July 21, 2007
Bad Persians
Myth and reality in wars between East and West
by Victor Davis Hanson
Times Literary Supplement

A review of Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars. Antiquity to the Third Millennium, edited by Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P.J. Rhodes (Oxford University Press, 2007, 453 pp.)

Near the beginning of Xenophon’s obscure fourth-century B.C. biography of the Spartan king Agesilaos, the historian describes an odd event during the Greek invasion of Asian Minor in 395/4 B.C. Somewhere near the coastal city of Ephesos, the Spartans had captured some “barbarians.” Agesilaos apparently wished to stage some sort of an exhibition to his outnumbered Greeks about just how unwarlike their enemies on examination really were: “On his orders, the booty sellers stripped off the clothing of the captured. There were many potential buyers for their garments, but otherwise they scoffed at their white and thoroughly soft bodies — the result of their effeminate habits — as useless and of no worth. Agesilaos was standing nearby, and so concluded, ‘These here are the men whom we are going to fight.’” What do scholars make of such weird stories about East and West?

Perhaps traditional classicists would accept Xenophon’s aside as “true,” at least in the sense that either the historian himself, or a close source known to him, had witnessed something like the incident. Moreover, most classicists — while noting that we get only the Greeks’ version of what happened and thus are asked to accept their definitions of manliness, and while remembering that many Greeks were themselves effeminate (the men of Sybaris especially), and many Persian subjects such as the feared Bactrian cavalry were not — would generally concede Agesilaos’s point: poorer Spartan hoplite infantrymen led a more rugged life than wealthier Persians in Ionia, and were usually more than a match for them in an infantry contest of physical strength and martial discipline.

But the 1980s classicists might have a very different take. Versed in theories of post-colonialism and sensitive to the biases inherent in “Orientalism,” it might unpack something much more nefarious. The incident itself might have been constructed to substantiate Xenophon’s own prejudicial narrative. Or, even if Agesilaos’s demonstration actually transpired as reported, it serves as a valuable exegesis of continuing Western racial and gender bias of the persistent type we see, for example, in the latest Hollywood take on Thermopylae, director Zack Snyder’s 300. So in this postmodern take, at the beginning of the West we can witness how our pernicious tradition began of stereotyping the “other,” solely on basis of artificially constructed norms of gender and ethnicity.

In the same manner, Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars — the published collection of papers presented at a 2003 Classics conference at Durham university — reflects this bifurcation between traditional empirical approaches and postmodern theorizing. The result is that we receive sometimes two radically different views of the early fifth-century B.C. wars between Greece and Persia. Some scholars in the collection implicitly accept the general outlines of the old paradigm, that a much larger, more autocratic Eastern empire serially tried to squash small, freer Greek city-states. And such a clash of disparate civilizations — well documented in classical literature, archaeology and epigraphy — for centuries has been emblematic of many of the differences we still undeniably see today between the East and West.

Again, the other view is that many of our own prejudices about the East start with a malicious tradition begun by the Greeks of demonizing their Persian neighbors. Or in the words of the editors of this very post-9/11 volume: “The ‘war against terror’ being waged by the U.S. and its allies is in danger of being perceived as, or as escalating into, a conflict between (a greatly secularized) Christendom and Islam. The failure of the Persian invasions of Greece at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. was indeed a defining moment in the history of the world.” At the outset, one must applaud a number of fine contributions among the sixteen essays. For example, in his characteristically thorough fashion, P.J. Rhodes assembles the literary evidence that shows the East-West divide could always be rather problematic and self-serving. Persia — almost like the image of Mexico in the old West — was often a receptive hideout to Greek renegades and exiles. And at various times, Athenians, Spartans, and Thebans all made alliances with the Great King against their fellow poleis.

Then, after the internecine bloodletting of the Peloponnesian War, a bruised fourth-century Greece increasingly reinvented Persia as the common bogeyman, vital to reuniting city-states. The call to push aside differences and unite against the age-old enemy culminated in the half-Hellenized Alexander destroying the empire (but only after butchering thousands of Greeks first) in his pose as some sort of divine Greek Nemesis.

In this vein, John Marincola in workmanlike fashion notes how the various Greek city-states claimed credit (Marathon and Salamis vs. Plataia) in defeating the Mede — until Alexander trumped them all by destroying outright the empire, and thus relegated the previous squabbles over beating back Persians to pedantic quibbling. On very meager evidence Johannes Haubold argues that the Persians were so well versed in the Homeric epics that they too used the Trojan War as a sort of cultural template of their own serial attacks on Greece. Apparently, we are to believe that Homeric bards — common referents among thousands of Greek elites — were likewise familiar, or of any real concern, to the non-Hellenic speaking Persian court.

Christopher Rowe refashions the obvious — that Plato and other aristocrats were not so celebratory of their ancestors’ victory over the Great King, and that their dissident voices represent a significant defection from the whole triumphalist notion of an East-West clash of civilizations. Maybe. But in reality the dissonance that Rowe notes was mostly a reflection of bitter aristocratic discomfort at the postwar empowerment of Athenian radical democracy and sea power, both critical to later success on the Aegean. In some sense, the crotchety whining of a politically marginalized Plato and his irrelevant pals was comparable to postwar reactionaries’ revisionist harping about a supposedly unnecessary Second World War, which, in this loony view, only served the Soviet Union and the cause of subsequent communism rather than defeated the evil of Nazism.

