We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
The frequent assumption that they [the Persians] were as greatly concerned on these levels [historically, culturally, strategically] with Greece [as they were with the east] is a misconception which stems from our own western view of the world and from the unfortunate fact that Greece has given us our main literary sources of information on the Achaemenids. It was the Greeks who were fascinated by Persia, by Persian mores, and, yes, by Persian court art and luxury goods—not the reverse. If only the Persians had spawned the likes of Aeschylus and Herodotus, our perceptions of their preoccupations would be quite different.
Athenians were indeed fascinated by Persia as their art and literature attest. The fascination was both cultural and political, but not without tensions. Part of that fascination manifested itself in the allure of Persian kings and what they represented. The kings ruled over a vast empire, larger than any the Mediterranean world had yet seen. They sought in their iconography and building programmes to exert a particular identity for themselves and the Achaemenid dynasty. Although the Athenians were not imperialists of the type we see in Persia, Rome or the figure of Alexander, they did build for themselves a small, Hellenic empire (archē) and they adopted a number of Persian mechanisms of power and some aspects of Achaemenid iconography for representing their power. Aeschylus' Persians, produced in 472 BCE, helps us understand the Athenians' developing archē, specifically how the representations of the two Persian Kings in the play helped the Athenians differentiate and define their power vis-à-vis the Great Persian Menace and, more importantly, the rest of the Greeks. By understanding better the engagement by the Athenians with Persian culture, we can better understand how the Athenians conceptualised their own power and position in the Aegean in the early 5th century BCE.
1. Root (1979), 41.
2. See Root (1985) and Miller (1997), 218-42, on the artistic influence on later Athenian public art, especially the Parthenon frieze and Odeion.
3. Griffith (1998), 43, suggests that monarchy is at issue. Monarchy, he writes, ‘is represented in Greek tragedy as being at the same time both a disreputable challenge to, or negation of, democratic norms, and a desirable and irresistible object of admiration and fascination, even comfort…’ But I think power is more at stake than any actual governing institution. Monarchy in Greek tragedy is also often democratised (e.g. Aesch. Suppl. and Eur. Suppl. and Heracl.) and was a functioning form of government in various neighbouring poleis. It is not monarchy that is both desirable and repulsive. It is the power associated with the monarch.
4. Thus earlier studies such as those by Podlecki (1966), Broadhead (1960) and Fornara (1966) where they insist that certain aspects of the play must be historically accurate because many in the audience would have fought at Salamis and so would have demanded accuracy.
5. Pelling (1997) discusses at length the generic expectations of tragedy and cautions the historian against taking too literally, as many earlier scholars have, the text of Persians as ‘history’. It is historical drama with the emphasis on drama.
6. See Kennedy (2009) for a fuller discussion of this approach to Athenian tragedy in general.
7. Broadhead (1960) is one such interpretation. As Hall (1989) accurately points out, tragedy requires pathos and such pathos is hard to reconcile with jingoism. Although some scholars contest that non-Athenians were in the audience as early as 472 BCE, the grounds for excluding them is less compelling (or non-existent) than reasons for accepting them as present as early as the founding of the Delian League in 478/7 BCE. One of the results of this jingoistic reading of the play has been to reject it as ‘tragic’. However, this is based on a misconception that Xerxes is the protagonist of the play and thus the Athenians could not help but rejoice at his demise. The protagonist, though, is the Chorus, I suggest, as in Aeschylus' Suppliants and Eumenides.
8. Melchinger (1979) seems to have first floated this idea, but it is in Rosenbloom (1995 and 2006) where this position is most strongly articulated.
9. Said (1978). Said has many critics, especially on the flattening of representations of those such as Aeschylus'. As Varisco (2007), 27, comments, ‘Said's amateurish and ahistorical essentialising of an Orientalism-as-textualised discourse from Aeschylus to Bernard Lewis has polemical force, but only at the expense of methodological precision and rhetorical consistency.’ See also Skinner (2012), 44-50, for a critique of this approach in scholarship to ethnographic texts including Persians.
10. Certainly the positive reception of this play in Sicily, a non-Athenian context, shows this reading of the play was available to audiences.
