Sophist Kings
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Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy as a Product
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Solon the Thinker, John David Lewis
Sophist Kings
Persians as Other in Herodotus
Vernon L. Provencal
Bloomsbury Academic
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To my wife, Tammy-Lynn,
our children, Rachel, Roland, Spencer, Taylor and Vanessa,
our grandchildren, Caden, Chloe and Sophia
and our extended families of Tiberts and Dawsons.
In Memoriam
Grandmother
Caroline Matilda Dawson (1909–1981)
‘Mom’
Contents
Acknowledgements
ix
Introduction1
0.1 Greek and Other
2
0.2 Summary overview
9
0.3 Note on abbreviations, dates and translations
12
1
2
3
4
Herodotus and the Histories
1.1 Herodotus
1.2 Historical narrative of the Histories
1.3 Rhetorical purpose of the Histories
1.4 Argument of the Histories
1.5 Persia as the sophistic Other of Greece
1.6 Rhetorical purpose of representing the Persians as sophistic Other
13
Herodotus and the Sophists
2.1 Sophists and their teachings
2.2 Sophist teachings in Herodotus
2.3 Introducing Persians as sophists
2.4 Conclusion
29
Herodotus and the Persians
3.1 Persian ethnos
3.2 Religion in Persia
3.3 Achaemenid religion: Ahuramazdaism
3.4 Persian kingship and empire
3.5 Achaemenid model of kingship
95
Persians as Other in Herodotus
4.1 Herodotus’ map of the world
4.2 Herodotus’ cultural grid
4.3 Egyptian–Scythian axis: Nomos hieros vs nomos phusikos
4.4 Greek–Persian axis: Nomos basileus vs nomos phuseōs
14
16
17
18
23
25
29
36
71
93
95
118
130
144
152
161
162
165
171
177
viiiContents
5
Sophist Kings
5.1 Persosophists in Herodotus
5.2 Archetype of the sophist king
5.3 Median sophist kings
5.4 Persian sophist kings
5.5 Achaemenid sophist kings
5.6 Persosophist Greeks
215
Conclusion
251
Notes
Bibliography
Expanded Table of Contents
Index of Passages – Herodotus’ Histories
Index of Persons
215
223
225
228
235
243
259
291
316
321
327
Acknowledgements
This work has been enabled by research grants, sabbatical leaves and collegial
support at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and is indebted to
teachers, present and past, of the University of King’s College and the Department
of Classics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Special thanks to those
friends and colleagues of the Atlantic Classical Association and the Classical
Association of Canada, who have shown a supportive interest in my work on
Herodotus over the years, and in particular to the sustained encouragement
of friend and fellow classicist Beert Verstraete (Professor Emeritus, Acadia).
Finally, a word of sincere thanks to past and present editorial staff tasked with
seeing this work through to publication and to the readers for their helpful
comments and suggestions.
Introduction
What justification did Xerxes have for invading Greece, or his father for
invading Scythia? … Only, I suppose, that they were following … the law of
nature.
Plato, Gorgias 483d, my translation
Sophist Kings: Persians as Other in Herodotus arose from pondering the
possibility that the view expressed above by the sophist Callicles in Plato’s
Gorgias might owe as much to Herodotus’ representation of the Persians as to
Plato’s representation of the sophists. The feasibility of that hypothesis requires
challenging the scholarly status quo on two fronts. First, by demonstrating that
Herodotus has more in common with the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus
than the sophist Protagoras, such that in the Histories he positions himself
as standing apart from and in dialogue with the sophists as his intellectual
contemporaries: not so far apart on the sophists’ more moderate teachings (e.g.
