No abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discover the origins of a political catchphrase, ‘the freedom of the Greeks of Asia’. The opening section presents and analyses first the evidence of Herodotus for the period from the Lydian conquest to the Mycale campaign, then that of Diodorus, where extant, for the same events. The contrasting usage of these two authors poses the question: when did the Greeks of Asia first come to be regularly thought of as a corporate body? That question is studied in the second section through the evidence of Thucydides and later writers for the period of the Athenian empire and that of Xenophon for the Ionian War and the campaigns of the Spartans, especially Agesilaus, in Asia Minor, and an answer is suggested: that the Greeks of Asia first came to be consistently thought of as a unit, and their freedom to be regularly exploited as a slogan, in the years between 400 and 386. The third section attempts to answer the further question which at once arises: why should this have been so?

Why cantoribus? The reference of the phrase cantores Euphorionis has been much discussed, by the author of this note among others. But what is the sense of cantores? The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Lewis and Short, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary variously classify Tusc. 3.45 as an instance of cantor in the special sense of ‘supporter’, ‘imitator’, or ‘eulogist’. Recently, however, W. Allen suggested that this may be to read too much into the word: ‘… cantor could well have the standard meaning of personal and private recitation of poetry. Since sometime cantare and legere have a semantic identity, however, it may be possible that the word cantores in hi cantores Euphorionis has a meaning no more momentous than that of lector. ’

No abstract

Military activity played a determinative role in the history of the Achaemenid empire. This chapter considers some ideological dimensions of this fact. It does so through a separate examination of Persian and Greek representations of the role of war and warriors in the imperial setting. The place of war in the elite Persian psyche does remain rather elusive, but the Persian and Greek data-sets, radically different in content and character, are not far apart in their depiction of an ideological environment in which military values played a larger role than is sometimes acknowledged but were less fundamental than one might have expected. What is sometimes called the pax Achaemenica is certainly an artificial construct, but nothing compels us to replace it with the vision of a truly militarist society.