‘Oioi – Oioi – Iehieh!’ Democracy in Crisis! Aeschylus’ Persians for Contemporary Stages

ABSTRACT

This article attempts a reinterpretation of Aeschylus’ Persians as primarily a warning about the instability of democracy following a major military victory against an overpowering totalitarian enemy. It discusses the historical and our contemporary ideas of the democratic principles of government versus the constant tendency towards a strongman regime. I argue that the play’s underlying philosophy is based on the Heraclitan idea of constant flux, which predates our modern ideas of the relativity of time and space, and the core concept underpinning any democracy that the only constant thing about it is continuous change. A short retrospective of modern productions of The Persians reveals the relationship between history and current events that can or cannot be associated with the play. By treating the thorny issue of translations and adaptations and the temptations of simplistic patriotic or antiwar interpretations of the play, the article also addresses the challenging task of determining what constitutes a just war and why a democracy is necessarily engaged in a continuous defensive battle against the forces of totalitarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• The Persians
• Aeschylus
• democracy
• authoritarianism
• Heraclitus

In November 2019 I had the opportunity of attending a production of Aeschylus’ Persians (472 BC), the oldest play preserved within what is called Western civilization. It was staged at a small pocket theatre in one of the northern German port cities. The playhouse had just been taken over by an ambitious German expatriate who had returned to his homeland to fulfill his dream of running his own theatre. The one room facility with some fifty seats had been successfully operating on a fare of boulevard pieces that filled the weekly performances in the shadow of the large, subsidized city theatre running more ambitious playbills. A few days before the production of The Persians opened, I managed to attend the last performance of the previous season produced by the former owner/director. The soapy play of that night had filled the house to the last seat with a laughing and weeping audience. With barely a week in between, Aeschylus’ Persians was opening under the direction of Heinz-Uwe Haus, whose productions of Brecht and classical Greek drama had gained him an international reputation. He happened to be a friend of the new owner and wanted to give the new venture a boost with his production. The audience, having been nurtured on boulevard fare for many years, was slightly hesitant about this sudden change and only about two-thirds were daring enough to attend the opening night. They were stunned by Haus’s bare bones but brilliant production, where the stage and most of the room for the audience were draped in white fabric, which created the illusion of an amphitheater, and the cast of four, three actors representing the Chorus, Messenger, and Xerxes, and one actress representing Queen Atossa. The Ghost of Darius appeared as an eerie voice chanting the original Aeschylean lines in ancient Greek. Other large pieces of white fabric served the actors to simulate the narrated action through gestures and shapes, and a large red fabric represented the rivers of blood flowing from the violent encounters between the armies of the mighty Persian Empire and the up-and-coming Athenian democracy.

What was it that stunned the audience into a minute-long silence at the end of the play followed by a sudden outbreak of voices? Aside from the highly efficient production that invoked a sense of ancient Greek theatre along with Brechtian techniques, there must have been elements in the original play that made it particularly conducive to a modern adaptation. It was in fact the voice from the distant past that hit upon the very nerve of our modern societal and political issues even though the play almost completely lacked the expected dramatic action on stage. The real drama, the devastating defeat of a vastly superior army by a small but highly motivated opponent, was conveyed through the introspective reflections and narrations of a very few characters: the Chorus, representing the elders at the Persian court, Queen Atossa (Xerxes’ mother), a Messenger, the Ghost of the deceased King Darius I and his defeated son Xerxes. The play’s simple plot reveals step by step the disastrous outcome of the sea battle at Salamis and the entire campaign against the Greeks. All develops in one location outside the Persian court in Susa near Darius’s tomb. It may well be that simplicity that makes this ancient play so persuasive to modern audiences. This article tries to address what determines our relationship to this ancient material and what role history plays in our perception of the contemporary reality reflected on our theatrical stages.

Whoever has some general notion of ancient Greek drama usually associates it with tragedies of mythological content, in which human characters of high descent get entangled with the fate predetermined by the gods that leads to the tragic end of those unknowingly aberrant humans. Oedipus by Sophocles along with Antigone are the most widely known ancient Greek tragedies on Western stages. Aeschylus’ Persians, however, does not fall into that category. A recent article confirms that “The Persae constitutes the only surviving tragedy that deals with a historical event.”¹ In fact, we know of only three ancient Greek plays that dealt with contemporary issues, of which The Persians is the youngest.² So whenever we encounter The Persians on modern stages, it is usually called a “tragedy.” But this play does not at all meet the Aristotelian definitions that inform our modern concept of tragedy. The audience’s emotions are not purified through a process of fear and pity (catharsis) for the protagonist, nor does the protagonist, Xerxes, encounter his defeat without guilt. The Aristotelian definitions of what constitutes a tragedy were in fact conceived more than a hundred years after The Persians won the first prize at the Athenian Dionysia festival in 472 BC. Yet this has not kept critics and scholars from measuring the play along these lines.³ Thus it may be the very fact that Aeschylus’ Persians does not conform to our traditional Aristotelian concept of tragedy that makes it so attractive to our contemporary theatre that has also been strongly influenced by Brecht’s ideas. Even though Brecht considered ancient Greek theatre to be at a primitive stage of what modern drama should be, he probably never realized how closely his concept of epic theatre had been realized in Aeschylus’ Persians.⁴

The most astounding element of Aeschylus’ play that deals with the victory of his nation against its archenemy, is that the events are not viewed from the point of view of the victors but from that of the defeated. Not a single Greek warrior is mentioned by name. The intention therefore could neither have been a nationalistic glorification of the Greek victory, nor a gracious gesture towards the defeated enemy. Aeschylus’ message was more complicated than that. The technique he used to stir the minds of his compatriots was the technique of distancing (Verfremdungseffekt). Still at the height of basking in the glory of victory only a few years after the actual battles, Aeschylus wanted his compatriots to experience the opposite—the emotional upheaval of a devastating defeat. At the same time, he needed to enable them to maintain a rational balance so as to explore the reasons behind the course of events that led to it. That required exactly the type of distancing effect Brecht explained in his theoretical writings and demonstrated so vividly through his model productions. His idea of an “epic theatre” was that theatre should not be primarily concerned with presenting dramatic action but with telling a story. This is precisely what happens in The Persians: All the action is conveyed through narration and not through events that take place live on stage.