nomos is a necessary human convention), but utterly opposed to more radical
views (e.g. might is right), and always apart in his professed belief that human
affairs are, in some manner, subject to divine governance. Above all, it must
be explained how Herodotus is not a ‘cultural relativist’ in the same sense as
Protagoras.1 Second, that Herodotus’ dialogical relationship to the sophists
takes the form of attributing the teachings and methods of the sophists to the
Persians (rather than to himself or to the Greeks, except those who ascribe to
the ‘Persosophist’ ideology), such that he consistently represents the Persians as
espousing and practising the teachings of the sophists in their specific role as
the ideological ‘Other’ of the Greeks. Challenging the status quo on these two
fronts, the further aim of Sophist Kings is to advance Herodotean scholarship by
demonstrating how the argument of the Histories is constructed on the premise
that the cause of war between Greece and Persia lies in the cultural antagonism
2
Sophist Kings
rooted in the conflicting ideologies of the ‘rule of law’ and the ‘law of nature’. By
‘rule of law’ is meant the principle handed down in the archaic nomoi of Greece
rooted in the epic vision of the justice of Zeus in Homer and Hesiod; by ‘law
of nature’ is meant the principle espoused by such radical sophists as Callicles
in the nomo-phusis debate prominent in fifth-century Athens (e.g. Thucydides
5.105, where the Athenians invoke the ‘law of nature’ to justify their subjection
of Melos). That argument, of course, explicitly overthrows the arkhaios nomos
that established the justice of Zeus – rather than the natural justice of predator
and prey – as the ruling principle of the Greek polis (Hesiod, Works and Days
ll. 276–85).
0.1 Greek and Other
My interest in researching Herodotus was sparked in the mid-1990s by
Hornblower, Greek Historiography (1994), and fanned by the influence of
the ‘cultural turn’ on Classical studies in the late 1980s and 1990s, which
was partly the result of widespread response in the academy to E. Said,
Orientalism (1978). Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus (1988), E. Hall, Inventing
the Barbarian (1989), Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others
(1993) and Georges, Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience (1994) formed
the starting point of my study of the Persians as Other in Herodotus. J. Hall,
Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997) and Hellenicity (2002) heralded a
new debate (Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (2001)) on
how the Greeks self-identified as Hellenes that would both advance the historiographical focus on the Other in Herodotus and contribute to an emerging
critique. Another source of this emerging critique came from an aggressive
preference for material culture over literary sources as providing a more
objective basis for the study of antiquity, which occurred, naturally enough,
among such Ancient Near East archaeologists as Sancisi-Weerdenburg and
Kuhrt, who led the ‘Achaemenid Workshops’ of the 1980s that practically
excised Herodotus from Ancient Near East studies. New archaeological
studies of ancient Greek art and architecture also appeared that represented
a growing divide within Classical studies: Miller, Athens and Persia in the
Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (1997) reflected a move
away from focusing on the oppositional relationship of Greek and Other,
while Cohen (ed.), Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of
the Other in Greek Art (2000) furthered it. The cultural debt of the Greeks to
Introduction
3
Near Eastern influence had already been recognized by Burkert, Near Eastern
Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (1992) and West, The East
Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997). The
new emphasis on cultural receptivity re-contextualized the so-called ‘Greek
miracle’ as a distinctive branch of Mediterranean culture, whose development
was indebted to the pre-existing culture of the Ancient Near East. Cohen
(2000) registered ‘the latest scholarly clarion call [to] move beyond the binary
thought and consideration of the opposition of the Greek Self and the Other’
(11), signalled early on by Pelling, ‘East is East and West is West – Or Are
They? National Stereotypes in Herodotus’ (1997), which called for a ‘nuancing’
rather than ‘rejection’ of the categories (65). When Gruen introduced Cultural
Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity (2005a), he did so by firing
a warning shot across the bow of ‘Self and Other’ (7):
Much has been written, especially in recent years, about stereotypes of the
‘other,’ negative images and distortions employed to enhance reflections in the
mirror of a nation’s own self-perception. Scholars have applied the analysis
widely for both the ancient and the modern worlds. This has tended to oversimplify what is, in fact, a complex, subtle, and diverse set of processes. It
obscures the multifarious ways in which nations fashioned representatives of
one another, borrowed and revamped different traditions in order to articulate
their identities in a broader community of peoples.
