The Impact of the Achaemenid Empire on Greek Local Narratives: An Overview

Abstract

While Greek literature’s impact on the empire seems difficult to investigate with the available evidence, the empire’s impact on Greek narratives can hardly be overstated. Unlike for other cultural areas, to focus on Greek narratives within the geographical ambit of the Achaemenid Empire is not easy, because Greeks had a double specificity: first, there have always been Greeks outside the empire in Europe, second, even the Greeks from Asia were not continuous subjects of the empire. The interaction between inside and outside the empire had consequences on the authors, the nature of their audiences, and the contents of their works. Greek literature produced by authors who were born or had lived in the empire, and especially Greek narratives, have been successively marked by three particularities: (1) opening up to the multicultural world covered by the empire; (2) then, after the so-called Persian wars with Greeks of Europe, the desire to understand and explain their origins as well as their results; (3) lastly, the conception of monographies on the Persian empire which were no more focused on Greco-Persian Wars. As a response to the Achaemenid Empire, Greeks of the area developed forms of geography, ethnography, and history that would probably not have been conceived without it.