Babbling Greeks? Mistranslations & misinterpretations of Persian customs
Yep, lockdown has helped me reach a new low. Couldn’t write that exam essay that you were really hoping would come up? Not to worry — Ostraka is your chance! This Ostrakon is based on an essay plan that I had prepared for my Greeks & Persians exam. Sad that I could not write about it, and a bit too eager not to, I’ve decided to experiment and write a brief piece on it.
I find exams to be great opportunities to extrapolate the bigger picture from the course content. They are a chance to link different pieces together and arrange them in ways that can challenge existing interpretations or glean out nuances. An optimal area to execute this is in methodology, i.e. what’s behind what we know, the source material, their limitations, their biases. To these ends, I made an essay plan that tackled scholarly views on Greek sources and how much we really know about their aims and biases in the first place.
When discussing the Greeks’ representations of “Others”, we often talk about the inherent biases and usually, to put it mildly, trash their historicity. Two issues are often raised. First, to some degree or other, the Greek sources almost always exclude foreigners (barbaroi) from their Greek civilisation and self-perceived perfection, thereby distorting them in negative ways. This is clear in the very definition of these “others” and their act of speech: barbarian, barbaroi, literally derives from the babbling sound Greeks thought foreigners made when speaking their own languages or trying to speak Greek. Second, partly due to this bias, these Greek sources often overshadow the extant emic evidence and our interpretation of it. So can we truly reconstruct some degree of historicity, or “truth”, from these Greek sources? Some have suggested simply steering clear from them, others treating them with due scepticism — in most cases, we label these Greeks as the real “babblers”, who project qualities onto the foreigners that reflect the inverse of their own Hellenism more than any truth. But let us pause. Beyond the dangers of massing the diverse corpus of Greek sources together, the Greek sources are often the only sources we have for Persian customs. Without them, we are a lot poorer in our knowledge of the Persians. So should we reconsider this view a bit? Just how full of othering, or in what ways, were the Greek sources? Most importantly, do we risk losing valuable information about the Persians in our attempts to patronise the Greek sources and highlight their inherent unreliability? The question I want to tackle is: Are the Greek sources on Persian customs a lost cause in reconstructing the “historical reality”?
As a side note, I should say that I realise this approach of revaluing often racist and stereotyped sources might ring inappropriately in the current context of Black Lives Matter and the removal of public statues of figures involved in racist policies and the slave trade. I am neither endorsing these attitudes nor trying to erase the unacceptable views of these mostly white, male, and old Greek authors, and I actively oppose these views and misappropriations. Here, I merely try to suggest different ways of approaching the evidence and searching for new interpretations. By doing so, as we’ll see, my analysis revalues local perspectives beyond the imperialistic dictum of Persia. So, in the spirit of Durham’s new online exams, I write this essay plan, albeit in a more blog-esque style with images and more accessible explanations (therefore slightly longer than the 1,700 words)— not least to start thinking about other ideas, and keep the learning going: the party never ends, as Socrates would say.
Are the Greek sources on Persian customs a lost cause in reconstructing the “historical reality”?
Steered by Saïd’s groundbreaking Orientalism, scholars have increasingly noted the ways in which the Greeks’ depictions of other cultures are driven by more self-centred aims than historical accuracy. Most prominently, the process of “Othering” by Greek sources, conscious or not, distorts the historical reality of Persian customs by projecting values that are binary opposite to Greek ones, exaggerating certain features and glossing out others, and inverting Greek normality. The result is an artificial caricature crafted more by Greek anxieties and self-definition. Given the pervasive extent of this process, scholars like Fehling famously for Herodotus have espoused the view that approaching the Greek sources for historical reality is a lost cause. Instead, these Greek sources should be discarded to avoid confusing the scant extant emic evidence.
