Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

116 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Greeks, in part because we see the war as much through the eyes
of the royal Trojan household, which is presented to us as a normative
family (apart from a single, brief reference to polygamy), as
we do through the eyes of the Greeks, who are presented to us as
irrepressibly contumacious and bellicose.
Not until Aeschylus’s Persians, which was produced at the City
Dionysia in 472 b.c.e. , are barbarians depicted as a stereotypical
group with a homogeneous culture. This change came about as a
result of the Persian invasion of Greece—an event that bred terror
and loathing in the Greek population, similar in intensity to
that felt toward the hated Hun by the Allies in World War I. The
stereotype was also disseminated through art, notably in portrayals
of the battle between the Lapiths and centaurs, which are
found on the metopes of the Parthenon (see p. 291) . The lascivious
and aggressive centaurs stand for the Persians, the innocent
and abused Lapiths for the Greeks. Depictions of this mythological
encounter, in which right clearly triumphs over wrong, no doubt
served to bolster Greek self-esteem in the aftermath of the Persian
invasion.
Precisely what the category barbarian amounted to in practical
terms is difficult to determine. The most plausible origin of the word
is “the people who mutter ba-ba-ba.” Barbarians, in other words,
were people who could not speak Greek. Non-Greek speakers were
excluded from participation in the Olympic Games and from other
Panhellenic ceremonies, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries. In time,
however, barbarian also came to acquire the pejorative meaning of
ignorant, brutal, and savage.
“Typical” barbarian behavior included drinking neat wine, beer,
and milk; wearing effeminate clothing; and practicing circumcision.
Thukydides (1.6.1–3) was of the belief that contemporary barbarians
behaved similarly to the earliest inhabitants of Greece, first
by carrying weapons around with them and second by wearing
loincloths when exercising. The most despised feature of barbarian
society, however, was the degrading subjugation of its population
to one man, as the following brief exchange from Aeschylus’s Persians
indicates. It takes place at the royal capital of Susa shortly after
the Persian queen received news of her son’s defeat at the battle of
Salamis.
Queen: Who is their leader? Who commands their army?
Chorus: They declare themselves to be the slaves of no-one and to
serve no-one.