting it and writing about it.
⁹
Perhaps, but if so, his was an entirely metaphorical conquest.

The dramatist Euripides (
c.
484–406 BC) was the best known of the great Greek tragedians. His play,
The Bacchae
, was probably produced posthumously in Athens in 405 BC and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It deals with the coming of the god Dionysius to Thebes. The Theban women become his orgiastic devotees, or Bacchantes, but the city's king Pentheus refuses to acknowledge the divinity of Dionysius – this despite such clear manifestations of Dionysius' power as the destruction of Pentheus' palace. Then Dionysius, disguised as one of his cultists, persuades Pentheus to disguise himself as a woman in order to witness the Dionysian mysteries. However, Pentheus is unmasked and torn to pieces by the Bacchantes.
¹⁰

According to Said, in
The Bacchae
Euripides links Dionysius with threatening Oriental mysteries. The play, which was produced at a time when Oriental cults were spreading, presented the lure of the Orient as an insinuating danger: ‘Dionysius is explicitly connected with his Asiatic origin.'
¹¹
But what ‘Asiatic origin'? Dionysius was the son of Zeus and Semele, the Theban daughter of Cadmus, who in turn was grandfather of Pentheus. It follows that Dionysius is no more Asiatic than Pentheus. The only grounds for possibly thinking of him as an Asiatic was that he had conquered a large part of Asia (but, on those grounds, one would also have to regard Warren Hastings and General Allenby as Asiatics). It would be sad if a dyspeptic reading put people off reading the play as it is not a polemical tract attacking the introduction of new Oriental ideologies into Greece.
The Bacchae
is a work of imagination that has nothing to do with agitprop. In the play, Euripides presents the rational and the irrational as being found within the individual, rather than distributed between the two continents.
As E. R. Dodds pointed out in
The Greeks and the Irrational
, the play was not intended as an attack on Dionysiac cults, for to ‘resist Dionysius is to repress the elemental in one's own nature'.
¹²
The legitimacy of Dionysius' divine status is emphatically affirmed.

Instead, the play commemorates the obstinacy and folly of Pentheus. His grandfather Cadmus, the seer Teiresias and the Chorus all warn him against opposing the Dionysiac rites. Their warnings are seen by Said as presaging Orientalism: ‘hereafter Oriental mysteries will be taken seriously, not least because they challenge the rational Western mind to new exercises of its enduring ambition and power'.
¹³
But by the time Euripides wrote this play, the Dionysiac cult was an accepted part of the spiritual landscape of Athens and there is no evidence that Euripides or any of his contemporaries thought of Dionysius as an irrational Oriental. The play refers to his ‘white skin' and, according to legend, he first entered Greece from Thrace (so from the north, not the east). The actual cult was probably Mycenaean in origin. In the twentieth century the theme of the Dionysiac strain within Greek culture and Western culture more generally was taken up and studied by the great German cultural historian and iconographer, Aby Warburg. Sir Ernst Gombrich (who later became director of London University's Warburg Institute) summarized Warburg's approach: ‘In its myth we find enshrined the extremes of emotion and self-abandon from which modern man must shrink in awe but which, as preserved in the symbols of art, contains those very moulds of emotion which alone make artistic expression possible. Without the primeval passion which was discharged in maenadic dances and Bacchantic frenzy, Greek art would never have been able to create those “superlatives” of gesture with which the greatest of Renaissance artists expressed the deepest human values.'
¹⁴
Far from being Asian monopolies, the Dionysiac, the frenzied and the irrational lie at the roots of Western culture.

Xenophon (
c.
430–354 BC) was a disciple of Socrates and a historian. An aristocrat, he was out of sympathy with the Athenian republic of his time and therefore he took service for a while in the army of the Persian prince Cyrus, son of King Darius II. Xenophon's
Cyropaedia
(‘Education of Cyrus') presented an idealized portrait of the Persian king in order to serve as a vehicle for Xenophon's meditations on statecraft and related matters. He rather idealized the achievements of the founder of the dynasty Cyrus the Great (539–529 BC), so that the
Cyropaedia
reads as a mixture of political treatise and historical novel.
¹⁵
In Xenophon's book, the Greeks would do well to emulate the achievements of Cyrus, the perfect ruler and general. Xenophon's account of the admirable Persian constitution was really his own invention. However, by the time he wrote, it was clear that the Persian empire was in difficulties and the work ends up condemning Persian luxury and chronicling the disorder into which Persia had fallen after the death of Cyrus. It should also be noted that in his
Anabasis
, his account of the long march home of a band of 10, 000 Greek soldiers after Cyrus had been defeated in his attempt to take the throne from his brother Artaxerxes II, Xenophon presented the Persians as soft and treacherous. Even so the
Anabasis
is more concerned with Greek politics and the rhetoric of leadership than it is with the Persians and, as the Italian novelist and critic Italo Calvino remarked of Xenophon, in this book he consistently showed respect for the hostile lands they travelled through: ‘If he often displays an aloofness or aversion towards “barbarian” customs, it must also be said that “colonialist” hypocrisy is completely foreign to him. He is aware of being at the head of a horde of foreign parasites…'
¹⁶