In 2011, Gruen edited another volume, Cultural Identity in the Ancient
Mediterranean, and published a monograph, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity,
which single out Hartog, E. Hall, Cartledge and J. Hall (2011c: 2) as formative
of the ‘scholarly consensus’ that the Persian wars formed ‘the pivotal turning
point in the conception of Greek identity’, which ‘prompted Greeks to reconsider the values that gave them distinctiveness and to shape those values by
contrast with a constructed “barbarian” who would set them in high relief ’’
(2011c: 9). Citing Momigilano, Alien Wisdom (1975), and Isaac, The Invention
of Slavery in Classical Antiquity (2004), for support, Gruen targets specific
pages in Hartog (1988), E. Hall (1989), Cartledge (1993), J. Hall (1997, 2002),
as well as Georges (1994), Hornblower (1991), Wiesehöfer (2005), Tuplin
(1999) and Mitchell (2007) as constituting ‘the overwhelming communis
opinio’, which he then invites the reader to question (2011a: 67; 2011c: 9nn.
1, 2):
The ‘Orientalizing’ of the Persian … drove Greeks to distinguish their special
characteristics from the despised ‘Other’ who lived contentedly under despotism,
4
Sophist Kings
scorned freedom, and preferred servility to rationality and self-determination.
Such is the overwhelming communis opinio. Should we buy it?
Gruen (2011c: 9)2
Gruen’s contention imputes to the school of Greek and Other the view
that Herodotus did ‘compose a manifesto to advocate the superiority of a
constitutional system, to celebrate Hellenic values’ and ‘to suggest essentialist
characteristics that entailed an irremediable separation between the peoples’
(80). But where does one find an essentialist view of Herodotus explicitly
advocated by the school of Greek and Other?
The view expressed early on by Cartledge (in which he quotes a crucial
statement made by Hartog) speaks of cultural and ideological difference,
without hint of essentialism:
Yet however tolerant Herodotus was prepared to be of the social and religious
‘customs’ of the non-Greeks, including the Persians, he was not at all prepared
to be tolerant of the ‘Law’ or ‘laws’ of the Great King of Persia. On the
contrary, in Herodotus’ book the latter personage emblematized all that was
wrong with oriental despotism, and ‘the question of power, barbarian – hence,
royal – power, set in opposition to the world of the Greek city-republics, runs
right through the Histories, constituting an important element in its organization’ [Hartog 1988: 322] … This difference, this ‘otherness’ was not just
an important organizational element but the crucial explanatory datum for
Herodotus.
Cartledge (1990: 37–8)
The closest one comes to a scholar espousing an essentialist view of Greeks and
barbarians on Herodotus’ behalf is in some rather unguarded statements made
in Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience (1994) by Georges: ‘the congenital
inability of Asiatic barbarians to understand the divine will’ (128); ‘the real
causes of the enmity between the Greeks and the barbarians of Asia do not lie in
the consequences of specific crimes and retributions but flow out of the underlying, “organic” differences between Greeks and barbarians’ (129). Georges
comes dangerously close to imputing proto-racist stereotyping3 and essentialism to Herodotus and his contemporaries when he introduces Herodotus as
promulgating a current stereotype of the barbarian as ‘atrocious and perverse,
given to human butchery, cannibalism, incest, the feminization of men, and
the masculine empowerment of women’ (123). On the other hand, Georges
sees the kind of cultural fluidity in Herodotus that argues against an essentialist
opposition of Greek and Other:
Introduction
5
His work as a whole is a grand meditation on the nature of [t]he world of
humans and gods in its inexhaustible variety. From this meditation arises,
however, not the strict and linear opposition between barbarian and Hellene
canonized by Aeschylus and caricatured by comedians, but a taxonomy of
human behaviour that threatens to span the received distance between the two
human poles of barbarism and Hellenism, or even to erase it.
