What did the ancient Eastern world think of the ancient Greeks?

by [deleted]

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lcnielsen

If they had anything to say, we would be unlikely to know it, because the kind of work you have in mind didn't, as far as we know, really exist in "the East" - to the extent it did, none survives. The Persians seem to have been far more interested in epic poetry and sacred hymns than ethnography - and who can blame them, really?

We need to be cautious in not jumping ahead of ourselves to assign outsized importance to the Greeks. The Balkans and Western Asia Minor were densely populated (relatively speaking) and economically important, but they didn't have the cultural and political legacy of Babylon, Susa, Thebes or Memphis. A good amount of the high culture in terms of architecture, art and thought is likely to derive from Greek interaction with the East (at a minimum, this is true for mathematics, for example).

I think we should perhaps also take a step back and consider the kind of interest the Greeks took in Persia. Not that much of their writings are as useful as we'd think to understand Persia, because they, like Ctesias, seem to have been more interested in the pomp and splendor of the Great King's court, intrigue, quaint anecdotes and exotism*. I don't think it's quite fair to go as far as Edward Said did and point to the writings of the Persian wars as originating "Orientalism" - to a certain extent I think that's a result of Early Modern and Enlightenment-era Westerners superposing their contemporary perspectives on the Ottoman Empire with their readings of Greek sources. It's the same kind of reading that turns Alexander into a proto-Crusader, if you will. It may have been a strange and exotic place, but it was also an effectively administrated, urbanized monarchy - indeed, it was the monarchy, and the modern-archaic dichotomy Westerners know-and-love would have been totally alien to the Greeks of those days.

*There's a possible bias in the survivorship of our sources that I've noticed - a lot of Hellenic and post-Hellenic authors, like Plutarch and Diodoros, seem to have had quite a taste for these same themes explored by e.g. Ctesias; the eunuch Bagoas is a notoriously frequently recurring character in various anecdotes, for example. So it is plausible that Classical writing provided a more diverse range of perspectives on Persia.

To return to the title question, I can't think of any native sources that tell us anything about Persian perspectives on the Greeks in the era you're interested in. It might've been a troubelsome frontier, but we hardly know if it was even worse than say, the Indian frontier region.

verrevert

Really, the views of the Greeks from the perspective of the Persians is known only through the works of other Greeks and that is an issue. Because of this, you have passages such as this one in Herodotus (7.53):

Having thus spoken, and sent Artabanus away to Susa, Xerxes next sent for the most notable among the Persians; and when they were present, "Persians," he said, "I have assembled you to make this demand, that you bear yourselves bravely and never sully the great and glorious former achievements of the Persians; let us each and all be zealous; for this is the common advantage of all that we seek. For this cause I bid you set your hands to the war with might and main; for as I am assured, we march against valiant men, whom if we overcome, it is certain that no other human host will ever withstand us. Now let us cross over, having first prayed to the gods who hold Persia for their allotted realm."

It is difficult to say because we do lack the literary sources, but you can question if the Persians thought so highly of the Greeks as it made out in this quote, and many others.

The Persian Sources that we have, primarily the tablets found at Persepolis for the Royal Archive, focus mainly upon internal matters e.g. administration, social structures, religious standings. There does not appear to be historical commentary within. There is a possibility that, like Berossus, historical work has been lost, but unfortunately we do not know.

A book that I would recommend is Thomas Harrison's Writing Ancient Persia, especially the second chapter which discusses Persian sources of information on the Achaemenid Empire.