Chapter 2. Identifying with the Enemy: Love, Loss, and Longing in the Persians of Aeschylus

In the first two decades of the fifth century BC, the century in which Greek tragedy as we know it flourished, the Greeks were attacked twice by the vastly larger army and navy of the Persian Empire. Against all odds, they ultimately succeeded both times in fending them off. But the cost was high. In 480 BC the people of Athens abandoned their city to the Persians and retreated with their families and possessions to the nearby island of Salamis. Athens was thoroughly sacked and the acropolis largely destroyed, but the combined forces of the Greeks at Salamis managed to defeat the Persians in a decisive victory. Aeschylus’ Persians is a tragedy that narrates and laments the battle of Salamis from the perspective of the defeated Persians.

Aeschylus’ play is an extraordinary testament to the Athenians’ ability to explore the suffering of war through the eyes of their greatest enemy. In this chapter I argue that the laments of the Persian elders that make up the majority of the play are intensely Greek in their content and emotional force, thereby transcending distinctions between Greek and barbarian and in fact merging the two in the emotional experience of the audience. [1]

I propose to look specifically at the erotic imagery in the play, in order to show that, though put in the mouths of Persians, these hauntingly beautiful evocations of loss exemplify Greek women’s laments and love songs. It has been argued that Aeschylus deliberately feminizes the Persian elders in order to construct them as the antithesis of the Greek male ideal. [2] I agree with this formulation only to a certain extent. Aeschylus attributes actions and speech normally associated with Greek women to the Persian elders in order to characterize them as Persian—that is, foreign, Eastern, and not Greek. [3] But the play does not demonize them. The laments of the Persians {57|58} not only highlight the differences between Greeks and Persians, but also uncover their shared experiences and commonalities. [4]

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The Persians is set in Persia, and all of the speakers are Persians. The play was produced and was part of a group that won first place in 472 BC, just eight years after the events it depicts. It is the only surviving Greek tragedy that has an historical subject, although this is an accident of survival. [5] Aeschylus himself fought against the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490, and Herodotus tells us that Aeschylus’ brother died in that battle. [6]

According to the play’s hypothesis, Aeschylus’ Persians was in fact indebted to a certain extent to the playwright Phrynichus’ Phoenician Women, which was produced four years earlier and also won first place. The chorus of Phrynichus’ tragedy was evidently composed of the wives of the Phoenician sailors who formed a substantial part of the Persian navy. These women were widowed by the defeat at Salamis and were no doubt the chief mourners in the play. For reasons that I will propose in this chapter, the composition of the chorus suggests to me that the play treated the Persians sympathetically and would have inspired a great deal of pity in the Greek audience. [7] In this {58|59} sense Phrynichus’ play is even more remarkable than Aeschylus’, since it was produced a mere four years after Salamis.

How is it possible that Phrynichus and later Aeschylus were able to produce tragedies on the Athenian stage about Salamis, an event that by all rights was a great victory against a superior aggressor? In other words, how can the Persians be a tragedy? Is not tragedy a genre that depends on the ability of the audience to feel pity for the events depicted on stage? [8] If so, how could the Persians evoke pity and sorrow from the Athenians in 476 and 472 BC?

Before exploring this question further, it should be noted that the playwright Phrynichus, whose tragedies do not survive, is also known to us because of an incident related by Herodotus. In the 490’s BC the Ionian Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor revolted against Persian rule with help from the Athenians and others; the Persians systematically subjugated them. In 494 the Persians defeated the combined Ionian navy in a sea battle near the Greek city of Miletus, and Miletus itself was destroyed by siege. All of the inhabitants were killed or enslaved. [9] Phrynichus produced a tragedy some time thereafter entitled the Capture of Miletus (Μιλήτου Ἅλωσις). Herodotus relates that the Athenians wept so profusely during the performance that Phrynichus was fined 1000 drachmas for “reminding them of their own misfortunes” (ὡς ἀναμνήσαντα οἰκήια κακὰ), and the play was banned from ever being performed again. [10]

What is significant about this story for our purposes is that in the Capture of Miletus the Persians are clearly the “bad guys” of the tragedy. Presumably {59|60} the Athenians weep upon hearing the lamentation of the captive Milesians and witnessing their downfall on stage (or hearing of it via messenger). The Athenians, moreover, had contributed a number of ships to the Ionian revolt, and so were directly affected by the outcome. Their emotional reaction is predictable: they weep for themselves and their fellow Greeks, as the Greek word oikeia implies. This anecdote from Herodotus makes Phrynichus’ Phoenician Women (and Aeschylus’ Persians) all the more surprising then as a subject for Greek tragedy. Could Phrynichus write tragedy just as easily from the point of view of the Persians as from that of the Greeks? [11] Could the Athenian audience have possibly reacted with weeping to a play like the Phoenician Women, in which the lamentation is Persian and not Greek?

