The Meaning of “Barbarian” in Aeschylus’s The Persians
Aeschylus’ The Persians is structured almost identically to the typical tragedy. It tells the story of the Persians’ defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. At the beginning, the chorus and the queen anxiously await news from the battle. The queen recounts a dream which bodes ill for her son, and as the chorus of men tries to comfort her, a messenger arrives. He brings the news of the Persians’ doom and the Greeks’ absolute power, but that King Xerxes, the man responsible for the failure, has escaped. The queen, devastated, commands the chorus to call upon the spirit of Xerxes’ father Darius, the great military leader. Upon learning of the defeat, the dead king condemns his son as unwise and rash, praising those that came before him. He returns to the Underworld immediately as Xerxes, in tattered robes, approaches. He laments the fate of his country with genuine grief.
The story is very characteristic of a tragedy. However, the play has no direct action—the only action is found in the messenger’s gory descriptions of the battle. The events discussed happened barely eight years prior to Aeschylus’ work, in contrast to the typical mythological setting. But the most striking detail of the story is that the tragic hero, who so artfully evokes pity from his Greek audience, is not Greek at all.
Die Seeschlacht bei Salamis (The Sea Battle at Salamis) by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1868
Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Aeschylus does much to convey the exoticism of the Persian realm on a surface level. He first distances the characters from his Greek audience by the chorus’s words. In the very beginning of the play, the chorus lists the names of the valiant soldiers of the Persian army. The playwright chooses names that would be distinctly strange to Greek ears. The chorus calls to “Amistres and Artaphrenes and Megabates and Astaspes…Artembares, fighter from steeds, and Masistes and the archer noble Himaeus, and Pharandares and driver of horses, Sosthenes.”[1] By introducing the unfamiliar sound of the names so early in the play, Aeschylus manipulates his audience into further viewing his characters as barbaric. Since they do not yet know the full context of the play, they have not yet formed opinions about the players or the story, so their views are easy to mold. In this same description of battle, the chorus mentions the “archers and horsemen, fearful to behold”[2] that are the standard of Persian warfare, thus adding another dimension to the un-Greek atmosphere. His word choice also weaves the element of exoticism throughout the play. As the Queen laments the fall of her kingdom, she cries, “A huge sea of evils has broken out and overwhelmed the Persians and all the barbarian race.”[3] It is her own race that she describes as barbarous because of the Greek audience to which she speaks. Should she use terms that did not highlight the rift between the people, the Greeks might begin to see through the film of foreignness that Aeschylus has painted over the surface of his work. Another example of this is the chorus’s incantation to call the dead spirit of Darius, the former king. They cry, “Sultan, ancient Sultan, come, appear! Come to the topmost peak of the tomb raising your saffron-tinted slipper, showing the feathers of your royal tiara.”[4] The choice of “sultan” as opposed to “king,” as well as its repetition at the very beginning of the stanza, serves to emphasize the oriental quality of the Persian land. The word stems from the Aramaic word for power, shultana, not from any shared Greek root.[5] In addition, the pronunciation is set in the back of the throat due to the guttural “ul” sound, which contrasts to the typical forward placement of Greek. The descriptions of slippers, feathers, and the tiara both enhance the Persian image and give clues as to the oriental costuming of the actors. Indeed, Anthony Podlecki, a professor of classics at Pennsylvania State University, introduces his translation by saying that the chorus enters, “dressed in suitable rich and exotic-looking robes, perhaps over the patterned trousers of the type worn by Asiatics.”[6] The very image of the actors is foreign. With the combination of the names, descriptions, uncommon words and oriental costumes, Aeschylus evokes the image of a distant land where his play takes place.
A depiction of Persian warriors, housed in the Berlin museum
Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Although the play is about the Persian tragedy, Aeschylus uses every opportunity to praise the Greeks—which his Greek audience would enjoy. He does this largely through the messenger’s descriptions of the final battle. First, he shows the cleverness of the Greeks’ trickery. A Greek, the messenger reports, had promised the Persians that “The Greeks would not remain, but to their rowers’ seats would leap in disarray, each man for himself, and run away in secret flight to save their lives.”[7] This paints the Greeks as unorganized, fearful cowards with no sense of honor. But the Persians fell for the trick. For “when the white-horsed chariot of dawn appeared and filled the entire earth with radiance to behold, the first thing was a sound, a shouting from the Greeks, a joyful song.”[8] They, “with daring confidence”[9] and “perfect plan and order,”[10] surrounded the clumsy Persian ships, forcing their enemy to destroy itself in an attempt to escape. The Greek heroes, as it were, became the polar opposite of what their trick had implied. In contrast to the painful defeat of the Persians,the Greeks were placed on a pedestal of success. This helps to strengthen the divide Aeschylus has created on the surface between the two people.