Although Aeschylus, Euripides and Herodotus cannot fairly be presented as unambiguous prototypes of the Orientalist accomplices of imperialism, this is not to say that racial and anti-Oriental stereotyping cannot be found in Greek writings. It would be astonishing if all Greeks were entirely free of such prejudices. The famous philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bc) was understandably prejudiced in favour of what he knew best, which was the city state, and in his treatise,
The
Politics
, he presented an unflattering portrait of Oriental despotism. He claimed that Persia was typical of tyrannies that forbade private associations and exercised close surveillance of their citizens. But tyranny was not a specifically Oriental institution and Aristotle discussed Persian tyranny in the same breath as that of Periander of Corinth.
¹⁷
Similarly he ranked Persia with Sparta and Crete as being among the martial races. On the other hand, Aristotle did believe that tyranny was more acceptable to non-Greek races: ‘and it is because barbarians are by natural character more slavish than Greeks (and Asiatics than Europeans) that they tolerate despotic rule without resentment'.
¹⁸
Towards the end of
The Politics
he speculated on the effects that climate had on the people of Europe, making them full of spirit, whereas ‘the Asiatic races have both brains and skill, but are lacking in courage and will-power; so they have remained enslaved and subject'.
¹⁹
However, it is important to bear in mind that Aristotle was not really very interested in Asia or its problems. He was writing about Greece and its city states, even though such states had been doomed by the rise of Alexander's Macedonian empire and both Greek and Persian territories had been incorporated within its borders. The physician Hippocrates (d. c. 400 bc), like Aristotle, believed that climate and region had a role in shaping people.
²⁰
In On
Airs, Waters and Places
, he compared geophysical conditions in Asia and Europe and argued that Asian temperament was different from that of the European because the climate was different. (Earlier Herodotus had made his quasi-fictional Cyrus remark that ‘a soft country makes soft men'.) This sort of thinking would resurface in the seventeenth century in the writing of Montesquieu.

In the Roman period, Rome fought a series of wars against the Parthian and Sasanian rulers of Persia. However, fighting on the empire's eastern front does not seem to have been accompanied by any distinctive racist propaganda about sinister Orientals. Long before the rise of Islam in the seventh century, there were large numbers of Arabs settled in Rome's eastern provinces and some Arabs were
prominent in Roman society. The Emperor Philip (AD 244–49)was an Arab. The Emperor Severus married an Arab and hence the Severan line (AD 193–235) was half Arab. The famous Neoplatonist philosopher, Iamblichus, was an Arab. But the word Arab was more commonly used to describe a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life than it was used as a racial designation. The full contribution of Arabs (and of Persians, Berbers and others) to Roman culture and society has been masked by the tendency of the Arabs of the cities to assume Roman or Greek names. The satirical poet Juvenal complained about the prevalence of Oriental cultural influence in Rome: ‘the Orontes [a river in Syria] has flowed into the Tiber'. In his
Satires
he associated the Greek and Syrian inhabitants of Rome with decadence and soft living. Most of the inhabitants of the eastern provinces of the Roman empire were Arabs or Aramaic speakers. Rome maintained on its eastern frontier a series of client kingdoms – Emesa, Nabataea, Palmyra and Edessa – which were Arab. Palmyra and Petra were great cities of commerce and high culture. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus wrote with admiration of the Nabataean Arabs of the region. Arab auxiliaries fought in Roman armies against the Persians. Not only had Arabs been settling throughout the eastern provinces of the empire centuries before the Islamic conquests, but there were also communities of Arabs in some of the ports of the western Mediterranean. Some Arabcommunities even settled in Roman Britain.
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Arabs participated in a Mediterranean-centred classical culture and in the medieval centuries that followed, Islam was to become one of the chief legatees of that culture.