Georges (1994: 124)
Gruen concludes his own essay on Herodotus (which appears in both Cultural
Identity and, combined with an essay on Aeschylus, Rethinking the Other) with
a loud blast of the ‘scholarly clarion call’ to banish the ‘Other’ from Classical
studies:
The chronicler of the great wars between Greece and Persia finds numerous
reason for bitter enmity between the nations. But a cultural divide does not
take precedence among them. Herodotus presents a motley canvas, no black
and white images. (…) Value systems overlapped rather than clashed. Customs
and practices could be distinguished but not necessarily to the advantage of
one or the other. And the two peoples shared a legendary and genealogical
heritage. Herodotus did not compose a manifesto to advocate the superiority
of a constitutional system, to celebrate Hellenic values, or to suggest essentialist
characteristics that entailed an irremediable separation between the peoples.
Cultural identities are ambiguous and fluid phenomena, as the ‘father of history’
knew, not to be defined by artificial antinomies.
Gruen (2011b: 80; 2011c: 39)
Most points covered in Gruen’s sharply pointed essay can be readily accepted
(save his suppression of the celebratory and commemorative aspect of the
Histories) in spite of the thesis they defend: his denial of the ‘cultural divide’
between Greeks and Persians in the Histories, which amounts to denying that
the Greeks perceived the Persians as the ‘Other’. There is a cultural divide in
Herodotus by which the Persians are specifically represented as the Greek Other,
but it is not constructed on an orientalist, essentialist or otherwise absolute
basis. To be fair to Gruen, it may be allowed that the scholarly exploration of
Self and Other – or even of ‘selves’ and ‘others’ – in Aeschylus and Herodotus
could easily be appropriated to an essentialist (and proto-racist) interpretation,
as tends to happen when fifth-century historiographical and dramatic representations of the Greeks and Persians are lumped together with fourth-century
rhetorical and philosophical representations, some of which appear to be
overtly essentialist or proto-racist, going so far as to declare non-Greeks slavish
6
Sophist Kings
by nature (most famously by Aristotle). But this tendency does not legitimize
Gruen’s attack on the scholarship of Greek and Other. Indeed, it is worth noting
that Siapkas (‘Ancient Ethnicity and Modern Identity’, 2014) finds ‘Gruen’s
dismissal of the “Other” to be based on a misunderstanding of this foundational
notion for identity studies’.
Sophist Kings argues that the basis of the cultural polarity of Greeks and
Persians in Herodotus is the clash of ideologies rooted in the polarity of nomos
and phusis in fifth-century Greek thought (Lloyd: 1966). What I have taken
from Hartog and Cartledge, and most others involved in the scholarship of
Greek and Other, is that the real basis of the cultural polarity of Greeks and
Persians in Herodotus is neither essentialist nor proto-racist, but, as often and
emphatically stated by nearly all, essentially ideological rather than ideologically
essentialist. Cultural polarity is based on opposed cultural assumptions, ideas
not blood; where ‘race’ (or even genealogy) does come into it, it is as an element
rather than basis of cultural – Herodotus would say ‘ethnic’ – identity. Sophist
Kings finds that Herodotus’ representation of Greeks and Persians supports
the view that Greek self-definition became oppositional vis-à-vis the Persians
as a result of the Persian wars (the focus in Herodotus is on how it generates
a common cultural identity – to Hellenikon – among the Greeks, capable of
uniting the politically autonomous and historically factious poleis), and that it
fits the pattern perceived in fifth-century Greek (especially and sometimes only
Athenian) drama, art and architecture, and historiography as being infused with
a dialogical representation of the (often Athenocentric) ‘othering’ of the Persian
in opposition to Greek self-identification: despotic as opposed to democratic,
slavish as opposed to freedom-loving, hierarchic as opposed to egalitarian,
emotional as opposed to rational, effeminate as opposed to manly, and so on.
‘Dialogical’ here means a more complex representation than mere propaganda,
whereby the representations are often nuanced with contradictory aspects of
Greeks acting or looking like barbarians and barbarians acting or looking like
Greeks.
