But suppose Herodotus just happened to hit on something true about the culture of Achaemenid Persia by chance, in the course of doing something quite different. From James Redfield to Maurice Hartog and beyond, modern scholars have long appreciated that Herodotus’ ethnography works by way of negatively defining the Greeks, so that he represents every other people by contrast, or at least with reference, to this “neutral” standpoint. Can his remarks about Persia’s hatred of the lie be similarly understood?
It would be trivial to point out that Herodotus’ Greeks do lie all the time and as a matter of policy. When Cleomenes, the King of Sparta, has got an army of Argives trapped in the woods of a sacred precinct, he draws them out in small groups with the promise that their ransom has been paid; but the Spartans take those who have come out of hiding some distance away, then butcher them. When the remaining Argives catch on and no more will come out, Cleomenes has the forest set ablaze. The Argives hold a grudge against Cleomenes for this act of impiety, but not for his earlier deception.
The reason it’s trivial to point this out is because, when it comes to warfare, the Persians employ the same kind of tricks without any hesitation. They capture Babylon (for the second time, after it rebels) only after a Persian nobleman is able to infiltrate the city by mutilating himself and posing as a deserter. If Herodotus means to draw a contrast between the place of the lie in Greece and in Persia, it can’t be this kind of low-stakes military maneuver that he has in mind.
To get a sense as to what Herodotus does have in mind, it may be helpful to consider a Greek deceptive practice that he marks out for special condemnation. the priests and priestesses of the Delphic Oracle frequently lie because they have been paid to do so. On Herodotus’ account, the expulsion of the Peisistratids from Athens and Demaratus from Sparta are only two of the many major political shifts in which bribery of the Oracle plays some part. Since the Oracle’s prophecies are the only statements that all actors in Herodotus assume to be true, the corruption of the Oracle’s servants undermines the very possibility (for Greeks at least) of a single, consensual truth in comparison with which lies could be recognized as such.
Since both these cases impinge on the legitimacy of kings or families of kings, it makes sense to ask: is politics the field in which Greeks, by contrast with Persians, do not recognize the absolute supremacy of truth over lie? In Herodotus and on the Bisutun Inscription, Achaemenia voices its support for the “true” king Darayavaush/Darius over the false pretender Bardiya/Smerdis. In Sparta, the line of the true king is fouled by a corrupted Oracle condemning Demaratus, and no one bats an eye.
Persia is a large enough country – sufficiently distant, both in spatial and in cultural terms, from the Achaemenid king who rules it – that the question “who’s in charge here?” needs to be answered in a different way than in the small-scale poleis of Herodotus’ Greece. For most Persians, at most times, the answer to this question is almost metaphysical in its abstraction and irrelevance; for Greeks, the answer is a matter of the day-to-day experience of power. In Persia, then, the king’s truth gets assimilated to a properly metaphysical struggle between asa and drug, one of the many cosmic polarities made available by Zoroastrianism. This is a technology of rule: that the king is true or false metaphysically, irrespective of his actual power or powerlessness. In a Greek polis, the distinction between these two forms of “truth” would hardly have made any sense.
I take this to be the force behind the ethnographic contrast Herodotus establishes by saying that Persians hate the lie: Persians acknowledge a form of lie, about legitimacy and right to power, which they hate and which simply does not exist in Greece.
Tomorrow: What this means now. The danger of being outrun by events.