28 The Customs of the Persians (§§131-140)

In Herodotus’s first discussion concerning customs, about those of the Lydians, the only custom (vόµos) in which they differed from the Greeks was the prostitution of their female children (τὰ θήλεα τέκνα). The rest of the passage (94) concerned the use of money, the invention of games to distract the mind from the famine, and the division of the people into colonists to Italy and those who remained. The one difference from the Greeks was stated most matter-of-factly, as if Herodotus were describing some species of animal and expressed no moral opinion directly (and any opinion hidden in the verb “to prostitute,” καταπορνέω, can only be surmised). Though the description itself be antiseptic, the effect on the reader might be entirely different. What I have in mind is the kind of effect achieved by understatement, as when Thucydides tells us in a most matter-of-fact way of the Athenian slaughter of the men and boys of Melos, or of the Spartan slaughter of the Plataeans. The contrast between the savagery of the deed and the calm of the description stirs a profound chill in the soul of the reader. Thus the description of the prostitution of their “female children”—itself a distant, almost zoological phrase—must have caused the historian’s Greek audience to wince, a great deal of importance having been put on the virginity of its daughters. Since it is the natural human tendency to identify moral goodness with one’s own customs, the description of foreign customs will cause a constant valuation of the audience’s own moral values compared to those of these barbarians.^[1] Herodotus’s apparent suspension of moral judgment will encourage readers to make their own. And, of course, as modern readers of Herodotus, we shall be particularly interested in those occasions when Herodotus interrupts his description to evaluate a custom.

Herodotus begins with the Persians’ religion. The Persians, he says, have no images of their gods, no temples, and no altars. He then gives their moral opinion: those who do have these things exhibit foolishness. Venturing his own opinion, he says that, unlike the Greeks, they do not believe the gods to have human shapes. By implication the historian is saying that the Persians think the Greeks are fools for their views of the gods. It was not necessary in relating the Persian view to suggest their criticism of the Greeks, but the historian must be deliberately trying to distance the Greeks and Persians. Perhaps the audience will include some Greeks who do not accept the anthropomorphizing of gods, and they will surely be thinking about the Persians’ philosophically compatible view. Herodotus’s own view about the gods seems to be rather like that of the Persians, for he often refers to the “divine” as a general supernatural force distinct from any particular human-like god.

Originally, says Herodotus, the Persians worshipped the sun, moon, earth, and the elements fire, water, and wind; later they learned from the Assyrians and Arabians to worship Aphrodite, who goes by various names. That they would, under the influence of foreigners, add a new god to their worship is extraordinary. It suggests that the kind of easy religious malleability that has marked all the peoples of the world except perhaps for the Jews (and even they, as their prophets show, had a hard time resisting assimilation) was present in Persia. This openness to foreign deities and customs, and this sharing of the same gods even under different names, has an effect opposite that of the earlier sentences; it brings the audience closer to the Persians. The identification of Arabian Alilat, Assyrian Mylitta, and Persian Mitra with Greek Aphrodite effectively puts the commonness in Greek terms.^[2]

The description of Persian rituals of sacrifice is given so as to emphasize the differences from Greek practice: unlike the Greeks, the Persians use no altars, pour no libations, play no music of pipes, or go without a head­-covering.^[3] The one sacrificing must pray for good things for the whole community, not for himself alone. A Magian chants a hymn about the birth of the gods, or so Herodotus has been told. A Magian must be present at the sacrifice, but the worshippers may take away the meat and do as they want with it. Strabo (732) says that the god’s share is the soul (ψυχή) of the victim. In Greek practice, some of the flesh would have been given to the priests as their portion. Aside from the ritual details, the chief differences point to the greater community spirit of Persian sacrifice and prayer than the Greek and the lesser participation and private interest of an organized priesthood.

The next custom is the celebration of their birthday, the day they honor most (133). The day is given to extravagant feasting. Herodotus now points out a difference from the Greeks: the Greeks eat all their food at one time, the Persians eat theirs in courses served one after another. Again Herodotus uses the difference to have the Persians point out a difference from the Greeks: the Greeks leave dinner hungry because they have nothing or little to eat after the main dish. According to the historian, the Persians have now twice asserted their superiority to the Greeks, in their spiritual conception of the divine and in their physical well-being.

And now the historian interposes a criticism: the Persians are excessively devoted to wine. Before discussing their behavior while drunk he points out that it is forbidden to vomit or urinate in front of others. The inclusion of this custom suggests that it was normal for Greeks to do so, a view of the Greeks that, if it were known, would probably diminish their dignity in modern eyes.

The Persians keep strictly to the practice of deliberating their most important issues when drunk, again when they have sobered, and acting only when their judgment in the two states agrees. If they have deliberated first when sober, they deliberate again when drunk. Herodotus gives no reason for the custom. Half a millennium later, as How and Wells point out, Tacitus supplies a possible reason (Germanicus 2): on the one hand, they will be too drunk to invent false tales, for, as Archilochus says, wine unlocks the truth in a man; on the other hand, they reflect when they are least likely to err. As Tacitus comes a half millennium after the History, there has been plenty of opportunity for theories to explain the Persian custom. From what we see in the History, however, there are grounds for doubting the truth of the story. Deliberation requires, after all, participants in the deliberation and a degree of freedom to speak; we see no such participants or freedom to speak. The closest to a debate comes in the discussion of Artabanus and his nephew Xerxes, but there Xerxes tells him that it is only his kinship that prevents his being punished for his views (7.11). Given, then, the absence of Tacitus’s interpretation of the custom, the unlikelihood of the reality of the custom, and Herodotus’s judgment that the Persians are excessively devoted to wine, we may conclude that he is here holding up the Persians as a strange and less than fully rational people, again a quality that (in Greek eyes) distances them from the Greek audience.