***

The role of history in theatre is closely related to the question whether we can learn from history or not. Of course, many mistakes of the past have been repeated. However, if human progress is at all possible, especially in terms of social development, it can only happen as a result of a thorough knowledge of the past. It follows that the repetition of past mistakes only happens through the loss of awareness of the erroneous ways of the past and their dire consequences or through their deliberate falsification. But when we consider a play of historical content for production, to what extent do we have to take history into consideration? We cannot expose the audience to the complexities of historical research, which even the fattest program booklet could not accomplish. A well-known experiment at the Berliner Schaubühne, “The Antiquities Project,” under the direction of Peter Stein, attempted a thorough exposure of the entire team to the scholarly research on the history of ancient Greek theatre before the actual work on the productions began.⁵ Naturally, this would be the ideal approach to any production of an ancient drama, but it is excessively time consuming and ultimately for the audience only marginally accessible. For The Persians such an approach would also include the entire history of the Persian Wars (499–449 BC). Moreover, we would run into the issue that much of the historical content of the drama has been expanded upon through the writings of Herodotus. Unfortunately, Herodotus, who wrote his Histories a good fifty years after the Persian Wars, is too often used when it comes to The Persians although there is no agreement among modern historians whether the “father of history” (“pater historiae,” according to Cicero) was in fact one of the first historians or the writer of stories within historical contexts. Herodotus, moreover, was from Ionia, in Asia Minor, and his viewpoint about the war would have probably differed had he been an Athenian. It appears that Aeschylus did not intend to associate his play with history in our modern sense, which is why he does not mention a single Greek name involved in the battle of Salamis. He simply assumed that his audience was familiar with the events, which varied just as much as when they were still too recent for settling into a reliable historical framework, and when any recording was at best haphazard. The claim, for instance, that Aeschylus’ main purpose was to compress the three battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea into one in order to make the total defeat of Xerxes and his Persian forces an exclusively Athenian victory relegating the Spartans to second place, is influenced more by Herodotus than by Aeschylus’ script.⁶ Thus a modern production team, while honoring the script and whatever historical context is firmly established, has to be concerned not so much with interpreting the realities of ancient history, but with what the ancient play may contribute to how we view our own contemporary political and cultural situation.

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Aeschylus was born in 524/25 BC in Eleusis (today a north-western suburb of Athens), to a family of ancient nobility. As a young man he experienced the struggles of Athenian society to establish a democratically shared system of government after the toppling of the sons of Peisistratus, the last of the tyrannical rulers. He lived through the entire Persian Wars and personally fought in the battle of Marathon (490 BC), where he lost his brother, as well as in the sea battle of Salamis (480 BC). From early on he must have been involved in public affairs and was interested in the literary arts, which led him already at the age of twenty-five to enter a poetry contest at the Dionysian festival. His artistic endeavors peaked when he won the drama trophy in 472 with The Persians as part of a trilogy of which the other two plays were lost.

One specific passage in The Persians has been puzzling scholars to this day: the report by the Messenger about the perishing of a substantial portion of Xerxes’ retreating land army when they tried to cross the Strymon River in northern Greece.⁷ The first contingent of the Persian army was able to cross the frozen river in the morning without any problems. However, the remainder perished in the floods when the ice suddenly thawed. Scholars have argued that the explanation of this impossible natural phenomenon, a river thawing this fast, might be found in mythology—that Apollo the sun god intervened on behalf of the Greeks—although there is no indication of this in the text. Yet it seems more likely that this event relates to Heraclitus’ image of the ever-changing river as a metaphor for life. Thus, while the river’s banks and course are to some degree constant, its waters are in continuous flux. The Persians, who were unable to read the signs of the fluidity or changeability of life, the continuous ups and downs of the wheel of fortune, thus contributed to their own downfall. Apparent stability, according to Heraclitus, is only a function of the flux of life. Being is always at the same time becoming and vice versa. His ideas constituted an early insight into the relativity of time and space. This message was clearly directed at the Greek audience, some of whom might have been familiar with the ideas of Heraclitus, their contemporary. Similar ideas underlie the Roman memento mori as well as the medieval metaphor of the wheel of fortune. Some of the almost proverbial quotes from Heraclitus describe this deeply philosophical outlook on our current world better than volumes of critical thinking:

All things flow, nothing abides. You cannot step into the same river twice, for the waters are continually flowing on. Nothing is permanent except change. All things come into being by conflict of opposites. A man’s character is his fate.⁸

But to return to Aeschylus: Despite his great success as a playwright—he won the Dionysian drama contest thirteen times and lost only once to Sophocles—he saw himself primarily as a servant to his community and as a soldier. This is the only explanation why there is no mention of his poetic and dramatic accomplishments in the epitaph on his grave in Gela, in Sicily, where he died in 457–56:

Aeschylus lies here entombed, Euphorion’s son, the Athenian,

At the flourishing city of Gela, he was conquered by death.

But his prowess is manifested at Marathon’s grove, the glorious,

Where the thick locked Persian had tested his strength.

***

Although Athens was not the first city-state that experimented with a constitutional democracy, it was the first that was able to stabilize it for a longer period after Pericles finalized its constitutional principles of power sharing during the last years of Aeschylus’ life.⁹ However, it was far from being a modern democracy aiming at equality and basic human rights. Women and slaves, who formed the basis of its economic system, had no voting rights. But the seeds of the idea of power sharing and active involvement of all citizens in public affairs had fallen on the fertile soil within the Athenian community wrecked for centuries with volatile power struggles among the various factions of the traditional nobility. The change of power had usually come about via a coup d’état and the term tyranny had not yet been filled with negative connotations in the eyes of the public.¹⁰

The determining political factor at the time of Aeschylus’ life was thus the vacillation between a semi-democratic oligarchy of equals, with slaves forming the economic basis, and the tendency to favor a strongman as leader, a god-like ruler, especially in the face of external enemies. Along with the strongman came the seductive idea of imperialism. In fact, Greece was an incredibly young and fragile democracy during the Persian Wars. The sentiment that a tyrant was needed to defend the city vis-à-vis the Asian threat must have been quite tangible especially during the public festivals. That Athenian democracy managed to establish and sustain itself during the Persian Wars was to a great extent the result of an economic miracle. Already under its last tyrant, Peisistratus, the silver mines in Laurion, about fifty kilometers from Athens, had been exploited with high efficiency using massive slave and even child labor. A new extraordinarily rich vein was discovered by the end of the sixth century that enabled the young democracy to set aside 3,000 tons of silver for arming itself against the Persian invaders. This money was spent primarily on building a vast number of trireme warships that were used to win the Battle of Salamis.¹¹ When, in the play, the Queen asks the Chorus what the military strength of the Greeks was based on, the answer is: “They have a fountain of silver, a treasure in their soil” (238).