Why, then, should we think that Plato represented the views of more than a few hundred like-minded right-wing cranks, bitter about the airs of the naval crowd who constantly crowed about their ancestors’ prowess at Salamis? In the end, Rowe offers a weak politically-correct fillip as a sort of conclusion, “Nonetheless the very fact of his attack on this hallowed Athenian myth ought to help prevent us from too easy an acceptance of the modern, and surely brittler, versions of that same myth — that at Marathon, and at Salamis, civilization was saved from barbarian, i.e. non-Greek, chaos.” But instead of such sermonizing, why not simply compare pre-Persian Ionia, home of the birth of the Greek renaissance in epic, lyric, and pre-Socratic philosophy, with it subsequent intellectual life in the sixth and fifth centuries as a Persian satrapy?

The strongest essays deal with later impressions of the Persian War in the much later European literary and artistic tradition. David Kimbell provides an exhaustive lesson on the war’s prominent role in Western opera (replete with sheet music excerpts). Ian Macgregor Morris sketches a meticulous, well-illustrated account of the rediscovery of the Persian War battlefields in Greece during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The more Europeans visited Thermopylae (the surrounding sea-level vastly changed antiquity), the more grew the fascination with Hellenism. Published maps and drawings of the battlefields, despite the lack of material remains, reminded romantics that Herodotus and Aeschylus apparently were telling the truth.

In this regard, three fine contributions of Timothy Rood, Gonda Van Steen and Clemence Schultz trace the role of the Persian War in renewing European romantic interest in contemporary political change — most of all modern Greek resistance to Turkish autocracy, in which Lord Byron did his best to recast the Greek war of independence against the Ottomans as a Salamis or Thermopylae redux.

But the most enjoyable essays are the last two on film and contemporary literature. D.S. Levene gives a surprisingly sympathetic, but convincing defense of the now neglected 1962 Rudolph Matê film, The 300 Spartans. Especially interesting is his discussion of how British accents were variously used by Hollywood filmmakers to emphasize either villainy or sobriety. And Emma Bridges’s take on Steven Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire is more than fair. She points out that the novelist is both conversant with classical military history, and not afraid in his general encomium on Spartan valor at Thermopylae to show the seamier side of an apartheid state based on the labor of thousands of helots. Both are sensitive critics, and we would welcome their views on the utterly idiosyncratic, megahit 300 — based on the comic book of Frank Miller — that unfortunately was released after publication of this present collection.

Returning to the earlier point of a clash of ideologies within Classics itself, I don’t know quite what to make of Alexandra Lianeri’s deconstruction of George Grote’s magisterial A History of Greece. Her sensible observation that the liberal Grote’s history was both a reflection of and player in contemporary 19^th-century reform British politics can’t quite escape the muzzle of her postmodern prose. “Yet we can now conclude that this moment did not signify an event of the past, but a narrative point of origin, a frame through which historiography set the limits of the historical, and by doing so, registered its links to the political limits which it sought to conceptualize. In such an encounter the historian becomes visible not as the critical investigator, but, in de Certeau’s terms, as an unassailable absence within the text, a lack which is the other that ceaselessly moves and misleads him” In the same vein, co-editor Edith Hall attempts to show how the Persian Wars were used and misused by generations of later Westerners to caricature or denigrate everyone east of the Aegean from Persians and Ottomans to contemporary Arabs and Muslims; in other words “to set the seal on the corrosive western identification of cosmic Freedom with the war against the Islamic faith”.

There is no doubt truth in her generality that all cultures unfairly shape their pasts for political purposes of the present. Compare, for example, the present Iranian government’s reaction to Hollywood’s caricature of their own newfound hero Xerxes, and the various ways in which both East and West distort his image to score contemporary political points. But the historian’s task is not to exhaustively note and amplify such banalities, but rather to ascertain to what degree they are exceptional and not common elsewhere, and are either completely groundless, or, in fact, derive from some empirical evidence however exaggerated.

Maybe Bush and Blair were reading their Xenophon, since even poor Saddam Hussein gets into Hall’s indictment, along with the war against terror, the ongoing Iraqi conflict and the other usual suspects. So, thanks to Edward Said, we can forget all that suicide bombing, IEDs, fatwas, televised beheadings, virulent anti-Semitism, burqas, polygamy, female circumcision, Sharia law, honor killings, Middle East dictatorships and theocracies, political oppression and religious intolerance, and instead blame such “fictive ethnicities” on imperialism that began with the Greeks: “Certain stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims — in particular relating to their perceived sensuality, effeminacy, and irrationality — had been increasingly exposed in the west, at least since the publication of Said’s Orientalism, as fictive ethnicities belonging to the now obsolete ideology of imperialism.” Clash of cultures indeed.