11. The term ‘frienemy’ was coined, it seems, in 1953 to denote the relationship between the US and Russia (W. Winchell in Nevada Stale Jrnl. 19 May 4/4 ‘Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?’). According to the OED (3rd edition 2008, on-line) it means ‘a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry; a person who combines the characteristics of a friend and an enemy’. A far more apt description of the complex relationship between Athens and Persia in the fifth century BCE than ‘enemy’.
12. See also West (1997), passim.
13. Kuhrt (2002), 11f.; West (1997), 1-60 and 606-30. Scholars point to Alcaeus 350 (Lobel and Page), in which he welcomes home his brother from military service with the Babylonians (τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἀντιμενίδαν… φησιν Ἀλϰαῖος Βαβυλωνίοις συμμαχοῦντα τελέσαι ἄεθλον μἐγαν), as evidence for such a relationship between Ionian Greeks and the Assyrian kingdom.
14. Kuhrt (2002), 12 n.25.
15. Whitby (1998), 215-22; West (1997), 618-21.
16. Balcer (1983), 261; Lewis (1985), 104-09. It should be clear from these statements, as well, that I disagree with the premise of many scholars who take it as a given that the Athenians knew nothing about the Persian court, as, for example, does Shapiro (2009).
17. Root (1979), 5-14; Miller (1997), 101f. See also Boardman (2000) on artistic and archaeological exchange.
18. Sancisi-Weerdenburg (2001), 324.
19. West (1997), 609-11; Kuhrt (2002), 11-13. Root (2007), 177-224, discusses possible reactions of visiting Greeks to the representations of Ionians in Persepolis after 460 BCE.
20. Miller (1997), 63-133, on cultural exchange in the years after 480 BCE specifically through trade, contact zones, mercenaries and diplomacy.
21. Miller (1997), 5.
22. To this may also be added the Spartan Lacrines' embassy to Cyrus telling him not to harm any Greek polis (Her. 1.152f.).
23. See Miller (1997), 243-58, on the receptivity of the Greeks to Persian culture. Balcer (1984) is a revealing study in one specific region's acculturation process (Sparda in Western Anatolia) and serves as a model for understanding the broader process. Tuplin (2010), 50-182, discusses the limits to understanding the acculturation process.
24. The work of E. Hall is most prominent in this regard. See also Harrison (2000), 69-86. It is a function of the Saidian approach that the Oriental ‘other’ is a fantasy image separate from any ‘real’ being. But Sancisi-Weerdenburg (1993), 130-32, rightly points out some of the perils of divorcing ideology and reality for Hall's analysis. The ancient writers did have access to and frequently incorporated accurate knowledge of others into their works. See also Gruen (2011), 9-21, for a reassessment of the Persians as ‘Orientalising’.
25. West (1997), 544 opens his discussion of Near Eastern influence on Aeschylus with a series of rhetorical questions that point to this view as unrealistic: ‘Aeschylus? Aeschylus? Was this not the man who fought at Marathon and Salamis against the forces of the East? The poet who first articulated the antithesis of Hellene and barbarian, and posited the all-around inferiority of the latter?…Is even he [Aeschylus] now to be found prey to these insidious oriental influences that seem to reach everywhere?’ His answer, of course, is yes, Aeschylus is ‘prey’ to eastern influence as were most Greeks in antiquity.
26. Even the military opposition between Athens and Persia was not sustained and did not seem to change the ease with which Athenian elites moved between the two cultures. One might think of historical relations between France and England as a counter-argument—the English hated the post-Revolutionary French, but loved their fashion, music, art, etc. (Hall 2006, 211). But I do not agree that the Athenian evidence prior to the Peloponnesian War supports this type of strong antipathy towards the Persians by the Athenians. Thus I agree with Isaac (2004), 257-83, when he says that, at least in the first half of the 5th century and in this play, Persia was not deemed culturally or morally inferior because it was a monarchy (283). Monarchy, even Persian monarchy, is not an issue in this play.
27. Root (1979), 131. For a general overview of Persian iconography, see Briant (2002a), 204-54.
28. Root (1979), 144-46 and Plates 10-11.
29. Root (1979), 149-54 and Plates 12-14. Similar monumental images and inscriptions appear on the Bisitun inscription, at Persepolis, and on the tombs of Xerxes and Artaxerxes.