The same economic miracle lay behind the foundation of the Delian League of city-states in 478 BC which established Greece as the dominant power of the Aegean Sea. This turned Athens from a defensive young democracy to an expansive one. The lures of conquest eventually led to its complete domination of Sicily and southern Italy shortly after Aeschylus’ death. Thus, from the very beginning democracies have had a tendency to undermine themselves by following imperialist impulses. It was 200 years after The Persians was written that the epitome of the strongman paired with world conquest reappeared most powerfully and this time in the figure of Alexander the Great. Similarly, the Roman Empire saw its greatest expansion not under a senatorial republic but under the Caesars. A hiatus of more than a thousand years followed until the sprouts of power sharing broke through the political ground again in Western Europe with the constitution of the Magna Carta Libertatum in 1215, the power sharing agreement between the English lords and their king. Indeed, our own recent history has witnessed the very same vacillation between young democracies on the defensive and continuous populist demands for strongmen, from Oliver Cromwell to the French Revolution that resulted in Napoleon’s short-lived European Empire, the Russian Revolution descending into Stalinist tyranny, and Hitler’s even shorter-lived Thousand Year Reich, to the current-day struggles of democracies to defend themselves against dictatorial forces from abroad and from within.

But to return to The Persians: some scholars have argued that what Aeschylus tried to convey to his compatriots was that the war between the Greeks and the Persians was the result of a conflict between two very different cultures. Alternatively, he might have tried to persuade them to feel empathy for the defeated enemy by better understanding their alien culture. They argue, for instance, that the Persians were overly emotional in their reactions to terrible news, and suggest that the Greek audiences would have gawked in amazement at the exoticism of excessive grief¹² Yet other scholars have maintained that the Persians’ vocal and physical expression of mourning was no less an element of the Greek tradition itself.

There is no point in dwelling on Aeschylus’ attempts to portray the cultural differences of the Persians, since, on the contrary, what has been overlooked is precisely how closely the two cultures resemble each other in the play. The key to this is that in the play the Persians—contrary to their religious customs at the time—pray to the same gods as the Greeks do—to Zeus, Hades, Neptune, Apollo; and the Chorus bemoans the destruction of the Persian army as follows:

O Zeus the King, now, now by destroying

The army of the boastful

And populous Persian nation (534–36)

Aeschylus does not mention Ahura Mazda as the supreme god of the Persians, even though one would assume that he had some knowledge of this god whom the Greeks called Oromasdes.¹³ In other words, the Persians appear culturally as close as they could be to the Greek audience, and thus that the spectators in turn could see themselves potentially in a similar situation. If there is an exotic element surrounding the Persians in the play, such as the strange names and the location of Susa, it has more to do with Brechtian distancing than with an attempt to create an exotic oriental atmosphere.¹⁴ The result of this was that the emotional impact of the gruesome fate of the Persians was experienced by the audience as if it were their own fate. At the same time, a certain distancing had to be maintained to allow for a rational approach to the question of why they were plunged into this abyss. Moreover, Charles Muntz has established that the invocation of the Ghost of Darius is remarkably close to what Greek practices were like in such circumstances, though he found it “bizarre” that the Persians would follow the same ritual as the Greeks.¹⁵ Finally, when the Chorus prostrate themselves before the Ghost of Darius, we cannot interpret this simply as an expression of the alien culture of the Persians but rather as the inherent nature of supreme rulers to appear as close to divinity as possible.

These observations are essential when it comes to adapting The Persians to modern stages, seeing that aspiring to a God-like status has been the dream of dictators from ancient Egypt via Greece, Rome, Louis XIV, the sun king, right up to our recent times. Indeed, the spectacles filmed by Leni Riefenstahl at Hitler’s Nuremberg rally grounds were nothing else but the celebration of a divine Führer figure. In Triumph of the Will Riefenstahl shows Hitler descending from the clouds in his approach to the mass rally at Nuremberg. At a closer look, the Persian culture and the Greek culture differ primarily in their political systems. Aeschylus’ gruesome representation of the Persians in their total defeat is a warning to his own compatriots, and we should remember that the purpose of the Athenian theatrical events was primarily “not to cheer but to think.”¹⁶

***

As noted earlier, the simplicity of the plot of The Persians contributed to its survival into our modern times. The play can be said to have the typical five-act structure that mirrors the predominance of the five characters within each act. The Chorus oversees the exposition, which describes the Persian Empire as emptied of all able-bodied young men who are away on the grand penal campaign against the Greeks to avenge the Persian losses suffered at the battle of Marathon. Unlike the expositions in tragedies such as Antigone or Medea, we are not presented with a conflict between individual characters but with a conflict between two nations. The array of names along with the parade of the weaponry from its vast expanses invoke the magnitude of the effort the Persian Empire has embarked on. It is the greatest military expedition of all time against a foe whose power remains undescribed. It seems unimaginable that any defense could withstand such an onslaught, for they are all “eager to impose the yoke of slavery on Greece” (29–30). This mighty army has already swept over Ionia into the mainland of Greece and in a prong-like movement crossed the Hellespont via a boat bridge, while the other half of the army encircles Greece from the north.¹⁷ Yet, from the very beginning, gnawing doubts trouble the souls of the elders, who are left behind in the capital Susa to take care of an empire now emptied of its defenders:

But by now the spirit within me,

All too ready to foresee evil, is troubled

About the return of the King

And his vast army of men. (6–9)

The Chorus extol their king as “the bold leader of populous Asia” (75):

A man equal to the gods, from the race begotten of gold

With the dark glance

Of a deadly serpent in his eyes. (80–83)¹⁸

However, the doubts of the Chorus intensify when faced by the fickle forces of the gods:

From which it is impossible for a mortal to escape and flee.