What Sophist Kings adds to the communis opinio regarding the Persians as
Greek Other is the perception that the cultural grid constructed by Herodotus
is more complex and systematic, and thus both more fluid and more rigid,
than has been recognized. Herodotus begins the Histories by envisioning a
common humanity divided by the binary opposition of Greek and barbarian
or non-Greek. In his account of Lydian, Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian and
Scythian customs that define their ethnic identity, we discover that there is a
tendency to represent the non-Greeks as the other of the Greek self: Egyptian
Introduction
7
customs are said to be the inverse of all others, but it is their inversion of Greek
customs that he cites, and this is true in all cases; all non-Greek peoples are
viewed through a Hellenocentric lens, by which we sometimes learn more
about Greek custom (as in his account of Persian sacrifice, where we learn they
don’t do what the Greeks do, much like Odysseus’ account of the uncultivated
land and uncivilized life of the Cyclopes). On the other hand, as Redfield had
demonstrated, Egyptians and Scythians are also represented as polar opposites
to one another, and there are obvious differences in the relationship of Greeks
to Egyptians and Ethiopians on the one hand and the Scythians and northern
tribes on the other. Often we learn about commonalities between Greeks and
non-Greeks: for instance, Greeks and Persians are most open to adopting foreign
customs, unlike the closed cultures of Egypt and Scythia. Greeks and Scythians
both prize their freedom and equality, whereas Egyptians and Persians embrace
hierarchy and slavishness. Yet, the Scythians regard the Ionians as the most
slavish of free peoples, and the rigid hierarchy of Spartan society is likened to
that of Egypt and Persia. With respect to the lands inhabited by the peoples,
there seems to be the same Hellenocentric bias: the temperate climate of Greece
(specifically, Ionian Greece) appears to be the normative centre of Herodotus’
map of the world, which is also the centre of civilization, from which one moves
out to the less inhabitable and inhabited uncivilized frontiers – Egypt and
Ethiopia to the south, Thrace and Scythia to the north, Persia to the east. (Yet
Herodotus attributes ethnocentrism to the Persians, which suggests that he is
not bound by the Hellenocentric conventions he employs – as he says explicitly
about his use of continental nomenclature, 4.45.) Geographical polarities have
diachronic aspects: as one travels south, one goes back in time to the oldest and
most civilized of peoples; as one moves north, we come to the youngest and
least civilized of peoples (evincing an epic rather than sophistic view of human
‘evolution’). Diachronically, the narrative of the Histories follows the rise of
the Persian Empire under Cyrus, who basically conquers the peoples formerly
under Assyrian rule, to which Cambyses adds Egypt, and Darius and Xerxes
attempt to add Europe. The result is that the complexity of relationships among
the peoples of the world is reduced to the simple polarity of Greeks and Persians
at war. But so far all we have done is look at aspects of the overall cultural grid
without grasping the logic of the grid itself.
In fact, underlying the complexity of relationships is a cultural grid composed
of north–south and east–west axes orientated to Herodotus’ ethnographic
map of the world, which is based on the most fundamental polarity that
governed fifth-century Greek thought: the contrariety of nomos and phusis.
8
Sophist Kings
The north–south axis of the grid is composed of the fundamental contrariety
of Scythia and Egypt; the east–west axis is composed of the more sophisticated
contrariety of Greece and Persia. The nomadic Scythians, who have adapted
their way of life to the land, are the youngest, most natural, most lawless and
least religious of civilized peoples, beyond whom are cannibals and monsters;
the Egyptians, who have adapted their land to their theocratic way of life are the
oldest, least natural, most lawful and most religious of peoples, next to whom
are the Ethiopians, people of a golden age, blessed by the gods. Their ethnic
contrariety can be expressed as the contrariety between a culture based on living
in accord with nature, the nomadic culture of nomos phusikos, and a culture
based on living in accordance with divine law, the hieratic culture of nomos
hieros. Between these extremes of the human adapting itself to natural necessity
or to divine law, lies the more sophisticated contrariety of self-constructed
ideologies rooted in the competition of logos and erōs as ruling principles within
human or rational nature. Whereas Egypt and Scythia are cultural contraries
having nothing to do with another, Greece and Persia are destined to be at war
with one another. The cultural antagonism of Greece in the West and Persia
in the East can be expressed as the ideological hostility between the culture of
nomos basileus, the ‘rule of law’ in which phusis is subject to the limitation of
nomos, and the culture of nomos phuseōs, the ‘law of nature’ in which nomos
serves an illimitable phusis.