It would be too easy to interpret the emotional force of the Phoenician Women or the Persians as Schadenfreude—delight in the misfortunes of the enemy. [12] Nicole Loraux has recently challenged interpretations of the Persians that liken it to a victory song of sorts: There is no gloating to be found in Aeschylus’ play. And while the Persians are certainly constructed as an “other,” as clearly demonstrated by Edith Hall’s work on the play, [14] the very fact that the Persians is a prize-winning tragedy {60|61} should encourage us to look for more than Athenian self-congratulation in the laments of the Persian elders.

Edith Hall’s Inventing the Barbarian explores how the Greek literary imagination constructed the idea of the Persians as a barbarian—that is, non-Greek—people with non-Greek, inferior customs in the wake of the Persian Wars: Hall goes on to discuss the way in which a common external enemy helped to foster a Panhellenic sense of community among the Greeks who allied together to fight the Persians in the decades following Salamis.

Hall’s analysis forcefully shows that the Greek imagination of the barbarian Persians in the fifth century BC had little to do with the actual character or customs of the Persians themselves. Whatever was opposed to Greek ideals became Persian, and portrayal of the Persians on stage or in literature was a caricature of Persian ways at best. The Persians therefore became in the Greek mind effeminate, luxurious, and excessive—the antithesis of the ideal masculine, frugal, and moderate Greek. Political differences were also an important preoccupation: to the democratic Athenian mind the Persians embodied tyranny. [16] The Persians in Aeschylus are clearly an other, and that characterization is achieved by setting up such oppositions as between male and female, frugality and luxury, moderation and excess. There is a patent desire on the part of Aeschylus to portray the Persians as exotic and foreign, and many have commented on such elements as the costuming, musical elements, and even movements of the actors and chorus, which would have served to create an exotic and distinctly Persian atmosphere on stage. [17]

The influence of Hall’s study has been justifiably pervasive. And yet, as I will argue, it does not provide a complete picture of the Athenian conception of the barbarian in the fifth century BC. For one thing, Hall insists that a {61|62} radical new treatment of barbarians in literature and art began to take place after the Persian Wars. For Hall, there is not a continuum that can be traced from the Iliad through the archaic period and into the classical. [18] Aeschylus’ Persians is for Hall one of the first and foremost examples of a new trend. [19] But the poetry of Aeschylus is steeped in the Homeric tradition, and there are many points of continuity between the treatment of the Trojans in epic and that of the Persians in Aeschylus’ tragedy. [20] The laments of the Persian elders draw on ancient themes that portray the fallen warriors as flowers cut down before maturity. This imagery is itself fundamentally linked to Greek hero cult traditions, in which the beautiful youths of myth are ritually lamented by the community. The Persian dead are heroized and lamented in terms that are thoroughly Greek, with the result that there can be little distinction drawn between the Greek and Persian soldiers. The Persians laments both equally.

The Persians begins with the entrance song of the Persian elders, in which the warriors of the Persian army are listed by name and described in terms that evoke an epic catalogue, as in the following excerpt: {62|63} The catalogue is focalized through the eyes of the Persian elders, who last saw the army departing in all of its glory. The list of fighting warriors and their attributes casts the Persian leaders as epic heroes, who are described as setting out for battle.

As many have noted, this catalogue of Persian warriors is reminiscent of Greek epic conventions. But it also contains details that are distinctly Persian in the Greek imagination. The army is polukhrusos—“full of gold” or “gold-bedecked.” [21] The names of the warriors themselves are foreign and contain many authentic Persian elements. [22] In this way Aeschylus presents the Persian warriors as exotic and luxuriant from the very beginning of the play. As we will see, the imagery and vocabulary of luxuriousness are perhaps the most important characterizing elements in the Persians. But at the same time the catalogue casts the warriors in a role that is larger than life. By situating the Persians in the realm of tradition and myth in these opening lines Aeschylus {63|64} links the Persians with Greek song traditions and in particular the metaphor world of epic poetry.

