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 you really get a sense of The fear in Athens from the archaeological record in particular, it's amazing, you know, that all of those beautiful marble statues we have of Kourai, these beautiful sort of naked males and beautifully dressed female figurines, which were possibly grave markers.
All of these were deliberately buried at the top of the Acropolis in order to save them from the Persian attack. The Athenians were just bracing themselves for the kind of annihilation that they'd seen elsewhere. And of course, this is why the population took ship, went over to the island of Salamis as quickly as they possibly could. And when Xerxes got there, yes, he did exactly as was forecast.
I mean, he razed the city to the ground. And I suppose the the population of the city in exile on Salamis, they would have seen their city burn. It's quite clear.
Yes, absolutely. But only a Greek could write that. I doubt if he ever sacrificed to Athena.
But he certainly offered a sacrifice.
You know, that's why I think in the long run, you know, it's often been presented as, you know, the sack of Athens is, And then the ultimate victory that comes after it over the Persians is the idea that we're saving democracy, we're saving world freedoms and all of this kind of thing. I don't think the Persians would have had any problem with the burgeoning democratic state there.
And in fact, some of the cities of Asia Minor were already sort of miniature democracies going on anyway. And I don't think there would have been the end of Persia. Greek culture, I think sculpture and art would have continued. Probably tragedy and comedy would have continued with slightly different themes, perhaps.
But this idea that Xerxes at that time threatened the entire beginnings of European culture is simply not true at all.
What I find interesting about the narrative account of it is actually the use of the lie, liar, kings in this. So Themistocles, of course, tells a whopping great lie, which convinces the Persians that they can win this thing. And I do think that Herodotus is very deliberate in presenting it in that kind of way, because as we know, the whole Persian idea is about truth and lie, okay?
So this is a complete distortion of the Persian version of things. And because they are tricked in that way by the lie, by the ungodly, they lose their position. So again, I think maybe sitting behind here as well, Herodotus has something of a Persian version going on too. I think it's just too much of a coincidence that the whole ruse is built on a lie of this kind.
Yes. For me, I'm not doubting her historicity, but the role that she takes, I think, is created to weaken Xerxes, that, you know, women are more capable women.
of military command than than he is and it's part then of the myth of anti-persian propaganda that goes on for the next centuries in which persians are molded into the figures of amazons and other sort of you know it's the effeminization of the east that we get going here so i don't want to i don't want to dismiss her as a historical figure or the fact that she might have
you know, certainly offered some support to Xerxes. But I think in the way that Herodotus creates the narrative, it's saying more about Xerxes than it is about Artemisia. And what is that narrative, by the way?
And if you want to follow a kind of through thread with this, of course, his interaction with this woman, Artemisia, kind of heralds the interaction that he's going to have with his wife, a mistress, and with his mistress, Artemisia, in the last few books of the histories, which, of course, completely brings him down. We don't see...
Xerxes being assassinated in Herodotus, but we know that that's coming. And it seems to be that this kind of woven storyline of women and in Xerxes' world having his ear actually is all played out from the Salamis narrative onwards.
What we can say, though, is that Salamis very quickly enters into the Athenian imagination, and it becomes a defining moment in the creation of Athenian-ness, really, because only seven, eight years after the battle is fought, Aeschylus, the great dramatist, puts that battle on stage, or at least a Persian messenger talks us through as an audience the narrative.
And if you think about, you know, the old theater of Dionysus carved into the southern slopes of the Acropolis, there, there would have been, you know, Athenians who had been at that battle, or there would have been families who had lost fathers or brothers or sons at that battle.
And it's really quite a remarkable thing that Aeschylus does in his play, Persi, the Persians, to basically create a tragedy out of modern history to begin with. This is not a fantasy mythical thing, even though we have ghosts and all of that kind of thing in it. But also what he does in that is create this sense of Athenian-ness.
And literally these individuals sitting in the theater would have been able to see each other across the auditorium, basically. They would have recognized people and the names in there. But I think there's something even more remarkable going on in that incredible play.
Edward Said, back in 1979, when he published his great book, Orientalism, which is all about this kind of East-West divide, said that Orientalism starts with Aeschylus in the Persians. I always wonder how much Said actually read the Persians. Did he read it very deep at all? Because what comes over in that play is actually simply nobody benefits from war.
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