With respect to Gruen’s critique of Cartledge on the significance of the
‘Other’ to understanding Herodotus, we can look at his critique of Demaratus’
response to Xerxes in book seven.
The celebrated scene has long served as centerpiece for those who see Herodotus’
pitting of Greek against Persian, of liberty against servitude, of free choice
against tyrannical compulsion as a linchpin for Hellenic identity in contrast to
eastern barbarism. In fact, it cannot carry such a burden. Demaratus claims to
speak only for Sparta, not for the rest of Greece – indeed Spartans are contrasted
with other Greeks on this score. More importantly, the speech that Herodotus
sets in his mouth praises a system of discipline, not a constitutional order.
Xerxes, to be sure, draws a distinction between men who fight on the orders
of an absolute ruler and those who do so (or rather would decline to do so) of
their own volition. Demaratus, however, asserts that Spartans, though free, are
far from entirely free. Law is their despot, a striking phrase. The system may
have been deliberately chosen, but it is no less authoritarian than that of Xerxes.
Herodotus places emphasis not on political liberty, let alone on democracy
(Sparta was hardly democratic), but on undeviating obedience to Spartan
Introduction
9
nomos, their despotes, which they hold in much greater awe than Persians do
their king. The famous exchange does nothing to suggest that the Greeks fought
to preserve a free system against the imposition of Persian tyranny.
Gruen (2011c: 22)
Gruen’s attempt to parse the distinctions that Herodotus observes among Hellenes
leads to overstatement. For Herodotus, it is not Athenian democracy per se that is
the ‘other’ of Persian despotism, but the principle of the rule of law, isonomia, in the
sense of all being equally subject to the rule of law. Surely we must allow Cartledge’s
view that the Spartans stand proxy here for the Greeks generally, for freedom by
way of the polis as a community of citizens self-governed by its own laws, as the
most obvious point made in the scene in context of the work as a whole.
The objection to be made to current scholarship on Herodotus is not that too
much is made of the Persians as the Greek Other, but not enough. The reply we
are making here is that, if anything, not all scholars have sufficiently recognized
that Herodotus’ ‘othering’ of the Persians is fundamentally ideological, and that
it is an ideology that he supplies to the Persians from fifth-century sophists
whose arguments served to justify Athenian imperialism. The ideology ascribed
to Persian culture has little to do with the Persians as we know them from
Persian evidence. Herodotus’ portrait of the Persians is, to a much greater extent
than scholars (including Gruen) have been willing to allow, an ideological
construct based almost entirely on alterity to the culture Herodotus ideologically identifies as ‘Greek’. The Persian culture of nomos phuseōs is precisely
the ideological Other of the Greek culture of nomos basileus. If there is not (as
Gruen and others rightly aver) a great deal of difference between the Persians
and Greeks, it is because, to a greater extent than realized, the Herodotean
portrait of the Persians is modelled on the Greeks as their ideological Other. The
obvious explanation for this is that while Herodotus was reflecting on ‘the aitia
on account of which they went to war with one another’, the ideological conflict
between Panhellenism and Athenian imperialism in his own time became
representative of a universal paradigm by which he grasped and represented the
past conflict between Greek freedom and Persian imperialism.
0.2 Summary overview
Sophist Kings: Persians as Other in Herodotus makes a number of contributions to our understanding of Herodotus and the Histories: that Herodotus is
10
Sophist Kings
in a dialogical relationship with the sophists, embodied and expressed in the
ideological antagonism of Greece and Persia; that the addition of the cultural
polarity of the Greeks and Persians to Herodotus’ cultural grid renders it
a multidimensional grid based on the bipolarity of nomos and phusis; that
he understands and represents the unfamiliar Achaemenid Ahuramazdan
theology of kingship and empire as a sophistic ideology of power; that he
understands and represents the court of Persia as royal intelligentsia equal
to the aristocratic intelligentsia of Athens; that he consistently represents the
Persians as sophists, and it is precisely as Persosophists that that they represent
the cultural ‘Other’ to the Greeks, especially the Athenians; that his representation of the Medo-Persian monarchs as sophist kings serves the immediate
rhetorical purpose of the Histories to hold up a mirror to the Athenians as the
new ‘Persians’ of Greece.