This metaphor world is evoked with particular resonance when the Persian elders bring their catalogue to a close: The depiction of the Persian army here and elsewhere as the flower of the land is reminiscent of Athenian traditions in which soldiers who have died fighting for their city are consistently imagined to be at the peak of hêbê. [23] The theme of hêbê as a flower or blossom (anthos) is an important and common one in Greek poetry, [24] but the metaphor of the anthos is especially connected with the death of heroes in war, as glorified {64|65} by epic poetry (kleos). [25] One of the primary metaphors for epic poetry in the Iliad is that of a flower that will never wilt: Here Achilles reveals not only the crux of his choice but also the driving principle of Greek epic song. The unwilting flower of epic poetry is contrasted with the necessarily mortal hero, whose death comes all too quickly. [26]

The theme of the hero as a plant that blossoms beautifully and dies quickly is also an important theme in Greek lament traditions, including the laments for Achilles within the Iliad: [27] The Iliad quotes within its narration of Achilles’ kleos many songs of lamentation that serve to highlight the mortality of the central hero as well as underscore the immortality of song. The traditional imagery of these quoted laments, as sung primarily by Thetis, spill over into epic diction itself, with the result that similes, metaphors, and other traditional descriptions of heroes are infused with themes drawn from the natural world.

The depiction of the death of the Trojan Euphorbus in the Iliad is one such place where epic diction draws on the plant imagery that pervades Greek laments for heroes. Euphorbus, like Achilles, is compared to a young tree: Euphorbus topples like a tree that is overcome by a storm. [28] The plant imagery in this passage is intensified by two references to blossoms. In the simile, the tree to which Euphorbus is compared blossoms with white flowers. Moreover, the D scholia to the Iliad reveal that this comparison between Euphorbus and the tree with its blossoms is even closer than might appear at first glance. According to the scholia, kharites, translated here as “the Graces,” means in the Cypriote dialect of Greek “myrtle blossoms.” [29] The flecks of blood in Euphorbus’ hair look like myrtle blossoms. Since the Arcado-Cypriote dialect layer of Homeric diction contains some of the oldest elements of the poetic system in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, it is likely that in the most ancient phases of the Iliad tradition Euphorbus’ hair was understood to look like myrtle blossoms. [30] Thus we find that the comparison of a dying warrior to a flower is an ancient theme at the core of the Greek epic tradition.

This theme is not confined to the literary tradition, however. It is fundamentally connected with communal laments for and the religious worship of heroes. A particularly good example of such worship is the popular women’s {67|68} festival of Adonis, the Adonia, in which the untimely death of Aphrodite’s young and beautiful mortal lover was lamented by means of “gardens of Adonis.” Women would plant seeds during mid-summer in pots on their roofs, so that they would grow very quickly and then immediately wither in the intense summer sun. [31]

An important part of the Adonia was the singing of laments, traces of which survive in literature ranging from Sappho to late antiquity. The Epitaph for Adonis (Ἀδώνιδος ἐπιτάφιος) by the Hellenistic poet Bion—possibly composed for performance at the Adonia [32] —is a lament and a love song for the beautiful youth, who died in a hunting accident. [33] The poem brings together a variety of traditions concerning Adonis and his transformation after death into a species of flower. [34] A common version of the myth has Adonis transformed into the anemone. In Bion’s poem, Adonis’ blood brings forth the rose, and Aphrodite’s tears produce the anemone: The narrator of the poem (a female mourner) then instructs Aphrodite to lay Adonis on her own bed for the prothesis, [35] strewn with flowers and garlands: {68|69} In this poem, which reenacts the very moment of Aphrodite’s discovery of Adonis’ death and her lament over his body, the wilted flower is already the symbol of Adonis. It is even said that the fact of Adonis’ death causes all flowers to wilt, as if by metonymy with his own dead corpse. Thus the death of Adonis is connected with both the creation and the premature death of plant life.