Herodotus next discusses the Persians’ observance of a strict hierarchy in their encounters with one another. When they met on the street they indi­cate their relative rank by kissing on the mouth, the cheek, or, in the case of one much lower in the hierarchy, by prostrating oneself to one’s super­ior. As a people they honor themselves the most, dispensing lower and lower honors to others in accordance with their distance from themselves. All of these views will seem strange to Greeks and especially to Athenians. The view that they are the best of mankind in everything will, to Herodo­tus’s audience, be heavy with irony-the Persians, after all, lost their recent war of conquest.

In some contradiction of their view that they are the best in everything is the next statement the historian makes, that the Persians more than any other people welcome foreign customs. If they are the best in everything, in dress, in armor, in sexual customs, why borrow from others? Yet they borrow their dress from the Medes, their breastplates from the Egyptians, and their pederasty from the Greeks. The mention of pederasty calls sexuality to the historian’s mind, and he explains that Persian men may have many legal wives and even more concubines.

Masculine goodness (ἀδραγαθίη) is shown by having many sons, for such shows strength (136). Sons are trained in only three things between the ages of five and twenty: horsemanship, archery, and telling the truth. The threefold nature of this education is quite remarkable, for the two military activities are quite different from truth-telling. The equal status given to the three different activities must mean that truth-telling is as difficult to learn as the more technical skills. Is Herodotus suggesting that it takes fifteen years to teach a Persian boy to tell the truth? A first reading of the passage would give one the impression that the Persians value the truth; reflection shows that perhaps they value it because, like figs and diamonds, it is so rare among them.

One of the Persian customs that Herodotus praises is that a father does not see his son until the boy is five years old: in this way the father will feel no distress should the boy die. No other passage in Herodotus that I know of is so indicative of the ancient Greek attitude toward women. The maternal feelings of loss and sorrow receive no sympathy at all; only the feelings of the fathers are taken into account. Now perhaps one might claim that since the mothers will have to take care of the children in any case the additional sorrow of the fathers would be wholly superfluous and thus the custom keeps the suffering to a minimum. Yet, if this is the rationale that mitigates the frigidity of the sentiment, it goes unexpressed. No doubt the historian’s audience would have been primarily, if not entirely, male, and the unconcern for women’s heartache simply a matter of course.

Again one thought seems to lead the historian to another. He has mentioned his praise of one custom; now he praises a second, the law that no one, not even the king, can execute on a charge of one single crime. Only if all the bad deeds are reckoned in number and magnitude and only if they are found to exceed the good deeds may the criminal be killed. Throughout the course of the History we shall see how this reckoning worked. Cambyses, for example, will reward his slaves for saving Croesus’s life and then kill them. We shall see Xerxes order the son of Pythias sliced into two halves because Pythias wished to hold him back from the battle. Later, Xerxes will give a crown of gold to the captain who saved his ship and then cut off his head. Herodotus’s audience will surely remember this custom, singled out for praise, when it is flouted.

The Persians have a belief that contradicts many Greek stories. They believe that no one has ever killed his own father or mother, that whenever such seems the case, further investigation will show that the killer was either adopted or a bastard (137). Again, the audience must be shaking its heads at the blindness to reality. Yet the view is expressive of Herodotus’s conception of the Persians. According to him, they have an absolute belief in the moral power of nature, including human nature, which would keep people from killing their parents. The law is inexorable, and individuals are as powerless to kill their parents as they would be to fly in the air like birds or swim under the sea like fish. The idea, then, attributes to the Persians a great restriction on human free will.

Persians are prohibited from speaking about the things they are prohib­ited from doing. One wonders how they may know what is prohibited unless they speak, but the matter is not taken up. Lying and indebtedness are the first and second worst crimes. Indebtedness is bad, among other reasons, because it causes one to lie. The logic would, I think, suggest that indebtedness is worse than lying, for it includes lying as well as other things, but the Persians put it the other way. Lepers are kept out of cities; foreign lepers and white doves (who are believed also to have leprosy) are banished. It is not clear to me what it means to banish doves (τὰς λευκὰς ἐξελαύνουσι), how they might have leprosy, or how the ban might have been enforced. He concludes with the ban on spitting, washing, or urinating in rivers, for they revere rivers most of all. We shall see various abuses of rivers in the History, not least the diversion of the Euphrates by Cyrus in his conquest of Babylon.

Herodotus concludes his account of the customs he knows about with one he takes credit for observing even though Persians themselves have not noticed it, that all their names end in the letter s.^[4]Perhaps Herodotus decided, within his very general framework of discussing the known and then the less certain customs, to start with the most important matter, the Persians’ gods, and end with what was probably the least important matter, the final letter of their names. Within these end points we have seen that his method seems to be one of loose association.

The last custom Herodotus discusses deals with the burial of their dead (140). (The discussion would seem to violate the organizational principle just mentioned; perhaps the finality of death suggests the topic as most appropriate for a conclusion.) Persian men are not buried until their corpses have been dragged and torn by a bird or dog, then embalmed with wax and buried. The Magi, unlike most other priests, kill everything but dogs and people, and especially kill ants and snakes and things that fly. The custom of burial will surely resonate with Herodotus’s audience, which will remember the opening line of the Iliad, where the horror of war is symbolized by birds and dogs preying upon the dead bodies of warriors. The effect surely will be to distance very greatly the holders of this custom from the audience, as later when Herodotus describes those who eat their dead relatives (3.38).