30. Kuhrt (2007), 503f; the same exact inscription (XPI) appears with the name Xerxes substituted for Darius outside of Persepolis.
31. Root (1979), 131 Fig. 18.
32. Whether Darius was or was not a tyrant is not the issue here. He was, in fact, a tyrant in the basic sense—he seized power extra-legally since he was not the legitimate heir of Cambyses, making the messaging of his legitimacy paramount.
33. Kuhrt (2002), 20, points to Xerxes' ‘daiva’ inscription as the exception.
34. Briant (2002a), 175-83. Root (1979), 63, discusses the positioning of Persia on the hieroglyphic text of the Canal Stelae. She mentions importantly that the position of the Persia glyph is in the centre to the left, which was the text to be read first under the rules of priority for hieroglyphic texts. This would visually put Persia in the centre of a text as well as having the centrality emphasised in the way the other peoples are listed. An inscription found in Ecbatana (DPh 2; DH [tr. Kuhrt (2007), 476]) has Darius declare that he holds a kingdom, ‘from the Saca, who are beyond Sogdiana, from there as far as Kush, from the Indus as far as Sardis’. It is the four corners of the Empire with Persia in the centre. See Kennedy (2006), 41-50, 69 on similar textual mapping found in Aeschylus' Eumenides that locates Athens within the judicial centre of the Greek world. Herodotus recognises this Persian worldview (1.134) and adds to it the aspect of honour and rank being attached by Persia to a people's proximity to the centre, which Aristotle (Pol. 1327b.39-33) will transfer to the Greeks much as Pliny (NH 2.190) will to the Romans.
35. E. Hall (2006), 184. Hall (1989), 69-100, gives the most sustained statement of the argument for this position. See also Georges (1994), 76-114, for arguments on Xerxes as paradigmatic Oriental despot.
36. Perhaps Hall is imagining the earliest appearance in Phrynicus' Phoenician Women which opens with a court eunuch setting up soft cushions for an upcoming council meeting (see hypothesis at TrGF 1,3 fr. 8); the eunuch and the pillows are both marks of the luxury she envisions. The motif of eastern luxury had a long history in Greek literature, as far back as the 7th century, but luxury itself should not be understood as exotic, alien or alienating. While the character of Archilochus' poem, our earliest reference to an eastern king as tyrant (fr. 19), turns away from the wealth of Gyges, it does not set a precedent for any sustained pattern in Greek representation of wealth and the east linked with tyranny. Rather, this is a projection backwards of later representations, including images from antiquity and the steady flow of Orientalist representation in the 19th and 20th centuries. In many ways, Hall's descriptions seem to have been influenced by images like the Darius Painter's ‘Persai’ (Naples 3253) or the ekphrasis of Themistocles lecturing the Persian court found in Philotratus' Imagines or European imaginings of the East. See Grosrichard (1998) for a detailed discussion of the fantasy of the Oriental despot in European thought; see Briant (2010), 3-15, and Briant (2002b), 193-210, on the theme of ‘Persian decadence’. In an address to her critics, Hall (2006), 207, remarks that ‘the best way to read the effect of the play on fifth-century Athenian sources would be to see what they made of it at the time’. And yet, for Hall, ‘at the time’ means 70 years after the play was initially written and staged by Aeschylus. Further, all additional contexts Hall provides are from the late 5th or 4th century BCE. She does not acknowledge a difference in context that 50 or more years can bring to an audience response.
37. Harrison (2000) has difficulty reconciling his strongly anti-Persian reading of the play with the representation of Darius since he sees Persian monarchy as the prime evil. Georges (1994), csp. 95-110, turns rhetorical somersaults to fit his stridently anti-Persian reading of the play with the text's representation of Darius. While there were certainly members of the audience who had a deep hatred for all things Persian, this was certainly not universal nor is it inherent in this play.