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Bion’s poem was composed centuries after the Persians (and Aeschylus’ play was itself composed centuries after the Iliad), but I have chosen to focus on it because it extends in a beautiful way an important constellation of traditional themes and imagery connected with the heroes of archaic Greek epic and cult. The Persians are described as the flower (anthos) of the Persian land as they march in glory towards battle—the very battle in which they will meet their deaths: τοιόνδ' ἄνθος Περσίδος αἴας/οἴχεται ἀνδρῶν (Persians 59-60, cited above). The phrase is invoked a second time when the messenger arrives to announce the devastating defeat: τὸ Περσῶν δ' ἄνθος οἴχεται πεσόν “the flower of the Persians has fallen and disappeared” (Persians 252). The Persians are in this way fundamentally linked with the warrior heroes of Greek epic traditions, in which Greek and non-Greek alike are singled out at the moment of the death by similes and metaphors drawn from the world of plants and flowers.

A third time the warriors are called the anthos of Persia, again in conjunction with death in battle: πολλοὶ φῶτες, χώρας ἄνθος,/τοξοδάμαντες, πάνυ ταρφύς τις/μυριὰς ἀνδρῶν, ἐξέφθινται “many men, the flower of the land, archers, a densely crowded myriad of men has perished” (Persians 925-927). The preceding lines (922-924) too pick up on an epic theme: Here the young Persian warriors are imagined to have filled Hades—the Greek underworld—to the point of overflowing. Such an image recalls the opening lines of the Iliad, in which Achilles’ anger is said to have sent many steadfast lives of heroes down to Hades (πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν/ἡρώων Iliad 1.3-4). Just as striking in these lines is the association of the Persians with the earth, here personified as lamenting the Persian dead. [36] Athenians believed that they themselves were autochthonous, born from the earth according to the Athenian charter myth. [37] The distinction between Athenian and Persian is here so nonexistent that the Persians themselves can be described as native to the earth (ἐγγαίαν 922). [38] Their connection to the earth reinforces the imagery of the wilted anthos, which is born from the earth and soon returns to it. [39]

The image of the anthos however is only one of a cluster of related themes of Greek lament that Aeschylus applies to the Persian warriors. Let us return briefly to Bion’s lament for Adonis, and the lines immediately following the passage just discussed.

Gregory Nagy has shown that the word habros is fundamentally connected with sensuality. [40] Adonis is habros in one of the two fragments of Sappho that lament his death: [41] Already in Sappho the sensuality and eroticism of the word habros evokes Asian—and specifically Lydian—luxury, as other fragments of Sappho make clear. [43] Herodotus tells us that it was only after the austere Persians conquered the wealthy and sensual Lydians that the Persians too learned luxurious ways (habrosunê). [44] After that point in history the Persians were always associated in the Greek mind with a soft and sensuous lifestyle, and thus it is no surprise that the word habros and its compounds characterize the Persians throughout Aeschylus’ play.

But before we examine the habrosunê that characterizes the Persians in Aeschylus, it is important to explore further the range of meaning that the word habros encompasses. As Nagy’s work on the word shows, habros has both positive and negative connotations that are fundamentally intertwined in early Greek poetry. In the victory odes of Pindar, habros can be applied to both athletic victory and the glory of song: [45] Just as the figure of Adonis combines the theme of luxuriance with the metaphor of the anthos that blooms brightly only to wither very quickly, {72|73} a third example of the use of habros in Pindar reveals how interconnected the two ideas are: Kleandros’ crown is luxuriant both because of its metonymical and metaphorical connections with victory and because of the delicate myrtle blossoms that form its substance. In Pindar’s ode, the man whose crown is habros has achieved a place in song because of his victory in athletics; this moment of victory becomes parallel to the moment of death in battle (or in Adonis’ case, hunting), where the heroes of the past achieved their place in the kleos of song. It is particularly appropriate then that the subject of Pindar’s song is named Kleandros—the man of kleos. As we have seen, this name already carries with it a host of associations, including the mortality of the hero—symbolized by the anthos—and the unwilting immortality of song. Pindar takes the implicit associations already built into the name of Kleandros and visualizes them as a concrete object, the habros crown of myrtle blossoms. [46]