Chapter 1, ‘Herodotus and the Histories’, looks at how the life of Herodotus
and the narrative of the Histories are connected by the centrality to both of
the rise and fall of Greek fraternity at the hands of the Athenians in the first
half of the fifth century. The Histories is very much the story of the birth of
Panhellenism in Athens’ declaration of allegiance to the Greek ideal of to
Hellenikon as related from the standpoint of Athens’ subsequent betrayal of that
ideal in the conversion of the Delian league into an empire. In part, Herodotus’
representation of the Persians as the ideological Other of the Greeks can be
understood to result from the immediate rhetorical purpose of holding up a
mirror to Athenian imperialism; in part, it is the result of Herodotus’ comprehension of history in terms of the tragic relationship of human hubris to
divine tisis.
Chapter 2, ‘Herodotus and the Sophists’, examines passages that resemble
the teachings and methods of the sophists, demonstrating that in most cases
we should attribute these resemblances not to Herodotus himself but to his
representation of the Persians, whom he introduces at the very beginning of his
narrative as adept in the theories and argumentative methods of the sophists.
It also becomes clear that rather than regarding Herodotus as sophist or protosophist, we should see him as engaged in a dialogical relationship with the
sophists, which we find most clearly represented in the opposition of Otanes and
Darius in the constitutional debate in book three, as well as the debate between
Demaratus and Xerxes in book seven, and which generally takes the form of
cultural antagonism between Greeks and the Persians as their sophistic Other.
Chapter 3, ‘Herodotus and the Persians’, brings before the reader essential
aspects of the history and culture of Persia, and its relation to the history and
Introduction
11
culture of other nations, which are absent in Herodotus’ narrative, knowledge
of which is prerequisite to an assessment of Herodotus’ representation of the
Persians as the Greek Other. It especially sets forth the Mesopotamian origins
of Persian kingship and the Ahuramazdan theology of salvific kingship and
imperialism adopted by the Achaemenid kings, Darius and Xerxes, which
scholars have read in their royal inscriptions and reliefs.
Chapter 4, ‘Persians as Other in Herodotus’, examines how Herodotus’
ethnographic map of the world refutes the Ionian theories of environmental
determinism and proposes that the cultural polarity of Egypt and Scythia forms
the lower axis of a multidimensional cultural grid based on the contrariety of
nomos and phusis, the upper axis of which is composed of the cultural polarity of
Greece and Persia based on antagonistic ideologies constituting the relationship
of the human to the divine and the natural. Herodotus’ representation of Persia
on the cultural grid as the Greek Other is seen to be infused with a sophistic
ideology permeating every aspect of Persian culture: religion, society, morality,
education and government. In lieu of the salvific Ahuramazdan theology of
kingship and empire embraced by the Achaemenids, Herodotus attributes to
Deioces, Darius and Xerxes a sophistic theory of law and government as originating in the erōs turannidos of the sophos anēr.
