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if-you-fan-a-fire · 5 years

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THE PASSING OF AN AGE OF INNOCENCE

“When Herodotus describes the plan formed by Megacles and Peisistratus to unite their families in a tyrannical dynasty at Athens, he describes it as “the most simpleminded trick that I have ever come across.” He goes on: “The Greeks have long been distinguished from barbarian peoples by being more clever and less susceptible to foolish simplicity, and of all Greeks the Athenians are considered the most intelligent; yet it was at the Athenians’ expense that this trick was played.” The contrast of present Athenian sophistication with barbarian simplicity is significant, for it implies that the simplicity characteristic of the Greeks of old, and even of the Athenians at the beginning of the Peisistratid era, was more closely akin to the attitudes—specifically attitudes of reverence for authority—prevailing among barbarian peoples. We do not have to look far to begin assembling further testimonial to this connection of archaic Greek and barbarian custom. Herodotus’ comment about the resemblance of elaborate Spartan royal funerals to the royal funerals of barbarian Asia is a case in point. Thucydides, looking back from close to the time of Herodotus, also identifies several old-fashioned cultural habits that have survived from the time of Homer until his day, and he remarks: “One could point to many other old-fashioned Hellenic habits that are similar to those still maintained by the barbarians.”

The tendency to be easily awed by pageantry and by symbols of sovereign power is one that classical writers readily associate with Lydians and Phrygians. In the Birds, for example, Aristophanes has Iris deliver an ultimatum to mortals from Zeus himself, with emphatic gestures to demonstrate the effects of fiery destruction by lightning bolts if it goes unheeded. Peisetaerus, the sophisticated Athenian, brushes off this warning with the words: “Do you think you’re spooking some Lydian or Phrygian with talk like that?” The same assumptions about barbarian nature are displayed by Euripides, in the Orestes, when he depicts at length the craven cowardice of a Phrygian who displays his obeisance to Orestes with the words: “I offer you reverence, my lord [anax], prostrating myself in barbarian manner!” Such displays of reverential prostration (proskynesis) were the customary gestures of obeisance to the Persian king, but Greeks had come to regard them as unbecoming for any free Greek, except in reverence to a god. After Alexander’s defeat of Darius III, when the propriety of such gestures became the subject of controversy among Alexander’s courtiers, we find obeisance linked not only to the idea of divinity, but also to the idea of tyranny. Classical Greek thought associated the idea of a man as supreme sovereign with the distasteful memory of tyranny and with the unacceptable confusion of man and god. Such concepts and confusions were regarded as customary among the barbarians of Asia, particularly among Lydians and Phrygians, but alien to Greeks. In the scene from Euripides’ play mentioned above, when the Phrygian falls at the feet of the Greek hero, Orestes replies: “This is not Ilium, but Argive land!” The Phrygian’s gesture is at home in Asia, in other words, and does not belong in Hellas. This is why Herodotus felt the need to distance himself from the implications of the story of Phye and Peisistratus at Athens. It violated the strong conceptual boundaries that Greeks had erected between themselves and attitudes that they considered characteristic of the barbarians of Asia.

When was this boundary erected? When were Greeks less ashamed of participating in the ceremonies that they later claimed were unbecoming of free men? Between the time of Peisistratus and the time of Herodotus, the conflict with Persia marked a cultural horizon that was capable of defining major currents in Greek thought. As Kurt Raaflaub has shown, this was the experience that led to the identification of freedom as a fundamental quality of Hellenic identity. This was also the experience, as Edith Hall has shown, that crystallized the distinction between Hellenes and barbarians in Greek thought. ...the Greek conflict with Persia is a watershed in Greek thought about the relationship between humanity and divinity. But the confrontation between Greeks and Persians did not define the Greek experience of tyranny, nor did it focus attention on the issue of divine kingship. Other factors must have contributed to the consciousness that Hellenes did not revere the same symbols of power that the barbarians of Asia did. Although the details are scattered in clues that still need to be pieced together, the larger issues pertaining to the rejection of tyranny and the emergence of a distinctive Hellenic identity are set forth by Herodotus and Thucydides. Thucydides recognized that the Greeks did not yet distinguish themselves collectively from barbarians in Homer’s day. The circumstances that we seek, then, are to be found after the composition of the Homeric poems and before the great battles between Greeks and Persians of the early fifth century. If we rephrase the present question and ask what made the Greeks become ashamed of participating in the pageantry of tyranny, then we need to look for the most impressive failure of tyranny known to the Greeks. In his own terms, Herodotus has anticipated this line of inquiry and has arrived at the answer, which he sets forth in the first 94 chapters of his Histories. The unexpected fall of the greatest tyranny of its day, the rule of Croesus, was the event that encouraged the Greeks, collectively, to distance themselves from the veneration of sovereign monarchs, and to insist that the line between a man and a god should not be crossed.