As Nagy has shown, the word habros is not in itself a necessarily negative idea, but it does inherently allude to a related concept in Greek thought, and that is hubris. Hubris is in fact a botanical term, referring to excessive leaf and wood production. [47] It is unregulated growth, which can ultimately result in sterility. In Theognis and other early Greek poets, hubris comes to connote excessive luxury combined with savagery. [48] In Herodotus and elsewhere, the habrosunê of the Lydians (and later the Persians) is directly related to the hubris of tyranny. [49] The luxuriance of a habros lifestyle runs the risk of fostering an environment in which tyranny can arise. I now propose to apply Nagy’s work on habros and hubris in the poetry of Theognis and in Herodotus to an analysis of habros and hubris in Aeschylus’ {73|74} Persians. The Persians has in fact been interpreted by several critics as a tragedy that is essentially about the hubris of Xerxes and its consequences. [50] As we shall see, the Persians of Aeschylus display the full range of meaning for habros, exemplifying both the luxuriance of the myrtle blossom of victory and the savage overgrowth of hubris. I argue that the word habros in Aeschylus’ Persians evokes primarily the sensual and erotic aspects of this word, as it is applied to such figures as Adonis in Sappho and both earlier and later Greek laments for heroes. Secondarily, however, the word habros prepares us for an explanation of the Persians’ downfall that centers around the hubris of Xerxes, the Persian king.

Although the laments of the Persians are sung by a chorus of male Persian elders, the dominant themes of the laments are characteristic of Greek women’s songs. Many of the Persian laments focalize the deaths of the Persian warriors from the point of view of Persian wives. The erotically charged imagery combines themes of love, loss, and longing: Here the Persian elders describe as part of their entrance song the situation in Persia since the departure of the warriors. Their concern is for the Persian {74|75} women, the wives who are left behind. Here again we see a close relationship between tears of grief and luxuriance, as manifested in the compound habropenthês. [51]

As with the figure of Adonis, the luxuriance of lament is erotic. The word pothos “longing” is now yet another theme closely associated with and evoked by the word habros. In Bion’s Epitaph for Adonis, Aphrodite laments that as a consequence of Adonis’ death “pothos has flown away like a dream”: πόθος δέ μοι ὡς ὄναρ ἔπτα (58). Earlier in the Persian entrance song, the themes of lamentation and sexual desire were similarly juxtaposed: Pothos is another charged word that, like habros, can have both sensual and religious overtones when applied to heroes. Perhaps the earliest manifestation of this combination of meaning can be found in Achilles’ declaration of Iliad 1, in which he officially withdraws from fighting and foretells the disastrous consequences of this act:

The surface narrative speaks of the Greek army and the longing that they will have for the absent Achilles, who is acknowledged to be the best fighter of all the Greeks at Troy. But on the level of cult, which is always an important dimension of Homeric poetry, this longing for the absent hero is symbolic of the longing expressed in ritual laments on the part of the community. In the second-century AD Heroikos of Philostratus, a fictional dialogue in which a vinedresser in the sanctuary of Protesilaos teaches a Phoenician visitor about Greek hero cult, the longing of the community for the absent hero translates into a longing on the part of a Phoenician to learn about the Greek heroes. On two occasions in this dialogue the Phoenician longs (potheô) to hear more about such figures from Troy as Protesilaos and Achilles. [52] In the Persians, the longing is on the surface the sexual desire of the Persian wives. [53] But especially in lines 61-62 where the subject is actually the land of Asia, we can see that the Persian warriors are being set up as absent heroes on the level of community and perhaps even cult. The theme recurs several times. We may compare 511-512: ὡς στένειν πόλιν/Περσῶν, ποθοῦσαν φιλτάτην ἥβην χθονός (“Thus the city of the Persians laments, longing [pothousan] for the beloved youth [hêbê] of the land”). [54]

Throughout the laments of the Persians the Greek concepts of habros, pothos, and penthos are constantly combined to express the grief of the Persian women for the absent warriors:

The laments of the Persian women are once again habros (habrogooi 541; cf. habropenthês 135), as they long (potheousai) for their absent husbands. [56] The Greek word goos is in fact the usual term for a lament by a female relative. [57] That the women’s longing and songs of lamentation are erotic in nature is made clear by the following lines, in which the marriage beds with their luxurious linens are imagined, the beds that were the delight of hêbê. Here the word eunê is literally a bed, as the reference to linens demonstrates, but it is also the word in Greek used more often than not for sex (as is lekhos or lektron, a word that is coupled with eunê in this very passage). This then is yet another remarkable passage in the Persians that uses the terminology, themes, and imagery of women’s love songs and laments to depict the loss that Persia as a nation has suffered. {77|78}