For that reason, my mind is clothed in black and torn with fear:

“Woe for the Persian army!” –

I dread that our city may hear this cry – (100–117)

The Chorus consists of men entering the dusk of their lives. They are left behind to advise the Queen, their supreme ruler during the absence of her son, King Xerxes. But they have little knowledge of leadership, since their function has always been that of sycophants. They are worried, not being used to making decisions, and full of doubts about what might happen to an empire drained of its entire male youth.

The second act starts with the introduction of Queen Atossa. She appears in all her regalia yet tortured by nights of little sleep and foreboding nightmares. Despite the devotion and respect paid to her by the Chorus, she appears human, worried about the fate of her son and the empire. The two dreams she wants the Chorus to interpret for her have become the model for prophetic dreams that have influenced Western literature ever since. Aeschylus is not making use of the impersonal Delphic Oracle for prophesy, as Sophocles does in his King Oedipus, but places it into the subconscious projection of the troubled soul of one of his main characters.

In the Queen’s first dream, Xerxes has yoked both a Greek and a Persian woman to pull his chariot. The Greek woman smashes her yoke while Darius looks on in pity, and Xerxes, who has been flung from his chariot, is tearing his robes. Aeschylus uses two women of equal strength and beauty to represent two subjugated nations. Even though women had no voting rights in ancient Athens, Aeschylus allegorizes them as the real strength of the nation both economically and psychologically that looms behind the Ionian revolt. For ultimately, it is the female strength at the home front that leads to the successful battles of Marathon, Salamis and Plataea.

In her second dream the Queen sees an eagle fleeing for refuge to the altar of Phoebus (Apollo, protector of the arts and civilization). A hawk (the lesser bird, Greece) swoops down on the eagle, tearing at its head with its talons, while the eagle (Persia) cowers down and submits. In ancient mythology the eagle signified imperial power, and the falcon signified (the Egyptian god) Horus. Both birds were symbols of light, the sky, and the air. But the eagle was also a symbol of Zeus, the father, while the falcon was the symbol of Apollo, the son. It is obvious that the Persian Queen sees her son Xerxes as culturally superior to the Greek “falcons.” All this is firmly embedded in Greek mythology and has no resemblance to Persian mythology.

Almost 1,500 years later, a similar dream image recurs in the famous medieval German epic of the Song of the Nibelungs. At the beginning of the poem the young Princess Kriemhilt tells her mother about her dream, in which the falcon she had raised was hacked to pieces by two eagles. The falcon is her future lover, the young heroic knight Sifrit, who is later assassinated by his royal hosts, Kriemhilt’s brothers, who were overshadowed by his prowess. Kriemhilt’s revenge leads to the complete annihilation of the kingdom of the Burgundians and the extinction of her own dynasty. In medieval symbolism the two birds also represent two ranks of nobility: the eagle stands for the king, while the falcon stands for the knight. In another German medieval epic, Virginal, a wise man advises the king:

[Y]ou are presiding over the knights.

as the eagle does over the falcons.¹⁹

In the medieval German Alexander epic, Darius I is protected from the sun by a giant life-like golden eagle:

The wealth one could see around him

Revealed Darius as the richest emperor.

Above his head hovered an eagle

Wings spread apart as if alive

Shining of gold.²⁰

The image of Darius I persisted throughout the Middle Ages as the richest emperor in the world who could not get enough, and his son as being of equal unlimited wealth, and the one who built the most elaborate edifices throughout his empire, but was then defeated by the Greeks. By the end of the Middle Ages, this image of grandeur and delusion was summed up in the original version of the satire Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff) (1494) by Sebastian Brant in his chapter “On the End of Power”:

Darius had great power over many lands.

And would have lived without shame.

At home he would have kept riches and fame,

But since he wanted more

And aspired to what he had not.

In the end he lost what he had.

Xerxes came into the land of the Greeks.

With so many troops as sand in the sea,

The sea itself he covered with ships.

And might have scared the entire world.

But what did he get from it at last?

Like the lion attacking a chicken

He turned upon Athens ferociously,

But in the end took flight like a rabbit.²¹

Even though it might upset the symmetry, act 2 of the drama is at least as important as the central third act. The Queen’s questions addressed to the Chorus and their answers reveal the entire ideological background of the Persian Wars:

Q: “Where in the world do they say that Athens is situated?”

A: “Far away where the sun sets in the West.

Q: “And yet my son had a desire to conquer that city?” -

A: ” Because all of Greece would then become subject to the King.” (231–34)

Q: Who is their “shepherd, master, commander.?”–

A: “They are not called slaves or subjects to any man.

Q: “How then can they resist an invading enemy? –

A: “Well, enough to have destroyed the large and splendid army of Darius.” [at the Battle of Marathon] (241–45)

In a nutshell, this is the definition of imperialism driven by hubris, a scenario that has not changed in two-and-a-half millennia of history.

The central third act of the play centers on the long-expected report of the Persian Messenger who reveals the catastrophic outcome of the battle. It is important to note that Aeschylus made this character a common soldier and survivor of the defeat of the Persian forces. He has no rank, no personal connection to the king or to any of his field marshals. Nevertheless, his insight into the events makes him appear as a man of superior intelligence.

Even though the negative impact of the gods on the outcome of the Persian campaign are alluded to several times, it becomes clear through the Messenger’s report that two reasons—purely human reasons—are responsible for the defeat. One is the ruse of a Greek double agent who manages to persuade Xerxes and his admirals to believe that the Greek fleet, shocked by the sight of the vastly superior Persian navy, is trying to escape during the night. As a result, the Persian ships patrol the narrows all night long to hinder a Greek escape. A tired Persian fleet clumped together at the narrows becomes a sitting target for the smaller and faster Greek ships, when they attack at dawn. The second reason is the difference in the fighting spirit of the two armies. While the Persian admirals and their soldiers are cowed into submission by their supreme leader, the Greeks boost their fighting spirit through their joint battle cry:

Come on, sons of the Greeks, for the freedom of your homeland, for the freedom of your children, your wives, the temples of your fathers’ gods, and the tombs of your ancestors! Now all is at stake! (402–5)

Wars are made by humans and so too are the consequences they suffer.