Before the foundation of the Persian empire and the arrival of Cyrus at Sardis, the Mermnad dynasty of Lydia and the Phrygian kingdom of Midas gave the Greeks their most intimate experience of the power of a true sovereign monarch. Starting with Midas, these kings of Asia were the first barbarians to make dedications to Apollo at Delphi, Herodotus tells us. Tyrtaeus, in the middle of the seventh century, names Midas as a paragon of wealth in the same sentence in which he names Tantalid Pelops as a paragon of kingliness... Tantalus, legendary king of Lydia or Phrygia, was closer to the gods than any man ever was, or ever should be, in Greek memory. At about the same time that Tyrtaeus was comparing the qualities of Asiatic kings and princes to the virtues of Spartan warriors, Archilochus was memorializing the splendor of Gyges, forebear of Croesus and founder of the Mermnad dynasty. In the verses that later Greek sources cite as the earliest use of the word “tyranny,” Archilochus has a carpenter avert his eyes from such magnificence: “I am not interested in the wealth of golden Gyges, nor have I ever envied him, nor am I jealous of the doings of gods, nor do I desire great tyranny, for such things are far from my eyes.” Great wealth, great tyranny, and the doings of gods are listed as qualities that distinguish Gyges, the king of Lydia, from ordinary men. The disdain that Archilochus expresses for the power, splendor, and pretense of Lydian royalty made his verses especially memorable to Greeks centuries later, when the kingdom of Gyges was gone. But Archilochus’ disdain did not define the prevailing view among his contemporaries. As Victor Parker has observed: “The point of these four lines is quite clearly that Archilochus expects that others will desire Gyges’ wealth very much, will be duly impressed by great deeds, and will most certainly desire power such as that of the Lydian king.” Before the middle of the sixth century, Phrygia and Lydia together were the immediate source of all that was magnificent and impressive to the Greeks. The most essential among many tokens of material prosperity, coinage, was an invention of the Lydians, or, some said, of the wife of Midas. The most emotionally powerful music of ecstasy and of lamentation was taught to the Greeks by Phrygians and Lydians. The most impressive spectacles of massed military might were provided by the Phrygians and the Lydians. The Cypselids of Corinth were ready custodians, and perhaps also the bearers, of Phrygian and Lydian dedications at Delphi. The Spartans welcomed the poet Alcman as a man of Sparta and of Sardis, and were pleased to exchange gifts and pledges of friendship with Croesus. A wealthy Athenian family named a son Croesus, and a wealthy Sicilian family named a son Midas. Only after the sudden collapse of the Mermnad dynasty in 547, when Cyrus overthrew Croesus and when the greatest monarch known to the Greeks was shown to be fallible, could the Greeks begin to describe the symbols and ceremonies of tyranny as fatuous. The foolish simplicity that Greeks now ascribed to Lydians and Phrygians lay not in the reverence of sovereignty, but in the idea that any living man could be its perfect embodiment. Phrygians and Lydians....had revered their kings for their intimacies with gods, and had celebrated kingship as the highest medium of communion with the gods. The rites of kingship remained at the center of Lydian and Phrygian ritual forms, even after their own living kings were no more. They remained, after all, under the dominion of the Persian King of Kings. The Greeks were more used to envisioning perfect sovereignty from a distance, and were better able to separate their beliefs and their ritual forms from the persons of living rulers, and to attach them to the unseen Olympian immortals. In time, as the Greeks became more resentful and more fearful of the power of Persian kings, they also became more derisive of those who lived in Asia and who respected the sovereignty of its monarchs. The collapse of the Lydian tyranny, therefore, marked the decisive parting of the ways between those who called themselves Hellenes and those whom they called barbarians. With the fall of Croesus, the Greeks began to come of age.”

- Mark Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion. University of California Press, 2006. p. 42-46.

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