But here again the realm of women’s laments is fused with that of epic kleos, as I will now go on to show. The work of Richard Martin has explored Homeric poetry as an overarching system that incorporates within its own formal conventions many other genres of speech and song. [58] Elsewhere I have suggested that the most pervasive of these genres is lament, as voiced primarily by such women as Andromache, Briseis, Hecuba, and Penelope. [59] The laments of Aeschylus’ Persians are infused with traditional themes of women’s song-making, but they are also highly allusive and inseparable from the epic traditions that showcase women’s song making. In the passage cited immediately above, for example, the Persian women are said to tear their veils in a traditional gesture of grief. For Aeschylus’ audience such a gesture may well have called to mind the actions of a paradigmatic epic figure like Andromache, when she learns of Hektor’s death: Even if Andromache is not imagined to be the paradigm for the Persian wives, other aspects of Aeschylus’ passage resonate with the laments of the Iliad. In addition to tearing their clothing, the Persian women “soak their bosoms so that they are drenched with tears” (διαμυδαλέους δάκρυσι κόλπους τέγγουσ' 539-540). This too is a traditional depiction of grief, but {78|79} the traditional diction is particularly evocative of epic. Compare the following two passages from the Iliad with the verses of Aeschylus: [61] In this case the allusive power of Aeschylus’ depiction of grief for the Persian warriors is almost certainly not in a specific reference, but rather in the force of tradition. [62]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Persians passage (and the play as a whole) is the way that it eroticizes the death of young warriors by means of constant reference to the marriages (and sexual unions) that have been left behind: But this too is a crucial epic theme. The Odyssey is at its core the story of a marriage bed left behind; the Iliad narrates the death of countless bride- {79|80} grooms—most notably Hektor’s. The Panhellenic poetry of the Iliad generally avoids sex and romance of any kind, but there is an erotic subtext in many passages of lamentation. [64] Andromache is metonymically connected to Aphrodite as she begins her lament for Hektor in Iliad 22.470; when she realizes that Hektor is dead, she throws down from her head the adornments that “golden Aphrodite” had given her on her wedding day. Likewise Briseis is compared to golden Aphrodite when she begins her lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19. [65] In Andromache’s lament of Iliad 24, she complains that Hektor did not leave her with an “intimate phrase” or embrace her one last time:

I submit that the laments of women in Greek poetry more often than not merge with the love song, and that the death of young warriors is an inherently erotic theme, because of the implicit loss of love and sexual union that such a death carries with it. [66] Epic poetry, which is essentially a man’s genre, narrates the deaths of warriors with a view to another warrior’s heroic exploits—his kleos. Thus the death of Hektor becomes the kleos of Achilles. {80|81} But women’s songs of love and loss, songs of which the Iliad occasionally provides a glimpse, narrate the deaths of warriors from the perspective of the bride left behind.

The pothos of the Persian women depicted in the passage under discussion is specifically that of “newlyweds” (ἀρτιζυγίαν 542). As I have already begun to suggest, the Iliad too is full of the deaths of bridegrooms, some barely mentioned, others with elaborate death scenes. [67] The Trojan ally Iphidamas is one such bridegroom:

These lines serve to mark the first death in Agamemnon’s aristeia. The importance of “getting it right” is signaled by the invocation of the Muses at the beginning of the catalogue. Iphidamas’ prominence as the first to be killed earns him a relatively expanded life history before the narrator depicts the death itself. The narrator focuses on the fact that Iphidamas is a newlywed, who gave it all up to become part of the kleos of another man. Iphidamas is not lamented by his bride in our Iliad. Instead his compressed life history, with its account of his recent marriage, serves as the lament for this doomed bridegroom. [68]

Iphidamas is by no means the only bridegroom of the Iliad, or the most memorable. In Iliad 2.700, for example, we learn of the bride of Protesilaos, Laodameia: [69] Protesilaos’ story is nearly identical to that of Iphidamas, but even more compressed. In just three lines we learn of his marriage, his immediate departure for Troy (before his house was even built), his famous death—the first of the Trojan War—and the lamentation of the bride he left behind. Protesilaos and Iphidamas are part of a pattern that pervades the Iliad, a pattern which alludes to women’s song traditions but also constitutes kleos.