The Messenger’s descriptions of the gruesome deaths of a great multitude of his comrades have been highlighted as one of the earliest records of an antiwar literature whose effects can be seen in our contemporary discourses:²²

[T]he enemy were clubbing men and splitting their spines with broken pieces of oars and spars from the wreckage, as if they were tunny or some other catch of fish, and a mixture of shrieking and wailing filled the expanse of the sea, until the dark face of night blotted it out. (420–23)

Or as when the Messenger laments:

It was some divinity that destroyed our fleet like this, weighting the scales so that fortune did not fall out even: the Gods have saved the city of the goddess Pallas. (343–44)

Thus, for the Persians the only explanation of the catastrophe is divine intervention. They have not attained the wisdom that sees mankind as responsible for their own actions on this earth, nor that the changes of fortune are nothing but the manifestation of life itself, whose very nature is constant change, according to Heraclitus:

(The ordered?) world, the same for all, not god or man made, but it always was, is, and will be eternally an ever living fire, (regularly) being kindled in measures and being put out in measures.²³

This, then, is the very modern wisdom Aeschylus tries to convey to his compatriots through his play. They are challenged to see something of themselves in their enemy. In other words, it is not so much a pacifist message as an impetus to keep asking the all-important questions of why and for what reasons things end up in a war, since success can never be guaranteed, for the conditions that prevail now could easily be turned upside down tomorrow.

***

As modern viewers we cannot assume that Aeschylus used the Ghost of Darius, the earliest example of a ghost in Western drama, as anything but a dramatic device to reveal truths the audience would otherwise not have been able to perceive. The same technique lies behind the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Hamlet or the premonition of impending doom by the ghost of the murdered Banquo in Macbeth. Death has not made these apparitions omniscient in any superhuman way. Darius has no knowledge of what has happened since he descended into the realm of death and must be filled in by the living. However, he reveals that an oracle predicted that after all his own successful campaigns and those of his predecessors, the dynasty would eventually suffer a tremendous defeat. He admits that he was wrong in assuming it might befall a much later generation, and that he had warned Xerxes against transgressing the red line that had led to his own defeat at Marathon. Again, it is not the gods that interfere in the endeavors of men, but the men who bring disaster upon themselves by failing to recognize those red lines. For the Persians it is the attempt to expand beyond their natural boundaries, the Hellespont and Bosporus straits that separate Asia and Europe; their disrespect for the gods in destroying other people’s sanctuaries; and embarking on conquests out of their selfish pride and hubris. The campaign against Greece was instigated by courtiers who mocked Xerxes for being incapable of avenging his father’s defeat and surpassing him as a warrior king. Again, it is not the divine force of ate that makes Xerxes blind to reality, but other humans, the courtiers, who exploit the weakness of their leader to make him pursue an all-out war. The deepest truth, which is as valid for our times, is the revelation that imperialism necessarily brings about its own defeat. This truth, which is stronger than the belief in divine intervention, is based on the universal insights of Heraclitus that, as noted earlier, inform the play. Like Heraclitus, contemporary theorists consider the basic principle of human existence, and thus also of democracy, to be its fluidity and constant change. No incumbent can stay in office continuously, no party can remain in power for an indefinite period, which is why elections are the most basic guarantors of change.²⁴

In the final act of The Persians we see Xerxes returning to his court, miserable, devastated, in shredded clothes, as he whips the Chorus into a frenzied dirge over his defeat. Aeschylus’ motif of the torn clothes foreshadows the fourteenth-century Spanish legend that has become known to us through Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.²⁵ At the root of this motif lies the metaphor for the power of a strongman being upheld so long as the superficial pomp surrounding him instills reverence and fear.

Dictators have always ascended to power through excessive fearmongering and reinforced it through awe inspiring demonstrations of power. When the populace realize that it is that very dictator that they should most fear, the one who abolishes their basic rights such as free speech and any semblance of justice, it is too late. By then even the army, the very instrument through which power is wielded internally and against foreign enemies, operates only under the threat of fear, just as Xerxes threatens his admirals before the battle of Salamis:

[I]f the Greeks should escape grim death by finding some means of escaping unnoticed with their ships, it was decreed that all the admirals were to lose their heads. (365–68)

Thus the very doom from which the dictator/strongman was supposed to save his subjects, he ends up bringing upon them—he who only after the catastrophe is revealed not as a god in disguise but as a mere weakling.

Aeschylus’ Persians has always been considered a tragedy that ends in excessive mourning over the heavy losses incurred in war. However, the play is more subtle than that as it leads the audience to an open question. It is not the dirge, the screaming, the handwringing, or the tearing of clothes and hair by which the Chorus leads Xerxes back into the palace that constitutes the end of the play. The audience is still fully aware that offstage, inside the palace, the Queen is awaiting her son for his formal reinvestiture, which the late king had ordered her to perform. In other words, everything starts from the beginning. Aeschylus wants his audience to arrive at the conclusion on their own that only a stable and defensive democracy can prevent a similar disaster from befalling Greek society in the future. If, however, they reinstate a strongman and embark on new imperialist ventures, they will end up in the same miserable condition they have just inflicted upon their archenemies, the Persians.

***

The Persians has been used on modern stages not only as a rallying cry for pacificism but in support of many different political causes of the far left and far right. Although it has not been performed as often as other Greek tragedies on international stages, at certain times in history, especially during or in the aftermath of particular wars, it was produced more often and with a greater impact than most of the other Greek plays. Our retrospective of selected stage productions begins in the wake of WWI. During that war, Lion Feuchtwanger, the German Jewish playwright and novelist (born in Munich in 1884, died in Los Angeles in 1958), wrote a new German translation of the Persians which was to be premiered in Munich in 1917. He wanted the play to be understood as a thinly camouflaged warning against Germany’s imperialist designs that were partially responsible for the outbreak of the war. There was no Salamis or Marathon to be claimed by either side of this grueling conflict. Instead, it had turned into one of the most protracted and bloody wars between the Axis powers and the Allies in the trenches of France and Belgium. Nevertheless, most of the critics saw Feuchtwanger’s version of the Persians as a patriotic praise of German politics and a shaming of her enemies. Feuchtwanger tried to no avail to counter this failed interpretation in the introduction to his translation, where he emphasized that the Persians in Aeschylus’ play were quite different from being a denigrated perfidious enemy.²⁶ This production stands out as an obvious example of how the play can be twisted and distorted to serve a specific political agenda by simply turning the Persians into the enemy one wants to target.