38. Garvie (2009), xii-xiv.
39. Griffith (1998), 57-62.
40. And Artaxerxes. See Root (1979), passim.
41. Note the use of the concept of the ‘bulwark’ for Persian laws. Sophocles uses this particular word of Ajax and the idea is also strongly associated with Athens during the Persian wars. The idea of Athens as a keystone or bulwark of Greece is also hinted at (though the term is not used here); see the Queen's exchange with the Chorus at 231-44.
42. This is a rather disputed line, which West maintains only with daggers. The word πόλεις has been removed by West after ἐϰϱάτυνε while Page brackets it. Garvie follows the text of Page here with no suggestions that the line as a whole should be omitted.
43. See Kennedy (2006), 53-66, on the use of summachos in Aeschylus.
44. Kuhrt (2007), 152 n.7 on DB §7. Sec A. Missiou (1993), 377-91, on the translation of ba(n)-daka as doulos in the 4th century.
45. Herodotus' list is not accurate either. It is fairly certain now that Deiokes never existed, despite attempts over several decades to make him compatible with Near Eastern evidence. See Helm (1981) and Brown (1988) on the accuracy of Herodotus' Median kings.
46. Medus is used here as the founder of the Median/Achamenid dynasty. See Sancisi-Weerdenburg (1988) on the historicity of the Median Empire. See Frye (2010) for conjecture on the relationship between the Medes and Achaemenids.
47. Garvie (2009), 303, following Page, moves this line to 769 in order to have it refer to Cyrus, ‘who for the Greek possessed those qualities pre-eminently’. West (1991), 183, however, argues that the line should be left at 767 though he notes that it would fit ‘less uncomfortably’ placed after 777 to refer to Artaphrenes, upon whose name it may be playing. But there are no real grounds, he argues, for transposing the line and it appropriately attributes the build-up of empire by Cyrus' predecessor to intellectual achievement. This is especially apt if, as I argue here, the attribution is an echo of the historical Darius' own self-representation of his kingship (and his family's).
48. Kuhrt (2007), 503f.
49. DNb 2h: ‘I am furious in the strength of my revenge’ (Kuhrt [2007], 505) or ‘I am fervent in my counter-attack’ (Schmitt cited by Kuhrt n.6 on 2h). Garvie (2009), 304, notes that ἤλασεν βὶᾳ would have underscored the unwillingness of the Ionians to be subjects of the Persians ‘and would thus be a sop to the sensitivity of any Ionians in the audience’.
50. At issue is whether line 778, which lists Maraphis and Artaphrenes as kings before Darius, is genuine or an interpolation. West (1991) suggests the possibility that Aeschylus' mention of Darius' succession reflects a muddle of the various succession stories in circulation, some of them, perhaps, not too flattering to Darius.
51. The story of Bardiya, known under the Hellenised name Smerdis, is recounted by Herodotus at 3.30, 3.61-68.1. See Balcer (1987) for an attempt at reconstructing the events described at Bisitun and a discussion of the historicity of Herodotus' account.
52. The Old Persian word here is aršta-, rectitude.
53. Griffith (1998), 57.
54. This status as prophet is in keeping with Greek views of the raised dead (Ogden (2001), 231-50) and with the god-like status he is granted within the play. Harrison (2000), 90, is over-interpreting when he suggests that Darius' failure immediately to understand that the oracle he learned had been fulfilled was a mark of Darius' false authority in marked opposition to Themistocles' unmatched skill at oracular interpretation (unmentioned in the play and thus transposed from Herodotus). The failure immediately to understand oracles is both a function of tragedy—the recognition of the lack of understanding is a key element in a number of tragedies, most famously Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos—and of being human.
55. Although Garvie (2009), 328, suggests that the term means ‘invincible’, there is a multivalence to the term that I think the audience would have been aware of and therefore I have chosen to translate the term here as ‘unfavourable towards war’.
56. See West (1997), 14-19, on the Near Eastern influence on depictions of kings in Greek literature.
57. Griffith (1998), 61f.
58. Kuhrt (2007), 142 Fig. 5.2; Root (1979), Plates VI and VIII. Auramazda is represented by a stylised figure with the wings of a bird and a torso and head that look similar to the image of the Persian King.
