‘For the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl’… or the insults that caused the Greco-Persian wars

In a previous post, I mentioned that the mechanism of revenge is a key concept helping us understand the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian war and Greek culture generally. Conflicts and enmities often began as a result of perceived insults, affronts to honour, which could only be redeemed or expiated through vengeance.

In fact, if we read Herodotus, we can see how, for the Greek mind, this mechanism of revenge didn’t just apply to recent events, but could stretch far back into history, and even into myth.

Thus, Herodotus begins his Histories by stating his intention to reveal the aetiology of the wars between Greece and Persia in the fifth century BC and suggesting that they were the culmination of a series of insults and reprisals between Europeans and Asiatics going back centuries and, indeed, into the mists of time.

Herodotus says that the ‘feud’ between Greece and Persia, or Europe and Asia, was initiated by the Phoenicians. These quintessential Mediterranean traders had come on their ships to Argos, hawking goods from Egypt and Assyria, and at the end of their mission, having sold most of their wares, they kidnapped a number of Greek women, including Io (daughter of the Argive king, Inachus) who had come to the beach to make purchases.

Responding to this outrage, Greeks sailed to Phoenician Tyre and abducted King Agenor’s daughter, Europa, taking her to Crete with them. Now, whereas Herodotus asserts that this kidnapping of Europa could be regarded as legitimate retaliation for Io’s abduction, the next offense in this cycle – the kidnapping by Greeks of Medea, the daughter of the king of Colchis – amounted to an unjustified and disproportionate escalation of this Greek-Asian vendetta, particularly when Colchian pleas to return Medea or at least compensate the king for his humiliation were rejected by the Greeks (on the grounds that Io had not been returned and no compensation paid for her abduction).

Thus, in the next generation, Paris, the Trojan prince, as revenge for Greek outrages against Tyre and Colchis, seized Helen, queen of Sparta, and carried her off to Asia. When the Greeks demanded her return and the payment of reparations for the insult Paris had committed, the Trojans said that since Medea had not been returned to her native land and no reparations offered for her kidnap, then the Greeks would receive none for the abduction of Helen.

The events that followed Helen’s kidnap and the refusal of the Trojans to give her up, i.e. the Greek invasion and sacking of Troy, informed, according to Herodotus, abiding Persian hostility towards the Greeks. Not only, for the Persians, did Greek ire at the abduction of Helen amount to a gross over-reaction – more often than not, according to the Persians, these ‘abducted’ women willingly went with their ‘kidnappers’ – but by crossing with an army from Europe into Asia, the Greeks had turned a ridiculous dispute over a woman into an unforgivable violation of the symbolic boundary separating the Greek (and European) from the Persian (and Asian) worlds; the Persians regarding Asia as inherently their domain.

Or, as Herodotus puts it:

‘The Asiatics, when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam. Henceforth they [the Persians] ever looked upon the Greeks as their open enemies. For Asia, with all the various tribes of barbarians that inhabit it, is regarded by the Persians as their own; but Europe and the Greek race they look on as distinct and separate.’

Burning down Persepolis

This is a portrait from 1781 by the English painter Joshua Reynolds of the courtesan Emily Warren as Thaïs, the Athenian mistress of Alexander the Great, who infamously urged the Greek conquerors to torch Persepolis to punish the Persians for burning down the Acropolis during the Persian Wars.

Plutarch describes the scene thus: 

‘As the drinking went on, Thais delivered a speech which was intended partly as a graceful compliment to Alexander and partly to amuse him. What she said was typical of the spirit of Athens, but hardly in keeping with her own situation. She declared that all the hardships she had endured in wandering about Asia had been amply repaid on that day, when she found herself revelling luxuriously in the splendid palace of the Persians, but that it would be an even sweeter pleasure to end the party by going out and setting fire to the palace of Xerxes, who had laid Athens in ashes. She wanted to put a torch to the building herself in full view of Alexander, so that posterity should know that the women who followed Alexander had taken a more terrible revenge for the wrongs of Greece than all the famous commanders of earlier times by land or sea. Her speech was greeted with wild applause and the king's companions excitedly urged him on until at last he allowed himself to be persuaded, leaped to his feet, and with a garland on his head and a torch in his hand led the way.’