But the greatest and most lamented bridegroom of them all is of course Achilles. In an earlier work I have explored the way that the figure of Briseis, {82|83} Achilles’ concubine, casts him as a bridegroom in her lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19. [70] Achilles himself speculates about marriage in Iliad 9, as he contemplates returning home to Phthia: Of course we know that Achilles will not return home and get married, and in this sense he is the ultimate and eternal bridegroom. [71] The allure of the doomed young man manifests itself in a variety of local myths and traditions about Achilles’ romantic exploits in and around the Troad and even in the afterlife, where he is linked with such figures as Polyxena, Helen, Iphigeneia, and Medea. [72]

These more local traditions about Achilles are also likely to have been the subject of women’s laments and love songs. The poetry of Sappho is an indication of this. As the fourth century AD rhetorician Himerius tell us, in her wedding songs “[Sappho] compared the bridegroom to Achilles, and likened {83|84} the young man’s deeds to the hero’s” (τὸν νυμφίον τε Ἀχιλλεῖ παρομοιῶσαι καὶ εἰς ταὐτὸν ἀγαγεῖν τῷ ἥρωι τὸν νεανίσκον ταῖς πράξεσι). [73] One such bridegroom is Achilles’ worst enemy, Hektor, who, together with his bride Andromache, is given Achilles’ epithet theoeikelos (“god-like”) in Sappho fr. 44. [74]

Epic knows Achilles as a killing machine, Sappho knows Achilles as a bridegroom. But as we have seen, the dichotomy between men’s and women’s songs about Achilles is not cut and dried. Homeric poetry alludes to traditions in which Achilles is above all a lover, and I would argue that, as with the figure of Adonis, it is in fact Achilles’ premature death and failure to mature and marry that makes him such an erotic figure. Another fragment of Sappho unites the imagery of the lamented warrior and the bridegroom that we have been exploring: Here the metaphor of the dead warrior as a plant cut down before reaching maturity is combined with erotic image of the warrior as a bridegroom (and vice versa). Heroes like Iphidamas, Protesilaos, Hektor, and Achilles are all prototypes for the warrior as bridegroom. Sappho then compares the beautiful potential of the young bridegroom to the anthos and hêbê of a young warrior, an image that as we have seen is full of pothos (as befits a wedding song) but also penthos (as befits a lament). A final passage from the Iliad suggests once again that the idea of a bridegroom in the prime of youth is potentially and perhaps even inherently a theme of lament. The image of the bridegroom is poignantly conjured when Achilles laments Patroklos in Iliad 23. This time, however, Achilles is in the role of a father: This simile, because it is applied to Patroklos, should perhaps suggest that the death of a young bridegroom is the saddest death of all, and such a death necessarily occurs whenever a warrior is cut down in the prime of hêbê.

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In the preceding argument I have tried to show that the death of heroes in battle is a focal point of ancient Greek women’s song traditions, encompassing both love and loss. These women’s traditions about figures like Achilles and Hektor likewise suffuse the Iliad and Odyssey, revealing that such essential themes as the mortality of the hero and immortality in song have their origins in the lament poetry of women. These same themes form the core of the laments of Aeschylus’ Persians. The Persian dead are lamented as flowers prematurely cut down and as doomed bridegrooms. Both themes come together in the word habros, merging the semantic and conceptual realms of death in battle and athletic victory, the everlasting glory of kleos and the luxuriance of lamentation.

Secondarily, however, the word habros in the Persians evokes hubris. When the Persian queen and elders conjure the ghost of Xerxes’ father Darius (the Persian king who attacked Greece in 490), he informs them that the Persian disaster is retribution for the hubris of Xerxes and his army. This hubris is two-fold. It begins when Xerxes dares to bridge the Hellespont, a famous story that is also narrated in Herodotus: [75] Xerxes thought he could overpower Poseidon and cross the Hellespont to invade Greece. This is an act of more than human boldness and reckless audacity. The hubris of Xerxes moreover spreads to his army, who, after crossing the Hellespont, show no restraint in their initial success. They go too far in victory: Here we see the savage side of hubris, a hubris that likewise characterizes the Persians in Herodotus when they sack the Lydian city of Sardis. [76] As I will argue in future chapters, the plundering of a defeated city is one of the primary contexts in which hubris manifests itself.

The botanical aspects of hubris, so important to the imagery of habros that pervades the play, come to the surface at the climax of Darius’ condemnation of Xerxes and the Persian army: In this way the negative associations of the word habros with the aggressive and violent overgrowth conveyed in the word hubris are woven into the dominant imagery of the play, with its floral/botanical metaphors for the fallen Persian warriors. The luxuriance of the Persians has a dark side. Under the direction of the impetuous and arrogant Xerxes the habrosunê of the Persian people becomes hubris, which results in utter disaster inflicted by the gods.

