Sophist Kings Also available from Bloomsbury Aesthetic Themes in Pagan and Christian Neoplatonism, Daniele Iozzia Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy as a Product of Late Antiquity, Antonio Donato Solon the Thinker, John David Lewis Sophist Kings Persians as Other in Herodotus Vernon L. Provencal Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Vernon L. Provencal, 2015 Vernon L. Provencal has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. 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Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN 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 Introduction 1 0.1 Greek and Other 2 0.2 Summary overview 9 0.3 Note on abbreviations, dates and translations 12 1 Herodotus and the Histories 13 1.1 Herodotus 14 1.2 Historical narrative of the Histories 16 1.3 Rhetorical purpose of the Histories 17 1.4 Argument of the Histories 18 1.5 Persia as the sophistic Other of Greece 23 1.6 Rhetorical purpose of representing the Persians as sophistic Other 25 2 Herodotus and the Sophists 29 2.1 Sophists and their teachings 29 2.2 Sophist teachings in Herodotus 36 2.3 Introducing Persians as sophists 71 2.4 Conclusion 93 3 Herodotus and the Persians 95 3.1 Persian ethnos 95 3.2 Religion in Persia 118 3.3 Achaemenid religion: Ahuramazdaism 130 3.4 Persian kingship and empire 144 3.5 Achaemenid model of kingship 152 4 Persians as Other in Herodotus 161 4.1 Herodotus’ map of the world 162 4.2 Herodotus’ cultural grid 165 4.3 Egyptian–Scythian axis: Nomos hieros vs nomos phusikos 171 4.4 Greek–Persian axis: Nomos basileus vs nomos phuseōs 177 viii Contents 5 Sophist Kings 215 5.1 Persosophists in Herodotus 215 5.2 Archetype of the sophist king 223 5.3 Median sophist kings 225 5.4 Persian sophist kings 228 5.5 Achaemenid sophist kings 235 5.6 Persosophist Greeks 243 Conclusion 251 Notes 259 Bibliography 291 Expanded Table of Contents 316 Index of Passages – Herodotus’ Histories 321 Index of Persons 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 histo- riographical 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.