Dr. Roel Konijnendijk
speaker
1,157 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 15 Mar
Dr. Roel Konijnendijk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And of course, it's worth reflecting as well that... This is all make-believe, of course, on the part of Herodotus. He was not in the conference room, nor any other Greek was there. And this is a typical Herodotian motif of inserting himself as the narrator into these closed council meetings so that he can hear the deliberation. But of course, it's all scripted by him.
Which is why Herodotus also interwinds ideas of dreams and omens into all of this as well. Xerxes is plagued by dreams, telling him to go forth and conquer, and he doesn't know what to do. And so Artabanus, he asks at one point, I'll go and sleep in my bed,
And like, you know, so in the royal bed and in the royal dressing gown, Atabanus gets exactly the same dream as Xerxes gets, you know, suddenly think, oh, yes, yes, that our fate, our destiny is to go over to Greece after all. So all of this is an integral part of the Herodotian system of creating these narratives.
There's a bigger divine concept that's going on here, fate that can't be overlooked or can't be overcome.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. And I also think that that splendid description we have in Herodotus of the kind of multi-ethnic army that's been put together and all this wonderful description of the clothing and armaments, I really get a feeling that what Herodotus is drawing on here is the visual propaganda that the Achaemenids put forward themselves.
So, for instance, on his tomb, Xerxes shows himself on this takht or this kind of divan throne being uplifted by representatives of the whole empire. And underneath in an inscription, he says, if you want to know how many are the people who represent my empire, look at these people below and they are named, you know.
I am from Macca, I am from Macedonia, I am from Sogdia, I am from Parthia, and so forth. And I think what Herodotus is doing is just picking up on a very popular Achaemenid motif of the display of the empire in that way. So I don't think it was as multi-ethnic as that, or if it was, they were bits and pieces, but not this vast force that Herodotus conjures up for us.
You know, I've just had sent to me from a colleague in Iran who's been digitally photographing Bissetan relief right up high, right next to it, because they're scaffolding that for restoration at the moment. And I've been able to do some line drawings of them, real sort of up close and personal.
And while Darius and his two Persian officers, you know, look handsome and beautifully chiseled, it's really interesting to see how they portray the foreign kings, the liar kings in front of them. They are really grotesque. Which we don't really see from far away. They've got snub noses and thick lips and big sunken eyes. And they're all wearing collars around their neck.
And a little detail in this collar shows that there's a metal stud that actually presses into their throats as well. So it's quite remarkable, the detail, you know. So yes, just really that emphasizes the fact that the Persians were very observant about peoples and they liked to portray them accurately. And I think that's what Herodotus is picking up.
Absolutely. In terms of like Persian theology, the idea is that Ahura Mazda, the wise Lord, is the creator of the world. He is the supreme creator God. And in the way that duality works in Persian theological thought, there is good, truth, arta, and there is bad, the lie, drauga. So because Ahura Mazda brings his world into order, which of course is by definition a good thing.
It's a kind of proto-Zoroastrianism. There's elements of it, but I wouldn't want to go that far. But certainly this creator god, who is a good god, establishes the king. It's almost like he creates kingship in order to ensure that his goodness, his arta, continues on this earth. So you could say that every war fought by a Persian great king is a holy war. That's how they would have seen it.
So it's actually bringing the world into its proper place. So these people who are outside of Persian control, who are forces of chaos, of drauga, therefore, for their own good, as well as the good of the whole world, need to be brought under the control of Persia and of, ultimately, its god Ahura Mazda. That's not to say they went out kind of proselytizing and converting. It's never about that.
But for the sake of the harmony of the cosmos, everybody needs to be singing praises to Ahura Mazda, essentially.
Yeah. So we have a lot of I mean, actually, all from Greek sources, these ideas that, you know, the king demands earth and water. And I do believe that if if that was the case, and this is probably symbolically given to a king by a diplomat, you know, we have all these scenes of diplomatic tribute being brought to a king.
And I wouldn't be surprised that at an initial point when a diplomat first arrives, then as his kind of diplomatic calling card, he possibly would have brought a bowl of earth and a dish of local water. It is an important part of the ideology of it. We get spins on that as well. I think this story is in Herodotus. I might be wrong.
But there's one occasion where Xerxes is proffered a dish of dates. And he said, oh, where does this come from? And he's told, oh, these are from Greece. And he says, oh, well, we will not eat them. not until we own it, and then I'll eat Greek dates. So there's something there about actually the produce of the land itself and the king's right and access to it.
But I suppose in the theological term, then the idea of the land being under the control and the rivers being under control is important. There was a kind of like a strange nature connection between the great king and the earth. He was seen very often as a gardener king, you know, letting the earth blossom. You know, the Persian word for a garden is paradisa, from which we get paradise.
But, you know, the earth itself is a paradise. When the Persian kings created their gardens at places like Pasagidae and Susa and Persepolis, they basically planted their gardens with the produce from across the whole of their empire, bringing the empire into miniature here. And also the same with waters as well, of course, which were paramount importance to this kind of nomadic desert peoples.
So I think there is something real in this demand for earth and water, which would have been played out in court ceremonial, I think.
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