But while Darius’ speech certainly sets up the defeat of the Persians as punishment for a wrongful attack on the part of Xerxes, the Persian war dead, as we have seen, are consistently lamented in terms that humanize and glorify {87|88} the fallen warriors. And while the predominant song medium of the play is the Greek woman’s lament, with perhaps special reference to the laments of Greek epic, Mary Ebbott has recently shown that a specifically Athenian kind of praise of war dead is employed as well.

In lines 302-330 the messenger catalogues the Persian dead in a list that is similar to Athenian casualty lists. Ebbott argues that “the framing discourse of tragedy changes the meaning conveyed by the form: instead of a roster designating those celebrated in a special grave, [the list] becomes a disturbing listing of war dead who are not honored and not even buried.” [78] The implications of Ebbott’s argument for the present discussion are several. The Persians are praised for their deaths in battle in terms that are uniquely Athenian, thereby denying their “otherness.” Even more significantly, the Athenians are made to think about the fact that the Persians, despite these praises and the laments that glorify them throughout the tragedy, have not been given a hero’s burial.

Here we come to the heart of Aeschylus’ Persians. The play is not a victory song in celebration of the Persian defeat, nor is it a universalization of the experience of defeat, such that the Athenians and Persians are all one in their humanity and mortality. Rather the Athenians are asked to see their enemy with all of its foreignness and otherness, and witness not only the commonalities between them, but also the injustices in which the Athenians themselves have taken part. Tragedy allows the Athenians to reenact and reexperience the events of Salamis from the perspective of the defeated. In this way the Persians, the earliest tragedy that has come down to us, perfectly illustrates a principle that operates in many tragedies still to come, in which the plight of the defeated is a central preoccupation.

I have argued throughout this chapter that the Persians is remarkable in that it narrates the battle of Salamis from the perspective of those left behind. From the entrance song of the Persian elders to the final extended antiphonal lament between the chorus and Xerxes, the focus of the play is on the emotions and experiences of the bereaved widows and parents of the deceased warriors. It is not surprising then that the laments of the Persians have a great deal in common with the laments of captive women that I will be examining in future chapters. In this case the Persians were the invading army. Because Persia was the aggressor, the Persian widows are not in the same precarious position as, for example, the Trojan women are. They have not been abandoned to the enemy, they do not face immediate enslavement, and their young sons have not been systematically killed. Nevertheless, {88|89} the similarities are many, and suggest once again that the Persians is not an exultant play, but one which is keenly attuned to the suffering of the defeated.

What is at first glance surprising about the Persian laments is that they are not sung by the widowed Persian women, as the laments evidently were in Phrynichus’ play four years earlier. Instead the Persian elders and Xerxes himself take center stage as the voice of Persia’s grief. In this way the Persians might be said to be effeminized by Aeschylus, made to perform actions far more characteristic of Greek women than men. As I have already suggested in my introduction to this chapter, the effeminization of the Persians may be a device whereby Aeschylus casts them as an other. That is, he portrays them as recognizably Persian, by making them recognizably not Greek, and the dichotomy between male and female is an obvious way to achieve this polarization. But even this hypothesis goes too far in its separation of Greeks and Persians and male and female. Structurally, the Persians resembles Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, in which the chorus of Argive elders express their fears and anxiously await news of the youth who have been in Troy for ten years. [79] We might also compare to the Persian elders the chorus of old men in Euripides’ Herakles, who likewise anxiously await the return of Herakles at the beginning of the play, and express their fears for Herakles’ family in terms that evoke a lament:

The plot of Sophocles’ Trachinian Women has a similar structure, in that it too is dominated by longing for the absent hero. [80] This longing on the part of the elders of the community is yet another means by which the Persian war dead are assimilated to Greek heroes like Herakles, whose sufferings were enacted on the tragic stage and whose untimely deaths were ritually lamented throughout the Greek world.

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The vast majority of Aeschylus’ play then collapses the barriers between the constructions of male, female, Greek, and non-Greek. Despite elaborate costuming, exotic Persian movements, and foreign sounding music, the Persians are shown, at least at the moment of death in battle, to be as Greek as any Athenian. {90|}