A healthy degree of scepticism is undeniably required when analysing these Greek sources. However, more recent discoveries and reinterpretations (famously the Himalayan marmots and Herodotus’ gold-dust ants) have challenged just how far the Greek sources are a lost cause, and suggested that in some cases they are closer to the historical reality than we might at first think. This raises the counter-concern of whether we risk losing valuable historical information, with some tweaking, in our attempts to discard the Greek sources. In this light, I will analyse some examples of Greek authors describing Persian customs to demonstrate that what lies at the core of these misunderstandings are mistranslations and misinterpretations, beyond simple and deliberate Othering. With this background, I will analyse more ambiguous Greek anecdotes that hint at elements of truth, before finally exploring cases that depict Persian customs more closely than we originally thought. By doing so, I argue that while Greeks certainly did operate with deliberate “othering”, some biases result from mistranslations and can at times shed light on other local perspectives not often visible in the emic Persian evidence. Dividing my examples into historical and ideological topics, I take a more inclusive, redemptive approach building on the scholarship of Miller and Mitchell to discuss other voices that would otherwise be lost.
On the one hand, however, the majority of Greek sources engage, to some degree, in “othering”. While it is prevalent, however, it is not always deliberate; in certain cases, these misinterpretations can be traced to more incidental mistranslations of Old Persian terms and different cultural contexts between the Greeks and Persians. In the ideological sphere, this is perhaps best exemplified by the Greeks’ misconception of the Persian King’s divinity. Sources like Herodotus’ episode of the Spartan messengers Sperthias’ and Boulis’ refusal to bow and perform proskynesis before King Xerxes, citing that they would not honour a mortal as a god through proskynesis (7.36), highlight that (some) Greeks believed that the Persians treated their king as a god. This is corroborated more explicitly by the eunuch’s claim in Plutarch’s Themistokles that the best law in Persia was that of prostrating before the King as if to the “image of a god”, and diachronically in Plutarch’s anecdote of the Theban Ismenias’ embarrassed covering up of his proskynesis to Artaxerxes by pretending to “accidentally” drop his ring and bow down to collect it. This association of kingship and divinity appears to stem from the act of proskynesis, and it is the differing Greek and Persian interpretations of this proskynesis that suggest this Greek misinterpretation may not have been wholly intentional. While Bowden has demonstrated that proskynesis in 5th century Greece often symbolised a sign of respect to a god (e.g. Xen. Anabasis where proskynesis is performed after a sneeze, believed to be divinely-sent), in Persian custom it appears to be simply reserved for the king. Second, given the lack of extant Persian evidence asserting their Kings’ divinity, the Greeks may have skewed the reciprocal relationship that the Persian Kings did have with their god Ahuramazda into a more identical one, even though royal Persian iconography (cf. Bisitun, DNb) detailed that the King reciprocally worshipped Ahuramazda in return for the protection and legitimacy Ahuramazda’s power provided. Thereby, it appears that this “othering” stemmed from different cultural interpretations of similar rituals and the Greeks natural inclination to their own meaning, alongside a degree of deliberate vilification. Consequently, this misconception was assimilated to and amplified by broader Greek perceptions of the ultra-human status of the King, as exemplified by Heracleides of Cyme’s claim that the Persian King did not physically touch the mortal earth (perhaps stemming from the King’s feet resting on the cushion in the Apadana relief).
This misunderstanding, alongside intended othering, in the ideological sphere also extends closer to historical facts and across time, exemplified through the Persian custom of the “substitute king” with Alexander and Darius III. Many Greek historians, such as Arrian 3.12, characterise Darius III’s final years as miserable and dishonourable: pursued by Alexander, Darius’ own courtiers rebelled and arrested him; all agree that Darius was held captive by his courtiers. Arguably, this is part of a broader historiographical trend: this humiliation culminates Darius’ especially inept reign that ended Persia, building on his illegitimacy to the throne and revolts early in his reign (Diodorus Siculus). By contrast, this helps to elevate Alexander as the especially great Greek conqueror. Hence the othering. However, approaching this detail of Darius’ “capture” through other Persian evidence suggests that the Greeks were misinterpreting a legitimate Persian custom that implies that the Persians were still fighting hard. As Nylander has argued, evidence like Xerxes’ placement of Artabanus on his throne to receive his dream at the Hellespont (Hdt. 7.12), or more emically LABS 351 involving priests, attest to the custom of installing a “puppet king” on the throne when the real King was threatened, so that the evil might befall that substitute king and the King proper be reinstalled safely. The “captivity” of Darius and usurpation of Bessus, therefore, rather than being traitorous and culminating Darius’ weaknesses, likely highlight Darius’ resilience and attempts to stay in power. In ideology, therefore, alongside simple othering, Greek sources seem to involuntarily overlook these Persian meanings, whether consciously or not, and interpret actions through their own cultural expectations; this problematises the narrative of Alexander’s sweeping conquest over the Persians. This misunderstanding highlights therefore that these Greek misrepresentations were not fully products of deliberate “othering”, but involved more complex cultural expectations and their misinterpretations.
