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A TALE OF TWO KINGS:
COMPETING ASPECTS OF POWER IN AESCHYLUS’ PERSIANS
Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Introduction
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 fasci-
nated 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 differ-
ent.
1
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 Mediterra-
nean world had yet seen. They sought in their iconography and building pro-
grammes to exert a particular identity for themselves and the Achaemenid dy-
nasty. Although the Athenians were not imperialists of the type we see in Per-
sia, 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.
2
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.
This article examines the representations of Darius and Xerxes in Aeschy-
lus’
Persians
through comparison with Achaemenid official art. I use the com-
parison to help investigate possible forms of audience reception of the various
staged moments within the play specifically relating to power and its relation-
ship to kingship and empire. This comparison is contextualised by examining
the trans-cultural relationship of Greeks and Persians in the years prior to the
Persian invasions up to the time of the play’s production. I engage questions of
how tragedy was staged as well as questions of cultural and ideological influ-
ences and contexts. The play offers a meditation on aspects of power. The stag-
ing of the kings, who are the
loci
of power within the play, present various as-
pects of centralised power and hegemony and its relative desirability. Although
the play allows its Athenian audience to reject tyrannical power and tyrants, it
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COMPETING ASPECTS OF POWER IN AESCHYLUS’ PERSIANS
also allows them to embrace other types of authority and provides a solid justi-
fication and precedent for their own
archē.
Through the figures of Darius and Xerxes, the play illuminates tensions be-
tween competing realities and ideologies, between competing aspects of power
—Darius the hegemonic leader versus Xerxes, the overly-aggressive, imperial-
ist tyrant. The former power is useful and desirable, the latter is dangerous.
3
Staging these tensions within a tragedy sets the post-war political debates over
Athenian-Persian relations into the realm of popular entertainment, thus mov-
ing real, everyday engagement with Persia on to an imaginary or mythological
space. Darius’ representation rests upon the everyday engagement with Persia
(but one functionally imaginary) and underscores the positive aspects and po-
tential of Persian-Athenian cultural exchange. Xerxes’ character points to a
new political fiction of Persian ethnic alienation in the guise of the real sus-
tained military threat of Persia.
I begin first with a review of the evidence for Greco-Persian interactions and
Persian monarchical self-representation. Is such an influence of Achaemenid
official representations on Athenian culture as early as 472 BCE plausible and,
secondly, how did the Great King represent himself officially? Next I move to
Aeschylus’ representation of Darius. I argue that it is a
tableau vivant
based on
the official images and inscriptions of Darius like those on his tomb and at Bisi-
tun brought to life on stage. Visually, the play shares much with the conven-
tions of ancient painting and sculpture. Although we often view vase painting
especially as following drama, we should consider that the exchange moved in
both directions. Tragedies are sometimes staged art,
tableaux vivants,
as much
as paintings are illustrations of the action on the stage. Staging Darius in the
manner of the real Darius’ own iconographical tradition transports into the
theatre the underlying message of positive hegemonic power found in official
Achaemenid art. Finally, I look at how this message is set in contrast to Xerxes
and his relationship to power within the play. Xerxes’ character does not adhere
to the ‘official’ version of kingship. Instead, he is an exaggerated king, king as
tyrant.
Inherent to this approach is a desire to reconstruct as plausibly as possible
the intellectual and cultural context for original creation and performance of the
play, a rather conservative historicist approach, on the one hand, but one con-
scious of a broader definition of ‘culture.’ This means that I will only engage
with materials that were in circulation prior to or contemporary with Aeschy-
lus’
Persians.
Therefore, unlike other studies that focus on the ideological as-
pects of this or other plays, I will only note well-known passages from Herodo-
tus or other later texts that may share similar content or may assist in recon-
structing a historical picture. The ideological and intellectual context for
Aeschylus is quite different from that of Herodotus, Aristophanes or Thucy-
dides. To claim that the same ideas, factors or events impacted creation and
reception in 472 BCE as in 442 or 402 BCE sets up a flawed range of possible
reactions to the play. In the discussion that follows I do not exclude other inter-
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REBECCA FUTO KENNEDY
pretations that rely on later historical contexts; I simply seek to expand the
range of possibilities through different contextualisation. I do, however, attempt
to avoid issues of anachronism that can occur from relying too heavily on later
texts, material culture, political/military realities or theories because of their
importance to our canon or to later visions of classical Greece. I am not con-
cerned, however, with issues of historical accuracy; whether Aeschylus reflects
the true events of the Battle of Salamis or the Persian court is not an issue here.
I take as a given that the work is one that incorporates reality to the extent that
the tragedy requires, but is ultimately a work of fiction. Aeschylus’ audience
might expect verisimilitude, but certainly not historical fact.
4
Some of the im-
pact of the play comes, of course, from including aspects of Persian culture and
Athenian experience (thus my own thesis), but exactitude was not expected nor
required.
5
Thus my approach to the
Persians,
and to Athenian tragedy gener-
ally,
6
varies from most interpretations in a number of ways.
First, while there has been a great deal of excellent scholarship focused on
the civic contexts of tragedy, the role that the Great Dionysia and tragedy
played in promoting a specific image of the Athenians as hegemons in the Ae-
gean to non-Athenians in the audience generally has been elided out of the
scholarship. This is despite Goldhill’s explicit discussion of the imperial impli-
cations of the pre-performance aspects of the Dionysia. I believe such an eli-
sion has skewed our interpretations of many plays, including, and especially,
the
Persians.
The Great Dionysia was not a festival for the Athenians alone, but
a festival to display Athens to non-Athenians as well. Interpreting this play as
either jingoistic praise of Athens or a pure critique of empire ignores the reality
of who was in the audience.
