Perpetual Enmity

1 Perpetual Enmity I It all began with an abduction. The girl’s name was Europa and she was the daughter of Agenor, king of the city of Tyre on the coast of Sidon, in what is now Lebanon. She was sitting by the water, pale, golden-haired, weaving flowers, hyacinths, violets, roses, thyme, into a garland, when Zeus, father of the gods, came out of the sea in the shape of a white bull, ‘his breath scented with saffron’. Her attendants fled. But she remained, and—in the Roman poet Ovid’s telling of the story Gradually she lost her fear, and he Offered his breast for her virgin caresses His horns for her to wind with chains of flowers10 Cupid, who had materialized fluttering beside her, lifted her gently onto the creature’s back. He carried her out to sea and across the straits which separated two worlds, to Crete where in the meadows of Gortyn they made love under a huge shady plane tree.11 There she would bear three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon, and give her name to a continent. Then, having tired of her, as he did of all his human consorts, Zeus married her to Asterius, king of Crete, who adopted her half-divine sons as his own. This is the myth of the Rape of Europa. For centuries it has been the story of the founding of the European peoples, and the source of what has ever since been called the ‘West’. But as Europa’s home had been in Asia, it meant that this ‘West’ had been born out of the ‘East’. ‘What then’, asked the great twentieth-century French poet Paul Valéry, ‘is this Europe? A sort of promontory of the Old Continent, an appendix of Asia?’ Yes, he answered, but one ‘which looks naturally to the West’.12 2 perpetual enmity As with all myths, however, there is another, more mundane version. This was first suggested by the Greek historian Herodotus, and later seized upon by the third-century Christian theologian Lactantius, eager to debunk and demystify all the unsettling erotic fantasies which had reached him from the pagan world. In this version, which Herodotus attributed to the Persians, the Rape of Europa was an act of revenge for the seizure by Phoenician sailors of Io the daughter of Inachus, king of Argos. Later on, wrote Herodotus, ‘some Greeks, whose name the Persians failed to record’—they were, in fact, Cretans, known for their savagery as ‘the boars of Ida’—put into the Phoenician port of Tyre ‘and carried off the king’s daughter Europa thus giving them tit for tat’. Lactantius provides these Cretans with a bull-shaped ship so as to explain away Zeus, and says that Europa was intended as a present for their king Asterius, a version taken up centuries later by the Italian poet Boccaccio who added his own twist to an already overcomplicated story by renaming the Cretan ruler ‘Jove’.13 The mythic abductions continued. The Cretans were what Herodotus called ‘Europeans’, and as Europa was an Asian woman, her rape was taken by all Asians to be an affront. Later Jason, another European, will sail into the Black Sea and abduct Medea the daughter of Aeëtes, king of Colchian Aia, along with the Golden Fleece she had helped him to steal. Later still, the Trojans, a people from what we now call Asia Minor, seize a, not wholly unwilling, Helen wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, in revenge, and carry her off to Troy. In turn, Menelaus’ brother, Agamemnon, raises an army crosses the sea, and lays siege to the great city of Troy for ten long years. Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, as the great Roman jurist Marcus Tullius Cicero called him, was searching for a resolution to the question which all these stories claimed to answer but none in fact did. Why had ‘these two peoples—Greeks and Persian—fought with one another’? Herodotus, had grown up with the enmity between Greeks and Persians and lived through its consequences. He had been born in Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum on what is now the coast of Turkey, sometime around 490 bce, the year that the Persian ‘Great King’ Darius I had launched the first full-scale attempt by an Asian power to subdue the whole of Europe. Halicarnassus was a Greek city, but at the time of Herodotus’ birth, and during all of the time which he spent there as a young man, it was under Persian rule. He had lived between two worlds, then apparently at peace if not always at ease with one another, and he wanted to know how relative perpetual enmity 3 amity between two peoples could be transformed into long years of bitter hatred. In search of his answer he dedicated his later life and all his creative energy to telling the story of the momentous struggle between Asia and Europe which have come to be called ‘The Persian Wars’—a series of conflicts which lasted off and on from 490 until 479 bce. The tales of Io and Europa and of the Trojan War were, he knew, merely pretexts. These quasi-mythic struggles had been fought out in the shadow of the gods, in times when humans were rarely seen to exercise any will of their own. Herodotus, however, is one of the very first writers to see human beings as responsible for their own actions. The gods are still there, but they are shadowy creatures. They still speak, through signs, auguries, and the unreliable and devious voices of the oracles. But they make nothing happen. It is humankind now which dominates and controls the world. Like the Trojan War, the Persian Wars were titanic struggles between Europe and Asia. But they were historical conflicts this time rather than mythological ones, and they had precise origins and no less precise consequences. Herodotus had himself spoken with many of the combatants in the course of gathering the material for what he called simply his ‘inquiries’, his Histories, and he evidently had a a great measure of sympathy for all of them no matter what their origins. Although he never learned Persian (he seems, for instances to believe that all Persian names end with ‘s’), he claims to be in possession of information which could only have come from Persian sources, and his view of the Persians, although it sometimes conforms to what will later become a hardened Greek stereotype of the ‘Oriental’, is more nuanced than that of most later writers. For all that, his vision is necessarily a Greek one, and because his is the only detailed account we have of the wars it is his vision which for centuries dominated our understanding of what happened and why. Modern archae- ology has now given us a sometimes very different account of the rise of the Achaemenids—the ruling dynasty of what is now routinely called the Persian Empire—and of the kind of society over which they ruled. From this new perspective it would indeed seem that Herodotus was not only the father of history but also, as he was once called by the Graeco-Roman philosopher and biographer Plutarch, the ‘father of lies’.14 The literal accuracy of his story, however, is not the point. For the Histories are not only an attempt to recount a succession of wars: they are also a representation of the origins—cultural, political, and to some degree psychological—of the Greek world. Although he grumbled that he could not understand 4 perpetual enmity ‘why three names, and women’s names at that [Europa, Asia, and Africa], should have been given to a tract which is in reality one’,15 Herodotus had a clear understanding of the distinction between ‘Europe’ and Asia. He also had a clear sense of what ‘Greekness’ was, and a term—to hellenikon—to describe it. It was, he said, ‘shared blood, shared language, shared religion, shared customs’. Here is the origin of the European, ‘Western’ sense of distinctiveness. But it is also the recognition that distinctiveness of any kind is never complete, and that Greece—Europe—owed an immense debt to what was for centuries its most enduring enemy. ‘Greekness’ may have been common to all. Herodotus is, nevertheless, well aware that the cities of ancient Greece, although alike in many ways, were, in fact, also very different kinds of societies; and if they shared the same gods and versions of the same language and even, more dubiously, the same blood, their customs could often be very different. When Herodotus describes what it is which separates the Greeks from their Asian adversaries, it is usually Athenian, and in particular democratic, values that he has in mind. The Greeks of Herodotus’ day lived in small cities, which were also, save for those under Persian rule, self-governing political communities—city states we call them today—scattered along the shores of the Mediterranean from Sicily to Cyprus and the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. Although the peoples of this world were all ‘Hellenes’ their story was not one of peaceful cohabitation. Until August 338, when, at the battle of Chaeronea, Philip of Macedon brought it finally to an end, the ancient Greek world was, in reality, always one of constantly shifting alliances. As the Persians frequently observe in Herodotus’ pages, the Greeks had always had a hard time making a common cause against any enemy. The frontier between Europe and Asia was also, in reality, highly porous. Greek cities flourished under Persian rule and influential Greeks fleeing the anger of their own people frequently sought asylum at the Persian court.

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