Herodotus on Achaemenid Respect for Foreign Religious Authority
Abstract
One fifth of the passages from Herodotus’ Histories that depict Achaemenid interactions with Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars demonstrate respect for foreign religious authority. The interactions in these passages take place between 490 and 479 BCE and include: Datis’ sacrifice at Delos and restoration of a statue to the island’s sanctuary (6.97.1-2, 6.118.1); Xerxes’ sacrifices at Troy and Athens and his decision not to enter Athamas’ grove (7.43.1-2, 8.54, 7.197.4); the Magi’s libations at Troy and sacrifices at Cape Sepias (7.43.1-2, 7.191.2); and Mardonius’ consultation of Greek oracles (8.133-36). Previous scholarship on Herodotus briefly explains the numerous instances of Persian respect for Greek sanctuaries included in his work as an aberration from a general pattern of Persian sacrilege at Greek sanctuaries (e.g., Pierluigi Tozzi 1977: 22; Thomas Harrison 2000: 81, 218; and Jon Mikalson 2003: 87, 157). My approach, by contrast, is to take these instances of respect seriously by looking at them as a group and alongside earlier sources from the western Achaemenid Empire that attest a broadly similar pattern of respectful behavior towards foreign sanctuaries. When we examine Herodotus’ portrait of Persian respect for Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars in this way, a nuanced response to the Achaemenid Empire emerges. In particular, by considering issues our earlier Achaemenid sources do not, Herodotus can contribute to a literary history of the Achaemenid Empire by offering the perspective of one of its Greek-speaking subjects.
Citation
Oppen, Simone. "Herodotus on Achaemenid Respect for Foreign Religious Authority," Achaemenid Workshop 3 (February 22, 2025).
About the Speaker
Simone Oppen
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Simone Oppen specializes in Greek drama and historiography, in particular literary production under the Athenian empire and its later reception.
She received her BA in Classical Languages and Comparative Literature (a double major with a minor in Dance and Performance Studies) from UC Berkeley, and PhD in Classics from Columbia University. She. has excavated multiple seasons at Columbia University’s excavations at the Villa Adriana in Tivoli and served as trench supervisor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) excavations in ancient Corinth. Her research and training have been supported by fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, the Fulbright Program, the ASCSA, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Jacobi Foundation, the Neukom Institute for Computational Science, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, among others.
Her in-progress book, provisionally entitled Moderation and memory: the Greco-Persian wars from Aeschylus to Aristotle, examines how literary invocation of ruins shaped larger cultural narratives around empathy and retribution. She is also at work on an article publishing vase inscriptions from the area that became Corinth’s Roman forum. She has published articles on lament for the fallen city in the Sumerian City Laments and Greek tragedy, gendered ways of viewing a divine body in Callimachus’ fifth hymn to Athena, freedmen holding civic office in Roman Corinth, and an edition of a Homeric papyrus. She regularly reviews scholarship on Greek historiography and drama.