7
Second, where the issue of imperialism is broached by scholars, it is fre-
quently bound up with theories of post-colonialism, Orientalism and tyranny. It
reverses the dynamics of the Atheno-Persian relationship to mirror that of the
perceived modern relationships between East and West. This leads to a series
of sleights of hand wherein all forms of imperial power and monarchy become
essentialised as ‘bad’ and inherently un-Athenian. This value judgment of im-
perialism then becomes a premise upon which interpretations of the plays are
built and the
Persians
becomes a warning against Athenian expansionism
8
or
the first representation in the annals of Orientalism.
9
I prefer to read the play as
separate from these preconceptions and instead engage the play from a position
that acknowledges both negative and positive images and associations the
Athenians had of both monarchy and imperialism. The Athenian relationship to
their own power and to the Persians was not so simplistic as to assume that
monarchy and empire were viewed by an Athenian (or non-Athenian Greek)
audience as a negative.
10
The play itself, as I argue below, is about the ambigui-
ties of these types of power. Power cannot be essentalised so easily.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I seek in this article to analyse the
play more firmly within its own intellectual, ideological and artistic contexts,
contexts that included the influence of Persian art, Persian propaganda and, yes,
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COMPETING ASPECTS OF POWER IN AESCHYLUS’ PERSIANS
fear and some loathing of Persia as a military threat. I do not, therefore, reject
cultural poetics as an approach to tragedy, but seek to redefine ‘culture’ to re-
flect more accurately the place of Athens and Athenians in the Mediterranean
world. I read the play from outside the dynamics of a Greek/barbarian dicho-
tomy that approaches immersed in post-colonial theories and the discourse of
tyranny have attached so absolutely to this play. I reject the notion that the
Athenians rejected Persia in reality or even ideologically. Neither the evidence
from classical Athens in general nor this play specifically support such a no-
tion. To understand the dialogue between play and audience, we must access
the larger expanse of influences that impacted the Athenians, and we must be
open to the same influences they were. We also must recognise that most di-
chotomies, while real in an ideological context, are often dysfunctional in the
real world and products of scholars’ (ancient and modern) interpretive ap-
proaches more than the object of interpretation itself.
Athenians and Persians—Enemies or Frienemies?
11
According to various art historians and historians of the Achaemenid period
intensive contacts between Greeks and Persians date back to before Cyrus’
conquest of the Lydians some time between 554-547 BCE. Kuhrt’s brief out-
line of the realities of Greco-Persian interaction begins in the 8th century BCE
and cites intensive and complex trade relations between the Assyrians and the
eastern Greeks,
12
including Ionian Greeks who worked on construction in
Babylon and who may have served as mercenaries in the army of Nebuchad-
nezzar.
13
Based on prosopographical evidence alone it is clear that this interac-
tion became more intensive in cultural, political, military and economic spheres
under the first Persian kings.
14
There is also evidence that intermarriage be-
tween Greek elites and Persians was not exceptional.
15
Under Darius, Ionian
Greeks were employed in great numbers in cities like Susa and Persepolis as
artisans, engineers, traders, irrigation workers, mercenaries, doctors, political
agents, administrative staff, even priests.
16
As both Root and Miller emphasise,
these Ionians did not remain in Susa, Pasagardae or Persepolis, but returned
back to Anatolia and their coastal homes and surely shared stories with their
fellow Ionians and their mainland visitors of the splendours they both worked
on and saw in the Persian capitals.
17
As Sancisi-Weerdenburg reminds us, ‘a
large part of the Greek world was part of the Persian Empire whether the
Greeks liked it or not’.
18
As subjects and neighbours of the Persian kings,
Greeks regularly viewed many images on coins, seals and in smaller monu-
ments that mirrored the great official monuments in the Persian capitals.
19
Coins with imperial images also found their way to Athens.
20
Athenian involvement in the Hellespont region and the Chersonese and then
the Ionian Revolt only increased engagement with Persia. As Miller again
points out, Herodotus’ comment that the Athenians and Plataeans were the first
Greeks to endure the sight of the Mede is ‘a poetical rather than historical
truth’.
21
They were not even the first Athenians to see a Persian army and
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REBECCA FUTO KENNEDY
Herodotus himself tells the tale that disproves his later comment when he re-
counts Athenian involvement in the Ionian Revolt and the Athenian march to
Sardis (Her. 5.100f.).
22
It was not only their Ionian neighbours who had interac-
tion with and commonplace knowledge of the Persians in the 6th century BCE.
The Athenians did as well.
23
The evidence thus makes clear that there was a steady stream of exchange
between the mainland Greeks and Persians and ample opportunity for the
Athenians especially to see and engage with official royal representations of the
Great Kings between the 540s and 472 BCE. Notwithstanding, some scholarly
approaches are premised on an ideological world in which the Athenians of 472
BCE had limited knowledge of and little interest in their Persian neighbours.
The evidence does not support this. Nor can the realities be ignored by appeal
to a structuralist approach to ideology as divorced from reality.
24
Ideology is
shaped by reality as much as it shapes it. To suggest that the relationship be-
tween Athens and Persia was a simplistic type of ‘hatred’ and schematised
within a flattened Greek/barbarian dichotomy does the same.
25
While there was
a political ideology that set Greek in opposition to Persian (seemingly for mili-
tary purposes), there were strong economic and cultural ties that belied that
false dichotomy. In fact, the developing political ideology that separated the
two, I argue below, was a mask to hide real political similarities and borrow-
ings.
26
The figures of Darius and Xerxes and their differentiation in Greek rep-
resentations are a key element in understanding the complexity of the relation-
ship between Greek and Persian both in reality and ideologically.
Fig.1: Sketch of central portion of top register of
Darius’ tomb at Naqsh-I Rustam (R. Kennedy)
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