The battle cry of the Greeks at Salamis has been the most often quoted passage for promoting patriotic agendas and the myth of a good war.²⁷ In 1941 Louis McNeice wrote a short play for the BBC, The Glory That Is Greece, using excerpts from The Persians, which popularized the perception that the Greeks were fighting the battle for Europe. The famous battle cry of the Greeks at Salamis was the centerpiece of the play invoking hopes that history would repeat itself in modern times. A 1946 production of the Persians at the National Greek Theatre also emphasized the patriotic victory over the evil forces without recognizing the complex dimensions of Aeschylus’ play. It triggered several other productions focusing on the patriotic goals against the evil “Persian” enemy. Both the left and the right were continuously striving to establish a dictatorship and were using populist slogans like “for home and hearth” on the one hand and “for the people” on the other. The result has always been the same, tyranny, the very enemy Aeschylus set out to defeat. ²⁸ Ironically, a 1942 production of the play in Göttingen, Germany, drew a parallel between the Greeks’ victory at Salamis with the “heroic” confrontation of the German army against the Russian/Asian in the battle of Stalingrad (1942–43), ignoring the fact that the army was there as the aggressor under Hitler who claimed it was defending the occident against the Asian communist menace.²⁹

After WWII with the advent of the Cold War and the Nuclear Age there were still many wars, often proxy wars between the European imperialist nations, France and Great Britain, with their colonies, and between the emerging superpowers, the United States, China, and the Soviet Union. Since the world had entered an even more hectic new age of warfare,³⁰ there was no reason for letting the dust settle on the oldest preserved European play. Thus, for example, a 1960 adaptation by Mattias Braun at the Schiller Theater in Berlin, directed by Hans Litzau, split up the Chorus into five members of the Persian proletariat and introduced an extra character, the governor of Susa, representing the dictator Xerxes. The Chorus deliberates how to deal with the tyrant, whether to succumb or to overthrow him. Queen Atossa is encouraged by the Ghost of Darius to kill her own son to save the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Persians. The obvious Marxist perspective of this adaptation was initially directed against the American involvement in Korea and later in Vietnam.³¹

In 1961, French director Jean Prat produced a black-and-white film version of the play, Les Perses, which ran on French public TV in prime time. Its elaborate setting simulated the original palace built by Xerxes with a focus on the Chorus of six actors (from the Comédie Fran$\text{c}\mathrm{c}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{i}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{e})\mathrm{d}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{s}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{d}$ in ancient Persian costumes and half masks. An ominous musical score by Jean Protromidès could be heard along with the rhythmic presentation of the text using a simultaneous radio broadcast along with the speakers from the TV set. There was no need to allude to current events: Charles de Gaulle was still the all-powerful president of the Fifth Republic, and France was involved in three losing wars against countries fighting for their independence.

In 1983, Hansgünther Heyme produced The Persians at the State Theatre in Stuttgart, and rather than alluding to current or recent war threats, he concentrated exclusively on satirizing the German militaristic past. In Heyme’s view this fatal part of history began with Frederick the Great of Prussia and ended with the destruction of Nazi Germany by the end of WWII. Thus in the key scene of the play, he had Frederick’s mummified body—standing for Darius’s ghost—lying on a cannon carriage and dragged on stage by a Chorus of six women. The body was gradually revealed by pulling off the national flags and other militaristic paraphernalia, the final cover being the huge Nazi flag with the black swastika. Aeschylus’ version of Darius as a model ruler was thus turned upside down as the initiator of all evil.³² This is one of the most striking examples of how the play can be distorted in the service of conveying a preconceived message.

Textual adaptations of the Persians are part of a long tradition of projecting the ancient play onto modern stages. Even the original Greek text, which is often celebrated in restored amphitheaters, is challenged at least in some of its parts by ongoing research of the genesis of the script. But when it comes to translating the original text into a modern language, a great deal of subjective interpretation inevitably comes to the fore. Adaptations, on the other hand, willfully alter the text by cutting or adding portions or rewriting a new version altogether based on the simple plot of the original. Heiner Müller, the German playwright and scholar who used ancient Greek theatrical material for hiding certain political inferences from the GDR censorship, tried to avoid the obvious pitfalls of modern translations/adaptations. He initiated his 1991 version of The Persians with an interlinear translation by the classical scholar Peter Witzmann.³³ The aim was to avoid all obvious associations with current events and to have the Greek past speak directly to a modern audience. The result was not a distancing but an alienating effect. Müller wanted to avoid the suggestive parallels to father/Darius/Bush and son/Xerxes/Bush, which were so suggestive at the time, but then left the audience dangling in timeless space without any leads.

One of the best-known modern adaptations was written by Robert Auletta and first staged by Peter Sellars for the Salzburg Festival in July 1993.³⁴ This adaptation found its way to the Edinburgh Festival and to the Los Angeles Festival later that year. Auletta’s text turns Aeschylus’ Persians completely upside down, not only by assigning the original superpower Persia to the militarily weak modern Iraq, which is crushingly defeated by the U.S. forces and their “coalition of the willing,” but also by turning Saddam Hussein into a modern Xerxes who reveals himself in a long soliloquy as a mad sociopath. In the very last scene he asks his mother, the Queen, to appoint a member of the Chorus as the new king, since he is too haunted by the corpses he saw in battle. The idea might have been to show how the democracy of America as an imperialist superpower has gone awry and to uncover the horrors of modern warfare behind the glossy images of TV’s “imbedded journalism.” However, for anyone even vaguely familiar with the original play, it was obvious that The Persians was a poor vehicle for the intended message.

Kaite O’Reilly’s adaptation, which premiered under the direction of Mike Pearson and the National Theatre Wales in August 2010,³⁵ on the other hand, remained faithful to Aeschylus even though her text could not be further from the original when it comes to a word for word translation. She transferred the text into gripping contemporary poetic rhythms that perfectly matched the emotional substructure of The Persians. As one critic put it: “O’Reilly’s version is drenched in bloody poetry. A messenger from the front line describes ‘wave upon wave of meat, bone, bodies … a sea of blood’” (Sam Marlow, The Times, August 17, 2010). She even kept the lines in which Darius confesses that he himself seized power through a coup d’état, which are often left out in other adaptations, since they muddy his image as the model ruler, which historically was not true anyway:

Fifth Mardus, who disgraced both realm

And ancient throne.

