Fake Bowing, From the Achaemenids to the Sasanians

Abstract

Two stories of fallacious prostration bookend the encounters between the Greek and Persian worlds at either end of antiquity. In the fourth century BCE, the Theban Ismenias faked a bow to escape disgrace before the Achaemenid ruler Artaxerxes II. Many centuries later, the Sasanian king Peroz I used the same trick as he faced defeat by the Hephthalite Huns – at least according to the Roman author Procopius, who has clearly reworked the earlier story. Scholars have noticed the intertext, but they have not explained it. Why did Procopius redeploy a tale of Achaemenid- Greek relations in his narrative of Sasanian central Asia? Drawing on a variety of sources from Greco-Roman historiography to Zoroastrian religious texts, I put forward a reading of the passage as a challenge to Procopius’ literary predecessors and as a destabilization of the received fault lines, first inscribed in the Achaemenid period, between the Greek and Persian worlds.