Moving more directly to historical examples of failed Greco-Persian diplomacy not only amplifies these underlying cultural misinterpretations, but also reveal more minute verbal mistranslations, beyond deliberate othering. With this, we can better map the causes for these misinterpretations and begin to see vestiges of, or attempts to preserve, the truth. Right from arguably the cause of the Persian Wars, cultural misinterpretations are at the basis. The Athenian messengers’ mistake of offering earth and water to Darius in 508/7, and the Athenians’ harsh rebuke of this (Hdt. 5.73), is arguably explained by the different significance each culture attached to the tribute of earth and water: Rung argues that while the Persians viewed this offering as a sign of total subservience and their imperial extent (e.g. the jars of water from around the empire kept in Persepolis’ Treasury, Plut. Vita Alex. 36, Strabo), the Greeks viewed it as ratifying a neutral non-aggression pact and mutual alliance (συμμαχία in Hdt.) and thereby helping them against the Spartans in their immediate politics. Similarly in such diplomatic missions, the Greeks also often misinterpreted the Persian custom of gift-giving, whereby the Persian King was meant to always give the greater gift, through their conception of equal xenia, as Miller has argued. In other cases, however, this misunderstanding extends closer to semantic details and mistranslation of words. In the Gadatas letter, likely an original Achaemenid letter recopied into Greek and erected near Magnesia on the Menander, the term used to define the satrap Gadatas’ relationship to King Darius is δοῦλος, “slave”. That this term plays into broader Greek stereotypes highlighting the servitude of all subjects and even satraps to the King (cf. Herodotus’ reference to Aristagoras as Darius’ “slave”, Andocides’ to Amorges as the King’s, and Agesilaos’ to Pharnabazus in Xen. Hell.), rings warning bells regarding historicity. The Persian terminology for satraps on inscriptions like at Bisitun, however, reveals that the Old Persian term used was likely bandaka, meaning the more neutral “underling” without connotations of slavery. The Greek carvers’ misinterpretation of one seemingly innocuous word “satrap” when translating the Old Persian letter, therefore, imposes a whole other cultural baggage, influences our interpretation, and contributes to Greek “othering”.
Other historical cases of such mistranslation, to highlight their complexity in Greek depictions of Persian customs, span both Old Persian and Greek terms. This is best exemplified by the Greeks’ views on eunuchs at Persian court. Leaving aside the contentious historical debate about their identity and the Greek tendency to glamorise and effeminise them (cf. Briant vs Llewelyn-Jones), I will approach the question of why the Greeks often portrayed them in power through the mistranslation of Persian and Greek words, and subsequent reference to different groups of people. From the Greek perspective, as Briant has noted, the phonetic similarity of the Greek description of eunuchs, εὐνοχοοι (“someone who protects the bed-chamber”), to οἰνοχοοι (“wine-pourers”, cf. Nehemiah with Artaxerxes), has led some Greek sources to often use them interchangeably, and thereby attribute the powerful position of cup-bearers to these castrated eunuchs. The Persian evidence, however, links to this Greek slippage and clarifies it. The confusion between a court official “pouring wine”, who was not necessarily castrated, and a physically castrated eunuch is also seen in the Septuagint of Esther, where the term eunuch is glossed as se sari, the Old Persian word meaning “of the head”. This gloss, compared to other emic Persian definitions of se sari in the Wadi Hammurat inscription, suggest that this “wine-pourer” was simply an official in a high position, a “minister”. The distinction also nicely captures the divide in our Greek sources: while these “ministers” did not necessarily have to be physically castrated eunuchs, given the large number of these ministers mentioned, Llewelyn-Jones has pointed to the historically large numbers of castrated eunuchs in sources like Herodotus. Thereby, these semantic distortions suggest that, through the mistranslation of an Old Persian title, Greek authors attributed great power to these castrated men. While this misidentification certainly plays into preexisting Greek stereotypes around effeminisation, it suggests the Greeks were in some ways engaging with the original language in complex ways.
