the mediterranean and asia 445
Persia and the imperial state traditionWilliam and John R. McNeill have isolated three principal West Asia inventions that
shaped the destinies of societies throughout the “Old World”:
(1) bureaucratic government, which territorial states adopted everywhere, but which
the Chinese adapted most successfully;
(2) alphabetic writing, which would democratize literacy and made possible larger
political communities; and
(3) portable religions, which forged large “imagined” communities that transcended
continents, and which were useful in stabilizing societies by making injustices and
inequalities tolerable.
These three influences, claim the McNeills, “have never been surpassed as instruments
for sustained civilized societies ...” (2003: 61).
Needless to say, the Mediterranean was very much part of this extended Old World
system, but some of its responses to West Asian influence were unique. We have
already noted the novelty of the Mediterranean city-state as a community of sovereign
citizens. Distinctions with eastern kingdoms played an important role here. The
Greeks and Romans identified very strongly with their civic constitutions and political
traditions, and regarded such polities as Persia, with its kings, luxuriant aristocrats and
“servile” subject populations, as the less worthy Other (Hall, 1989). Mediterranean
elites were therefore conscious of the novelty of their own political systems. In the
Greek world that awareness was sharpened by the Persian conquest of Anatolia in the
mid-sixth century bce and the invasion of Greece itself in 490 and 480/79 bce.
The Greeks city-states that resisted King Xerxes likened the struggle to a “clash of
civilizations,” between distinct types of society and cultures, and by the end of the
struggle the Greek-speaking peoples had developed a clearer sense of being a coher-
ent cultural group. Only a small proportion of Greek city-states actually fought
the Persians—many, in fact, fought for Xerxes—but the unexpected victory over
the colossal Asian power suddenly lent prestige to being Greek. The first direct evi-
dence of Greeks claiming to be a distinct ethnicity is found in Herodotus’ account of
the Persian wars, where the Athenians refuse to accept Persian inducements to aban-
don their Greek allies on account of “being Greek:” “we are of one and the same
blood, and use one and the same tongue” (trans. Cartledge, 2006: 63).
Greek-ness was thereafter defined in contradistinction to Persian-ness: Corinthians,
Spartans, and Athenians found common ground in their common differences with
the Persians. However, as an empire of great splendor and might, Persia also projected
symbols that appealed to the Greeks on many levels. In fact, Persia and the broader
Asian world that it represented never ceased to impress and beguile its less-refined and
poorer Mediterranean neighbors. Even as fifth-century Athens was setting itself up as
the “School of Greece,” dictating to other Greeks a model to which others Greeks
were meant to aspire, Athenian elites at the same time were captive to Persian culture.
Aristocrats learned from their Persian counterparts how to be aristocrats: how to dress
and behave. They imbibed the arts of conspicuous consumption, including the use of
attendants as fan- and flywhisk-bearers (Miller, 1997: 198–209). As in earlier times,
Asia continued to provide the symbolic capital for outlining class distinctions. Overall,