But upon further analysis, Aeschylus seems to demonstrate the exact opposite—that Greeks and Persians are the same. When the queen first appears, she tells the chorus of a vision she had the night before:
Original Greek
ἐδοξάτην μοι δύο γυναῖκ᾽ εὐείμονε,
ἡ μὲν πέπλοισι Περσικοῖς ἠσκημένη,
ἡ δ᾽ αὖτε Δωρικοῖσιν, εἰς ὄψιν μολεῖν,
μεγέθει τε τῶν νῦν ἐκπρεπεστάτα πολύ,
κάλλει τ᾽ ἀμώμω, καὶ κασιγνήτα γένους ταὐτοῦ.[11]
English Translation
Two women appeared before my eyes, both finely dressed,
The one was fitted out in robes of Persian weave,
The other in Doric dress, and when they came into view
They both were far more striking that real live in size
And faultless in loveliness, and sisters they seemed to be
Of the same stock.[12]
These two women, representing their two nations, are seen as the same. Does not that mean the people of the nations are not so different, too? Although describing the Persians as enemies, Aeschylus continues to evoke pity for them. He tells of the honorless massacre of the foreign soldiers, who were “stoutest of heart and of outstanding lineage…a most inglorious death.”[13] He shows his Greek audience the pitiful state of their conquered opponents:
Original Greek
αἱ δ᾽ ἁβρόγοοι Περσίδες ἀνδρῶν
ποθέουσαι ἰδεῖν ἀρτιζυγίαν,
λέκτρων εὐνὰς ἁβροχίτωνας,
χλιδανῆς ἥβης τέρψιν, ἀφεῖσαι,
πενθοῦσι γόοις ἀκορεστοτάτοις.[14]
English Translation
With delicate sobs the women of
Peria Are longing to see their newly
wed men; The beds of their marriage,
with delicate covers,
The luxurious pleasure of youth
they have lost,
And they grieve with long,
insatiable sobs.[15]
The Greeks, having vanquished this distant land, were completely ignorant of the consequences. Were not these exotic Persians also humans, who could rejoice and grieve and pray? They even worshipped the same gods as their audience, shown when the chorus cries out to Zeus in grieving prayer.[16] Yes, the differences between people were stark on the surface, but under the facade of costumes and oriental names, there was no human difference.
Aeschylus set up his play as a tragedy. The messenger recounts the shameful, undeserved death of so many Persian soldiers; the chorus describes the widowed young women, their hopeful hearts crushed by the Greek victory; even the hero, Xerxes the Persian king, cries “Oh!” so often in his pitiful lament, that the audience cannot help but sympathize. And yet, the playwright makes a conscious effort to distinguish between the two nations. We, as the readers, are therefore left to wonder: what is the true meaning of “barbarian,” or “foreigner”? How deeply do the distinguishing factors lie? And, should we remove those factors, might not we see that we are all human?
Notes
[1] Aeschylus, The Persians, trans. Anthony Podlecki (Englewood: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 21-32.
[2] Aeschylus, The Persians, 26-27.
[3] Aeschylus, The Persians, 433-434.
[4] Aeschylus, The Persians, 657-662.
[5] Harper, Douglas, “Sultan (n.)”, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/sultan#etymonline_v_22334, accessed October 31, 2019.
[6] Podlecki, Anthony, Commentary on Aeschylus, The Persians, 23.
[7] Aeschylus, The Persians, 358-360.
[8] Aeschylus, The Persians, 385-389.
[9] Aeschylus, The Persians, 394.
[10] Aeschylus, The Persians, 417.
[11] Aeschylus, The Persians, 181-186, from Tufts University Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0011, accessed October 31, 2019.
[12] Aeschylus, The Persians, 181-186.
[13] Aeschylus, The Persians, 442-444.
[14] Aeschylus, The Persians, 541-545, from Tufts University Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0011%3Acard% 3D532, accessed October 31, 2019.
[15] Aeschylus, The Persians, 541-545.
[16] Aeschylus, The Persians, line 532.