59. In the Bisitun inscription, Darius makes a point of emphasising his Achaemenid ancestry (DB §1) and his family's long history of ruling Persia (DB §12) even though he is not from the ruling branch of the family.
60. Briant (2002a), 240-54, discusses the in-between state inhabited by the Persian king in monarchical ideology.
61. The questions centres on where Darius appeared and how he got there. If centre stage, was the actor behind an altar and then rose up? Was there a passage with trap door that the actor could emerge through? Was there a skēnē as early as 472 BCE upon which he could appear deus-ex-machina-like? Or was there a rocky outcrop in the early theatre upon which gods and the raised dead could appear? See Garvie (2009), xlvi-liii, for discussion of the theories. However he arrived and wherever on the stage he appears, the text clearly marks him as being elevated above the Chorus and Queen.
62. At least in later theatre. It is unclear how early this became the norm. Clearly in Eumenides, the gods are not elevated on the theologeion, but Athena may have been slightly raised as she presided over the trial.
63. They also ask Aidoneus to escort him up at 650.
64. Despite the position of Darius in the underworld as a king and the focus of cult ritual, he is still not a god. The implication by many scholars that we should read Darius as a true god and not more on par with a hero in the underworld is perhaps a misunderstanding of the relationship in Persia between god and king. It is also a wilful misinterpretation made in order to force a characterisation of the Chorus as slavish (e.g. Harrison [2000], 87-91).
65. See T600, 620 and 1144 from the Corinth Excavations, pictured at Hammond and Moon (1978), 374. The fragments appear to show Darius rising from a tomb with incense (or, perhaps, the ‘Stygian mists’ of 669) rising up with the Chorus backing away with hands shielding their faces. There is an aulos player pictured as well, which suggests this is a tragic scene (Hammond and Moon [1978], 373f.).
66. See Csapo (2010), 7, or Hammond and Moon (1978), 380, for image. This vase, perhaps the earliest to represent a tragedy, is dated to 500-490 BCE and shows what seems to be a ghost-raising scene. It is not a representation of the Persians, but, the dances were done to metres which reflected certain ideas within the lyrics; the metre, movements and lyric would all work together, so that ghost raising would have one form, lament another, etc. See Kitlo (1955) and Ley (2007) for discussion of Choral dance.
67. Wiles (1997), 92, compares the σχήματα explicitly to the Victorian tableaux vivants and the mie (poses) in kabuki.
68. See discussion in Ley (2007), 159-62.
69. They cry out σέβομαι twice at 694f. This word can mean to fear or dread as well as to worship a god (Suppl. 921), but it is also generally used for paying respect to heroes or any dead as at Per. 543.
70. For a different understanding of Darius' associations with fear in the play, see Kantzios (2004).
71. It should also be pointed out that if the image Darius had carved at Bisitun of the defeated kings had been copied and circulated in locations accessible to the Greeks, it could have been a misinterpretation of the defeated kings as the King's subjects and advisors that influenced the idea of the King's advisors as cowering in awe. Such confusion is clearly warranted in the Greek (and scholarly) misconstrual of proskynesis.
72. Some of these islands were hostile to Athenian liberation and were thus conquered and subjected to Athens. See esp. Her. 8.111f. on Andros, but also Thuc. 1.96-100 on other islands who resisted ‘liberation’.
73. Balcer (1976, 1977 and 1978), passim; Raaflaub (2009), 89-124. See Kennedy (2006), 56-61, on episkopos in Aeschylus' Eumenides.
74. Root (1985).
75. The Old Persian word frequently translated as ‘tribute’ is baji- which can also denote ‘gifts’. The earth and water presented to Artaphrenes in 507 BCE would be considered a ‘gift’ (Her. 5.73). See Sancisi-Weerdenburg (1980) and Root (2007) on gifts to the King and their representation in Achaemenid art. See Kuhrt (1988) on the meaning behind the offering of earth and water.
76. Tribute loss is only mentioned in reference to the Ionian subjects now lost and not in reference to what Darius provided his own Persians. The Persians themselves did not pay tribute to the king.