We dispatched him quickly, a palace coup

Led by the brave Artaphrenes.

Who now should be king? Lots cast. I won. (774–76)

The production by Mike Pearson did not need to have his actors appear in Nazi costumes. Simply by setting the performance in a mock-up German village used by the British army for practicing house to house combat set the direction in which the audience could spin their own network of associations from WWII to the present Iraq war. A similar path was followed in the 2011 production of the Persians by Johan Simons in Munich that took place in the Bayern Kaserne, used originally by Hitler’s Wehrmacht. It was later abandoned by the new federal army for housing refugees from various war zones around the world.³⁶ This setting, too, left plenty of room for individual associations by the audience.

Contemporary productions are often troubled by the theatrical device of the Ghost of Darius, and it is audio and screen projections that can usually help to bridge that gap. The representation of royal pomp and circumstance as one of the manifestations of dictatorship usually concentrates on the role of the Queen. The trouble is that Queen Atossa is the most complex character created by Aeschylus with the widest range of emotional expression that can easily be crushed under the burden of her costumes, as happened in a production in Los Angeles, where her dress included a fifty-feet-long train of fabric.³⁷

By far the greatest attention is usually placed on the Chorus. Aeschylus introduced the Chorus as an additional male role on the stages of ancient Greek theatres. Whether the lines were originally recited by a larger number or just the group of characters present on stage is difficult to ascertain. What is certain is only that the Chorus introduces itself from the very beginning as “we.”

… we are called the Trusted,

The guardians of the wealthy palace rich in gold,

Whom our lord himself, King Xerxes,

Son of Darius, chosen by seniority. (2–5)

These lines clearly define this collective character as the king’s sycophants, his most experienced and trusted subjects chosen by the autocrat as the innermost circle of power. In modern productions the size of the Chorus varies from 1 to 500, and between male and female actors.³⁸ The argument for female characters is usually that the women suffered the most by the consequences of warfare. As much as this might be the socio-historical truth, it has nothing to do with the actual character of the Chorus Aeschylus created for the Persians. It is as deep an intrusion into the original play as changing the text altogether to bring in contemporary ideas. The most common deviation from ancient Greek theatre in modern productions is the idea that the Chorus represents the voice of the people. For Aeschylus and his contemporaries, the voice of the people was never heard from the stage. It came from the steps of the amphitheaters, if at all. To what extent ancient audiences vocally participated in the actual performances is beyond our grasp. What we can safely assume is that the theatre was the main social medium of the time that stimulated the discussion of the most vital issues of the Athenian democracy before, during, and after the performances.

***

Compared to two-and-a-half millennia ago, warfare looks quite different today. We no longer perforate our enemies with pointed handheld weapons but rather kill them at a distance with a joystick and even have the capacity to wipe humankind from the face of the earth. But the causes of war have not changed much. The concept of imperialism is still the same, hubris is still the same, the lust to seize someone else’s resources is still the same. Democracy has established itself around the globe but it is still not a given that it is here to stay. The answer to the question what constitutes a “just” war is still complex, and the hope for lasting peace is still a pipe dream.

When Queen Atossa asks why her son had to conquer such faraway lands, the Chorus answers “because all Greece would then become subject to the King [of Persia]” (234). This is the very definition of imperialism. Today, even totalitarian nations no longer bluntly admit their intentions when they are out to conquer. For hundreds of years wars have been fought in the name of religion or culture, be it Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Christian, Muslim or Hindu. The newest version is to replace the freedom from the yoke of one system with the yoke of another. The Chorus explains to the Queen what happens when an imperialist nation suffers total defeat from a weaker enemy it wanted to subdue:

Not long now will those in the land of Asia

Remain under Persian rule,

Nor continue to pay tribute,

Under the compulsion of their lords,

Nor fall on their faces to the ground

In awed obeisance; …

Nor do men any longer keep their tongue

Under guard; for the people

Have been let loose to speak with freedom,

Now the yoke of military force no longer binds them. (591–94)

Extraordinarily little has changed when we hear these words addressed to us from the distant past. However, we would miss their point if we thought they are merely directed at imperial autocracies as a warning against a possible devastating loss to a militarily and economically weaker democratic opponent defending its homeland.

We must not forget that Aeschylus’ play addressed his own Athenian democratic society. Based on the principles of power sharing, checks and balances, and a written code of law originally introduced by Solon in the seventh and sixth century and then developed by Kimon and refined by Pericles in the fifth century BC. When these core principles are challenged or eroded democracy is in crisis. The temptation of power coming on the heels of wealth feeds the desire for more power and imperialism. Fearmongering may quickly lead to electing a strongman and war. After the formation of the Delian League, Athens became the focal point of the original defense treaty and began to pressure smaller cities and island states with paying tribute without granting them access to the decision-making process. Thus, the League headed by Athens grew into an empire even though the basic democratic principles were still formally intact within this larger political entity. Aeschylus’ fears about the threats of the subversion of democracy and its backsliding to an autocracy were well justified. Ironically, it was Pericles, admired for his commitment to democratic principles, who gradually changed from a leader chosen by the people into an undisputed strongman who imposed his will both politically and militarily on the Athenians. Thus, at the heyday of Greek democracy, only a few years before the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC, democracy had de facto already been suspended.³⁹

***

Although many of us tend to assume that our concepts of war and peace are completely different from those held by the ancients or during the Middle Ages when warfare was considered just another fact of life, if we listen carefully to the voices of the past, we will see that we have not come that far. Since war established itself as a perpetuum mobile from ancient times to the present,⁴⁰ the question of a “just” war has also been perpetually posed. Aeschylus made his own attempt at an answer. According to him, neither the cause nor the outcome of war is the result of divine interference but must be sought and found within human nature. Ironically, Aeschylus used the deceased King Darius I, one of the greatest Persian conquerors, who had subjugated Ionia, which was settled by Greeks, as a spokesman of the just war. In his monologues the Ghost of Darius invokes the natural boundaries between countries and the disregard for other peoples’ sanctuaries, and attributes the defeat of the Persians in the three decisive battles with the Greeks—the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea—to the transgression of those red lines by the rashness and hubris of his son, King Xerxes. But Aeschylus wants his audience to draw the conclusion on their own—that a just and therefore winnable war is that of a defensive democracy fighting for the preservation of their homeland. It is this type of legitimacy that leaves the Greeks victorious in the face of an overwhelming military power. However, he also conveys a hidden warning to his compatriots: this legitimacy may be lost once a democracy turns into an imperialist power led by a charismatic strongman and loses its foundational principles of power sharing and the rule of established laws.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Krikona, “Commemorating the Power of Democracy,” 91.