Castoriadis on the objectivity of the Greeks

Just to go back to a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Thermopylae, the Persian invasions and Greek triumphalism, in which I insisted that the pride and sense of superiority characteristic of Greek culture was tempered by self-criticism and objectivity, this idea is found in Cornelius Castoriadis’ essay, The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy (in Politics, Philosophy, Autonomy), from which the following is an excerpt:

‘Hannah Arendt has rightly said that impartiality enters this world through the Greeks. This is already fully apparent in Homer. Not only can one not find in the Homeric poems any disparagement of the “the enemy”, the Trojans, for example, but the truly central figure in the Iliad is Hector, not Achilles, and the most moving characters are Hector and Andromach. The same is true for Aeschylus’ Persians – a play performed in 472 BC, seven years after the battle at Plataea, with the war still going on. In this tragedy, there is not a single word of hatred or contempt for the Persians; the Persian queen, Atossa, is a majestic and venerable figure, and the defeat and ruin of the Persians is ascribed exclusively to the hubris of Xerxes. And in his Trojan Women (415 BC), Euripides presents the Greeks as the cruelest and most monstrous beasts – as if he were saying to the Athenians: this is what you are. Indeed, the play was performed a year after the horrible massacre of the Melians by the Athenians (416 BC).’

On Athenian propaganda and the Battle of Plataea

Above is a video with Professor Paul Cartledge lecturing at the Hellenic Society on the Battle of Plataea (479 BC) – at which, a year after Thermopylae and Salamis, Greek forces routed the Persian invaders. Cartledge wants to explain why the massive barbarian empire was so determined to conquer tiny Greece and how it was that tiny Greece managed to defeat the Persians. Cartledge – a Spartan expert – is also interested in how Athens, as part of its aim to become the pre-eminent Greek state, usurped the glory associated with the victory at Plataea when it was the Spartans, as the leaders of the Hellenic Alliance and the most renowned Greek warriors, who deserved the most honour and credit for Greece’s salvation.

Greek history: a never-ending story

This is how Isaac Asimov concludes his book, The Greeks: A Great Adventure.

‘History is a story without an end. Almost at its opening, Greek history dealt with the battle between Europe and Asia; between the men on one side of the Aegean Sea and the men on the other. It was Greece and Troy; then Greece and Persia; then Greece and the Ottoman empire. And it continues.’

Thermopylae, the Persian invasions and Greek triumphalism

Above is a lecture from Jeremy McInerney of the University of Pennsylvania on the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) in which, famously, a small group of Greek warriors led by Leonidas’ 300 Spartans, resisted for three days a vastly superior force of invading Persians, dying heroically to the last. It’s a seminal moment in Greek and European history that McInerney provides a good introduction to, placing it within the wider context of the Persian invasions of Greece – the Ionian revolt, Marathon, Salamis, Plataea and so on – the repulsion of which is widely considered to have resulted in an upsurge of Greek self-confidence that paved the way for the flowering of Greek culture that continues to resonate to this day. 

In the last 10 minutes of the lecture, however, McInerney claims that apart from the extraordinary vitalism of Greek culture that flowed in the aftermath of the defeat of the Persians, he also detects the emergence of an overweening and deplorable triumphalism in which Greeks developed a contempt for the East that has never been erased from Western discourse – and McInerney points to the war on Islamic terror and the recent cartoon film, 300, which purports to be about the Spartans at Thermopylae, as examples of this. 

McInerney’s condemnation of the Greeks is nonsense. 

Not only was swaggering pride not something the Greeks lacked before the Persian invasions, but it is also characteristic of Greek culture, beginning with Homer, that this conceit was tempered by self-criticism and objectivity. Aeschylus’ Persians is anything but patriotic tub-thumping and even Herodotus, in whose Histories the Persian invasions are documented, was censured, most notably by Plutarch in his Of Herodotus’ Malice, for favouring the barbarians and maligning the Greeks.