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Who wouldn’t prefer to fight beside a Bouboulina, for example, than with a gang of sickly, effeminate recruits from Oxford or Cambridge?’įinally, as late as 1988 the German scholar Hermann Bengston could write: ‘In terms of world history, the ramifications of the Greek triumph over the Persians are almost incalculable. No wonder Durrell wanted to fight with the Greeks. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.’ At a more pedestrian level, the American expatriate novelist and raconteur Henry Miller wryly mused on the Hellenic origins of Western vigour in his travelogue of Greece: ‘Everywhere you go in Greece the atmosphere is pregnant with heroic deeds… For stubbornness, courage, recklessness, daring, there are no greater examples anywhere. For these are World-Historical Victories they were the salvation of culture and spiritual vigor and they rendered the Asiatic principle powerless.’Īs the British utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill saw it, ‘The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. In the early nineteenth century, the German philosopher Hegel opined that: ‘ live immortal not in the historical records of Nations only, but also of Science and of Art – of the Noble and the Moral generally. We shall confine ourselves to a few illustrations. In addition to Montaigne, startling examples of the notion are readily at hand. But few would deny that a common trope has glorified ancient Greek culture, using the Persian wars as a focal point, as though it were a monolith directly opposed to the entirety of Asian culture. Other scholars have shown such sweeping characterisations of Western thought to be gross simplifications – as prone to stereotypes as those they purport to expose. To some scholars, Aeschylus’ play may be taken as the earliest extant example of what we have come to call Orientalism, the politico-cultural fabrication of an imagined ‘Orient’ that is forever and always inferior to ‘Western civilisation’ (1) A pervasive idea in Orientalist discourse has been that a putatively superior ‘Western civilisation’ was the only hope for the world’s salvation, that its very existence hung in the balance at the time of the Persian wars, and that the ancient Greeks, progenitors of the Western tradition, heroically preserved it on the field of battle. ‘No longer will they that dwell throughout the length and breadth of Asia abide under the Persian yoke, nor will they pay further tribute through the master’s crushing necessity, nor will they fall headlong on the ground to revere him, since the kingly power has utterly perished.’ ( Persians, lines 585-90) By metonymy, the Persians came to represent the quintessential Eastern ‘barbarian’, and in a memorable choral passage Aeschylus wrote: The monumental historical experience of the Persian wars allowed Aeschylus to break with established conventions in Greek dramaturgy, whose subject matter had for the most part been restricted to Greek mythological topics, in order to portray the historical event at Salamis on the tragic stage. Eight years after the Athenian victory over the Persian king Xerxes’ fleet in the naval battle at Salamis in 480 BCE, the celebrated Athenian playwright Aeschylus produced his Persians at the festival of the City Dionysia in Athens. Indeed, ancient Greek intellectual and cultural responses to these events gave birth to the idea of a great and impenetrable divide between inferior East and superior West. But thinkers, both ancient and modern, have taken the distinction to extremes. It is true that the Great King of Persia styled himself as a god who ruled over his subjects as slaves and that the Greek city-states practiced participatory self-government to some degree (women, resident aliens, and slaves of course excluded).
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Throughout the centuries, Western writers and artists have repeatedly represented this military conflict as a triumph of Western ideals of freedom and self-determination over slavish submission to repressive forces of oriental despotism. In terms of politico-cultural constructions of world history, the ancient Greeks’ unlikely victory over the numerically superior invading Persian forces between 490 and 479 BCE has held a privileged position.