² Phrynichus won a drama contest in 511 BC with his Capture of Miletus, the Asia Minor city conquered by the Persians. The play reminded the Athenians of a painful loss of one of their colonies and therefore was indexed. According to Herodotus, Phrynichus was more successful with his Phoenissae that dealt with the defeat of Xerxes I in the battle of Salamis, which may have served as a model for Aeschylus’ Persae.

³ For instance, Grethlein, “Variationen des ‘nächsten Fremden,’” 12.

⁴ For a detailed analysis of Brecht’s ambivalent relationship to ancient Greek theatre, see Revermann, “Brecht and Greek Tragedy,” 213–32.

⁵ Dreyer, “Archiv und Kollektiv,” 345.

⁶ Podlecki, “Introduction.”

⁷ Aeschylus, The Persians, 494–507. Citations are from the critical edition and parallel prose translation by Alan H. Sommerstein. Line numbers refer to the Greek original, and hereafter are cited in the text.

⁸ This is a conglomerate of fragments by Heraclitus as well as commentaries by Plato and Plutarch and modern translations and interpretations. It is based on the Heraclitus Fragments 12, 49a, 84a, 91a, 91b, 119 and the respective commentaries of the edition.

⁹ Krikona, “Commemorating the Power of Democracy,” 88.

¹⁰ With that in mind, Thomas Harrison’s claim in The Emptiness of Asia, 47, that the Persians needs to be read against the background provided by Herodotus seems irrelevant for later audiences. The real issue is with the so-called ancient Greek democracy.

¹¹ See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Laurion#Ancient_times.

¹² Hutzfeldt, Das Bild der Perser, 47.

¹³ That the Persians worshipped Ahura Mazda, who is mentioned by Zarathustra as their supreme god, was confirmed during the reign of Darius I (549–486 BC), which means that the Greeks must have had some knowledge of their religious practices, especially via Ionia where the Greek population had been subjugated by the Persians for many decades.

¹⁴ Brecht, for instance, had warned against filling a production of the Good Person of Setzuan with needless Chinoiserien.

¹⁵ Muntz, “The Invocation of Darius,” 267.

¹⁶ Kitto, Poeisis, 56.

¹⁷ The Hellespont is known today as the Dardanelles or the Strait of Gallipoli, which forms the border between Europe and Asia connecting the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea. At its narrowest point it is 1.2 km wide.

¹⁸ The Persians were supposed to be descendants of Perseus, who was begotten by Zeus when he visited the mortal Danae in a shower of gold. It is remarkable that the origins of the myth of the unfathomable riches of the Persians is firmly placed within Greek mythology.

¹⁹ Virginal (VIR), 559. All quotes of medieval German literature are from the MHDBDB (Middle High German Conceptual Database) (http://mhdbdb.sbg.ac.at/index.en.html). The English translations are my own.

²⁰ Ems, Alexander (AXR), lines 6163–67. MHDBDB.

²¹ Brant, Das Narrenschiff (NAR), Absatz 56, MHDBDB (my translation).

²² Examples: Rosenbloom, Aeschylus: Persians, 163; Revermann, “Brecht and Greek Tragedy,” 231.

²³ Heraclitus, Fragment 30.

²⁴ See Müller, Contesting Democracy and Democracy Rules.

²⁵ The motif of the deceitful weaver who exposes the naked dignitary through his magic fabric also appears in Indian literature.

²⁶ Grethlein, “Variationen,” 2 note 8, and 3–4.

²⁷ The United States, for instance, used this passage to gain support for entering WWII to create their myth of the good war. Pauwels, Myth of the Good War.

²⁸ It was during and immediately after WWII that Greece became the focus of the so-called battle of civilizations. Initially it was the war between the fascist occupation forces and communist partisans, which was followed by the civil war, the struggle between the ultra-right political forces and the communist party. It resulted in frequently changing governments wildly swinging between the political poles. Van Steen, “Now the struggle is for all,” 497–98.

²⁹ Dreyer, “Fremde Zeit,” 153.

³⁰ The French Indochina War (1946–64); The First Arab-Israeli War (1948–49); The Korean War (1950–53); The Algerian War (1954–62); The Suez Crisis and Sinai War (1956); The US-Vietnam War (1968–72); The Yom Kippur War (1973); The Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89); The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88); The Gulf War (1990); The Kosovo War (1998–99); The Second Iraq War (2003); The Second Afghanistan War (2001–2021); The Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-present).

³¹ Grethlein, “Variationen,” 4; Dreyer, “Fremde Zeit,” 154.

³² Dreyer, “Fremde Zeit,” 154–55.

³³ Ibid., 159–60.

³⁴ Auletta, The Persians by Aeschylus.

³⁵ O’Reilly, Aeschylus Persians.

³⁶ Münchener Kammerspiele: Die Perser von Aischylos—Premiere May 5, 2011, Director Johan Simons, in der Bayern-Kaserne. Reviewed by Wolf Banitzki: https://www.theaterkritiken.com/muenchner-kammerspiele/40-theaterbereich/verwaltung/446-die-perser.

³⁷ The Persians, directed by Anne Bogart, co-founder and director of New York-based SITI Company at the Getty Villa’s Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater in Los Angeles, September 2014. Review by Myron Meisel. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/persians-theater-review-732598/.

³⁸ From March to June 2008 the Geneva based director Claudia Bosse, of the Théâtre du Grütli, rehearsed with 500 female and male citizens of Brunswick/Germany the lines of the Chorus of the Persians for a joint production of the festival Theaterformen by the State Theatres of Brunswick and Vienna. The intention was to recreate the emotional sense of what ancient public theatre was all about. It missed the point, since it was not the public recitation that would create the feeling of communal sharing of the medium but the discussions that ensued before, during and after the performances. https://vimeo.com/201113480. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wr30BNcJP8.

³⁹ Will, Thukydides und Perikles, 303.

⁴⁰ Schmidt, “Gewalt und Krieg im Mittelalter.”