This Greek engagement with Persian sources is most explicitly visible in another area of Persian life, the military, as it involves visual and first-hand interaction. When numbering Xerxes’ troops before Thermopylae, Herodotus names the elite corps of the best 10,000 Persian warriors the “Immortals”. Prima facie, this unusual name appears to be a symptom of othering, as an extension of the association of the Persian King as divine. However, a closer look at the Persian word for a similar and more general office suggests that Herodotus’ term is more a result of a mistranslation of a different group, rather than intentional othering: the Old Persian for the King’s “companions” at court, anûšiya, differs by only two vowels to the Old Persian word for Immortals, anauša. Rather than being deliberate, therefore, it appears that somewhere the meaning was lost in translation. What this mistranslation attests to, importantly, as Herodotus himself reports elsewhere, is the direct discussions that Herodotus had with Persian and native translators and interpreters, arguably with an aim to capture the historical reality and ideology of the Persians. Indeed, one should be cautious before dismissing Herodotus’ thinking and attempts to reconstruct the truth here, since the reason he gives for this title “Immortals”, that they were constantly replaced to the number of 10,000 (i.e. they were eternally 10,000, not in life), seems equally logical and plausible. Supporting this even further, this direct interaction with Persians extends to the visual sphere: later Alexander historians also distinguish among these Immortals the supreme Μηλοφόροι, “Apple-bearers”. This reference has confused scholars, but a comparison to emic Persian evidence might explain it. The unusual spherical object, i.e. the metal counterweight, at the spears’ ends of the depictions of such warriors on the glazed bricks at Susa may actually be the attribute which gives them this title. Therefore, beyond simple othering, these martial examples demonstrate that Greeks like Herodotus were actively thinking of ways to interpret this new Persian culture as it was, in their Greek terms. Even though they may have distorted reality and slipped into othering, these examples attest to some Greeks’ engagement with Persian customs through translators and visually to ascertain their truth, and challenges the degree of malevolent stereotyping.
Finally, this direct engagement with the Persian customs and attempts to depict them faithfully opens the possibility that in some cases these Greek sources did capture some vestiges of historical truth and should not be fully discarded. Now, I analyse an ideological and historical case to demonstrate that the Greek (mis)interpretations of Persian customs can sometimes provide insights into valuable local perspectives of Persia’s subjects not visible in the emic royal evidence. In history, beyond the vindicated historicity of isolated cases of Herodotus’ “gold-digging ants” and “flying snakes”, is the case of Herodotus’ pessimistic portrayal of Cambyses’ actions in Egypt. Characterised by Cambyses’ cultural insensitivity in flogging priests, burning mummies, and killing the Apis bull, Herodotus’ account clearly plays into the “othering” of Persia in its foreign affairs (as opposed to Greek respect for others’ laws) while also being crafted to fit into his overarching pattern of Persian Kings (each is progressively and cumulatively worse, or each has his own flaw [Cambyses’ cultural insensitivity]). More recently, however, scholars have debunked the historicity of Herodotus’ negative account by foregrounding the remarkably positive cooperation and pharaonic respect Cambyses showed to Apis and other cults in local Egyptian evidence such as the Apis Bull Stele, Cambyses’ cenotaph for Apis, and the Udjahorresnet stele. This is valid, yet not wholly unproblematic: it assumes there was one single sentiment towards Cambyses’ actions, and elides together other contested versions and genres of Egyptian history. One such literary genre which fits Herodotus’ quasi-apocalyptic account remarkably well is the Egyptian tradition of Chaosbeschreibung, or ex-eventu prophecy, where a figure prophecises the present apocalyptic destruction of Egypt before native rule is restored. Reiterated in a recent Herodotus Helpling seminar, John Dillery has argued that Herodotus’ details closely follow the tropes in the Potter’s Oracle and Leper Fragment of Manetho: a foreign invader ravages Egypt, kills the sacred animals, mutilates the priests, before being self-punished and expelled. Fascinatingly, therefore, and given Herodotus’ interaction with Egyptian priests, Herodotus’ Greek and seemingly exaggerated account may very well draw from direct interaction with this particular priestly, local, Egyptian historical version that interpreted Cambyses actions in Egypt pessimistically, rather than the Egyptian elite propaganda closer to Cambyses; Dillery posits this tradition stemmed from the contemporaneous Cambyses Romance. This historical case, therefore, demonstrates that the Greek sources, prima facie stereotyping, can shed valuable light on variant local perspectives on the effects of Persian imperialism, otherwise invisible.