77. Thucydides 1.96-100; for the early years of the Delian League, see Meiggs (1979), 68-91; Badian (1993), 73-108. When members joined the Delian League, they dropped iron into the sea to signify an alliance for all time. Trying to leave the League could, therefore, be viewed as oath-breaking and there seems to have been little uproar when the Athenians used League resources to force erstwhile members back into the League in the 470s and 460s BCE.
78. Rosenbloom (2006), 101.
79. Obviously, I disagree here with Harrison's (2000), 84-91 arguments for continuity between Darius and Xerxes. See also Per. 550-53 where the Chorus blames Xerxes for their troubles with the powerful triple anaphora ‘It was Xerxes…’: Ξέϱξης μὲν ἄγαγεν, ποποῖ, / Ξέϱξης δ’ ἀπώλεσεν, τοτοῖ, / Ξέϱξης δὲ πάντ’ ἐπέσπε δυσφϱόνως / βαϱίδεσσι ποντίαις.
80. Hall (1998), 69-72; Rosenbloom (2006), passim. Garvie (2009), xxii-xxxiii, contests the emphasis on hubris, especially by Rosenbloom.
81. Or not worth pondering because of the inconclusiveness of the efforts: Garvie (2009), xix.
82. The fact that Xerxes was assassinated in 465 BCE by Artabanus may have altered the way Xerxes' character and the end of the play were interpreted by audiences watching revivals after his death. The lesson of Mardus would have been that much stronger. As would Xerxes' standing as a paradigmatic tyrant. See Briant (2002a), 565-58, on the assassination.
83. πολυάνδϱου δ’ Ἀσίας θούϱιος ἄϱχων / ἐπί πᾶσαν χθόνα ποιμανόϱιον θεῖον ἐλαύνει / διχόθεν, πεζονόμοις ἔϰ τε θαλάσσας ἐχυϱοῖσι πεποιθὼς / στυφελοῖς ἐφέταις, χϱυσονόμου γενεᾶς ίσόθεος φώς. / ϰυάνεον δ’ ὅμμασι λεύσσων φονίου δέϱγμα δϱάϰοντος / πολύχειϱ ϰαί πολυναύτας Σύϱιόν θ’ ἅϱμα διώϰων / ἐπάγει δουϱιϰλύτοις ἀνδϱάσι τοξόδαμνον Ἄϱη (‘Savage in war, ruling over many-peopled Asia, he drives his extraordinary flock across the whole earth in two ways, entrusting them to his stout, reliable commanders by both land and sea—a godlike mortal of the golden race. His eyes glare with the dark stare of a murderous snake and he, speeding his Syrian chariot along accompanied by many men, drives his war of archers against spear-famous men’).
84. εὖ γἀϱ ἵστε, παῖς ἑμός / πϱάξας μὲν εὖ θαυμαστὸς ἃν γένοιτ’ άνήϱ, / ϰαϰῶς δὲ πϱάξας, οὐχ ὑπεύθυνος πόλει, / σωθείς δ’ ὁμοίως τήσδε ϰοιϱανεῖ χθονός (‘For know well: should my child do this, he would become a man well-admired. But if he fails, he is not subject to review by the city; if he survives, he remains ruler of this land’).
85. παῖς δ’ ἐμὸς τάδ’ οὐ ϰατειδὼς ἤνυσεν νέωι θϱάσει, / ὅστις Ἑλλήσποντον ίϱόν δοῦλον ὣς δεσμώμασιν / ἤλπισε σχήσειν ϱ̔έοντα, Βόσποϱον ϱ̔όον θεοῦ, / ϰαὶ πόϱον μετεϱϱύθμιζε ϰαὶ πέδαις σφυϱηλάτοις / πεϱιβαλὼν πολλήν ϰέλευθον ἤνυσεν πολλῶι στϱατῶι, / θνητὸς ὢν θ εῶν δὲ πάντων ὤιετ’ οὐϰ εὐβουλίαι / ϰαὶ Ποσειδῶνος ϰϱατήσειν (‘My child achieved this ignorantly in his youthful audacity. My child was the one who hoped to chain the sacred flowing Hellespont, the divine flow of the Bosporus, and who altered the path of the sea, and casting around it wrought-iron shackles, he supplied a wide road for his vast army. Though mortal, he foolishly thought to overreach all gods, especially Poseidon’).