Chapter 5, ‘Sophist Kings’, uses the profile of the ‘Persosophist’ established
by the Persian logioi (1.1–5) to identify a number of Persosophists attached to
the royal court: ambassadors, judges and counsellors. Turning to the Iranian
kings, the chief characteristics of Deioces, Median founder of the ancestral
constitution of Persia, are identified as constituting the archetype of the Sophist
King as sophos anēr and erastēs turannidos. To this archetype, Astyages, last
of the Median kings, adds despotēs doulōn, exemplified by Cambyses, son of
Cyrus, who founded the Persian monarchy on Astyages’ throne. Cyrus stands
out as the greatest practitioner of the Persian nomos of imperialism, established
by his Median predecessors, Phraortes and Cyaxares, a nomos that found its
limit under his Achaemenid successors, Darius and Xerxes. Measured by these
archetypal characteristics, Darius, a master Persosophist, proves the most able
of sophist kings; by contrast, his son, Xerxes, exemplifies the tragic role of an
heir who proves inadequate to the hubris of dynastic ambition (preceded in
Astyages’ relation to Deioces and Cambyses’ relation to Cyrus) and suffers the
nemesis of divine tisis, fitting the tragic paradigm set by the fall of Croesus
as ‘payback’ for the transgression of his ancestor, Gyges, as founder of the
Mermnad dynasty in Lydia. Finally, we look at the Greek tyrants and generals
who medized after the Persian wars, betraying the Greek ideology of isonomia
12
Sophist Kings
for the Persosophist ideology of power, finding among these Darius’ Greek
counterpart, Themistocles.
The Conclusion sums up by the argument of Sophist Kings by way of
considering the implications of allowing that Herodotus was familiar with
the Achaemenid employment of the Ahuramazdan theology of kingship and
empire, and that he deliberately rejected it as royal propaganda meant to conceal
the sophistic ideology that he ascribes to the Persian constitution of despotism
and imperialism as its true basis.
0.3 Note on abbreviations, dates and translations
All dates are bce (except references to scholarship). SK is an abbreviation for
Sophist Kings: Persians as Other in Herodotus, employed as a means of self-crossreferencing. SK refers the reader to the expanded table of contents at the end
of Sophist Kings (pp. 316–20). Hdt. is the standard abbreviation for Herodotus’
Histories; Th. is the standard abbreviation for Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars;
Pl. is the standard abbreviation for Plato. LSJ is the standard abbreviation of the
Greek–English Lexicon compiled by Liddell and Scott, revised and augmented by
Jones, et al., used here of the 9th edition (1968). Unless otherwise indicated, all
translations of Herodotus are taken from the Penguin translation by Marincola
and de Selincourt (2003), for which permission has been kindly granted. Other
translations of Herodotus are employed, including my own, where needed to
convey a sense not articulated by the Penguin translation. My translations of
Herodotus are based on the Oxford Classical Text prepared by Hude.
1
Herodotus and the Histories
The life of Herodotus and the historical narrative of The Histories1 are both
centred upon the crisis that gave birth in Greece to the Panhellenic cultural
identity of to Hellenikon.2 The historical narrative of The Histories begins and
ends with the loss and recovery of Greek freedom in Ionia, where Herodotus
was born and grew up, and its thematic climax is a speech in which Athens
declares her allegiance to the Greek fraternity based on to Hellenikon, what
it means to be ‘Greek’ (8.144). The Histories attributes the Greek victory to
democratic Athens (5.78, 7.139), where Herodotus is said to have publically
presented his work, for which he was awarded handsomely (SK 1.1). By the
time he did so, however, Pericles had already removed the Delian treasury to
Athens, effectively completing the conversion of the Athenian-led alliance of
freedom-fighters into an Athenian Empire, and the earliest signs of impending
internecine warfare throughout Greece were beginning to appear.3
The Histories was completed several years after war between Sparta and Athens
and their allies had been declared, a war which Herodotus’ younger contemporary, Thucydides, blamed on the growth of Athenian imperialism (Th. 1.23).
It is really from this perspective of having witnessed the destruction of the Greek
fraternity at the hands of those who were most responsible for its realization that
The Histories is composed.4 As such, like the plays of Athenian contemporaries,
The Histories has the immediate rhetorical purpose of addressing the contemporary political situation by way of its representation of the past.5 It does so
chiefly by representing the Persians as embracing, embodying and espousing
the sophistic doctrines by which the Athenians justified imperialism (SK 4.4.5).
This is not to say that Herodotus is intentionally misrepresenting the Persians
as sophists to teach Athens a lesson, since he understands Asian tyranny on
the basis of Greek tyranny, and Persian imperialism on the basis of Athenian