Finally, this Greek palimpsest of local versions extends to the ideological sphere and directly to royal Persian ideology, especially with Persian ideology of watery boundaries and Herodotus’ accounts of Darius’ and Xerxes’ routes to Greece. Famously, Xerxes’ whipping of the sea at the Hellespont has been seen both as a historical exaggeration and as culminating Herodotus’ theme of Xerxes’ hubris and transgression on nature. However, reappraising it through royal Persian evidence on the sea might instead suggest its historicity and the value it provided to these Kings, rather than highlighting their megalomania. First, as the Babylonian world map and Persian royal titlature demonstrate, the sea was represented, in Persia, as the boundary of the known world (landmass of Asia) and called “bitter”; beyond it were the nagû, the unknown lands. Traversing the sea and conquering these nagû enabled later Persian Kings to assert their superiority over their predecessors, since they would surpass the latter’s world conquests up to this “bitter” sea: this is evident in both Darius and Xerxes’ use of the phrase “beyond the sea” to describe the Ionians and Greeks whom they conquered (DPg, DNb, Daiva Inscription). Thereby, as Haubold has argued, this imagery of the sea and surpassing it was crafted emically by Persians and provided valuable ideological capital for Kings to legitimise their power. Returning to Herodotus, the fact that Xerxes’ action occurs at the Hellespont, the symbolic stretch of sea between the known world of Asia and the nagû i.e. Greece, may suggest that Xerxes’ performative mission did happen and served to legitimise his rule by surpassing the sea. Indeed, Xerxes’ words in Herodotus come astonishingly close to this royal Persian ideology: Xerxes calls the sea “bitter, brackish” (πικρὸν ὕδωρ, 7.35), just as in his Persian inscriptions. Most interestingly, other details in Herodotus support and may be nodding to this Persian ideology. Herodotus’ emphasis on Darius’ trip and performative gaze over the Hellespont when going to Scythia may have been part of a real legitimising royal ritual; more clearly, Xerxes’ detour to the Peneus’ mouth before marching across land to Greece symbolically enacts his arrival and conquering of the nagû as stated in his emic royal ideology. Finally, this close resonance between Greek and Persian royal ideology is captured at the broadest scale through both cultures’ use of fish imagery. Aeschylus’ Persai famously compares the Persians as fish drowning in the sea after Salamis; respectively, alongside the Persian custom of “netting” islanders like fish to capture them, Cyrus’ story to the Ionians during his conquest of them in Herodotus richly exploits the comparison of the Ionians as fish, now doomed on land. Therefore, given the sea geographically separated these two cultures, both Greeks and Persians logically refer to each other as the fish-people, as perhaps the Greek sources realised, alongside recognising the Persian Kings’ use of sea imagery. Therefore, digging into the initial stereotypes reveals details both of local traditions and royal Persian ideology; discarding these Greek examples, rather than analysing them critically, would lose these perspectives.
In conclusion, therefore, while many Greek accounts of Persian ideology and history certainly are driven by “othering” to varying degrees, they are not always intentional, but sometimes bi-products in the Greeks’ attempts to understand and record these cultures. In some cases, most interestingly, these attempts to capture the truth in forms understandable to Greek audiences pay off, and capture authentic local versions and responses to Persian imperialism, as well as the prized emic royal Persian ideology itself. Therefore, reappraising the Greek accounts through local and emic evidence, albeit cautiously, can extrapolate valuable new emic evidence. This demonstrates that Greek sources like Herodotus, in their attempts to engage with this fascinating culture and at times compare it more favourably to Greek customs, are not entirely, and perhaps were not intended to be, lost causes.
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