86. Sansone(1975), 55.
87. There is a great deal of scholarship on this contrast. See, for example, Goldhill (1988) and Kantzios (2004). The key moment for this opposition comes when the Messenger recounts the Greek battle cry before the battle of Salamis: ὦ παῖδες Ἐλλήνων ἲτω, / ἐλευθεϱοῦτε πατϱίδ’, ἐλευθεϱοῦτε δὲ / παῖδας, γυναῖϰας, θεῶν τέ πατϱῴων ἕδη, / θήϰας τε πϱογόνων νῦν ὑπὲϱ πάντων ἀγών (‘O sons of Greece, come on! Free your fatherland, free your children, your wives, the shrines of your paternal gods, the graves of your ancestors! The contest now is for all!’, 402-405).
88. Δέσποτα δέσποτ’ ὥ is perhaps an attempt to render the Persian title ‘king of kings’. See Garvie (2009), 271, for a discussion of the textual issues with the phrase.
89. Another instance where recognising the Chorus as the protagonist of the play relieves a problem of interpretation that need not exist.
90. ‘Safe criticism’ is the art of saying the unsaid through emphasis and ‘figured’ speech. It allows a writer to ‘speak to those who understand’ (Aesch. Ag. 39, quoted by Ahl (1984), 180). As Ahl there states, ‘People will grasp only what, in a sense, they already know.’ Athenians prepared to view their growing archē as something markedly different from Xerxes' Persian empire will find ways to read such a view into the play.
91. Griffith (1998), 57, suggests that the Chorus' questions for Xerxes about those lost (955-1001) act as a euthuna. Symbolically, yes, he is asked to account for the men, but, as Kantzios (2004) points out, he immediately returns to giving orders and commanding the scene. There is no real accountability, just another list that mimics accounting. Rosenbloom's (2006) assertion that he controls only the Chorus because ‘there is no “world-order” for him to control’ (136) is over-statement. The suggestion that ‘now he rules an empire of tears’ is exaggerated as well. The Chorus' laments that the whole of Asia is empty and the empire destroyed should be read as exaggeration of emotion. Only those lands specifically populated by Greeks are ever named as free from Persian dominion and the famous lament at 584-97 can also be understood to apply only to Ionians. Asia may be devoid of military-aged men, but the empire is intact all the same.
92. Garvie (2009), 338f.
93. Garvie (2009), 339, views as implausible Avery's suggestion that Xerxes entered the stage with the Queen by his side and is re-robed on stage. I agree. It is implausible given the stage cues within the scene and unnecessary for the promise of a new robe to remain.
94. There are no grounds within the play to dismiss the promise of new robes and the threat this implies. Such a dismissal has to do with the view the reader takes on how tragedies should end or a predisposition as to how this tragedy in particular should end. The text does nothing to discourage the promise of renewal. Harrison's (2000) interpretation of the promise of new robes being ‘a symbol of false resurgence’ (91) is, as Garvie (2009), 339, points out, ‘unnecessarily complicated’ and a product of his extreme anti-Persian reading of the play. For Harrison, there can be no hope and no positive aspect to Persians in the play.
95. An offer the Athenians briefly took up first in 507 BCE and then again in 424 BCE but rejected in 479 BCE. See Her. 5.73 on the earlier Athenian agreement with Persia (which the Athenian envoys were punished for after agreeing to give earth and water) and Andoc. 3.29 for the philia agreement of 424/3 BCE. The representation of the Persian ambassador, the ‘Eye’ at Acharnians 61-125 (425 BCE) may be a parody of similar negotiations that took place earlier. The rejection of Persia's offer of alliance is famously recounted in Her. 8.140-44.
96. Later authors like Herodotus and especially Thucydides would recognise the similarities between Athens' exercise of power and Persia's even if those who exercised that power did not or chose not to recognise it; see Tzifopoulos (1995) and Rood (1999). However, they seem to have consciously borrowed from Persia. The demonisation of Persia in later rhetoric suggests that they remained conscious of it and masked their own behaviours by making themselves the lesser of two evils (whether either was considered an ‘evil’ by the majority of their allies/subjects is another debate).
