The ancient Greeks knew luxury when they saw it. And they certainly saw it in August 479 BC, during the closing stages of the Battle of Plataia. This was a clash between an alliance of Greek city-states and Persian forces sent by the Achaemenid empire to conquer mainland Greece. After a lengthy standoff, the Greeks decided to withdraw to more favourable ground. The Persians, thinking their foes were in flight, rushed to administer the coup de grâce. But their haste proved their undoing, and after hard fighting it was the Greeks who emerged triumphant. So crushing was the Persian defeat that Plataia marked the final land battle of the botched invasion. Greek victory was sealed when they captured the Persian campaign quarters, where they beheld riches on an almost unimaginable scale. The ancient historian Herodotus reports that gold was so plentiful it was mistaken for bronze. He also describes the scene when the Greek commander, Pausanias, beheld the opulence of the Persian command tent and ordered the captured servants to prepare a typical Persian feast:
when Pausanias saw gold and silver couches beautifully draped, and gold and silver tables… he could hardly believe his eyes…just for a joke, he ordered his own servants to get ready an ordinary Spartan dinner. The difference between the two meals was indeed remarkable and, when both were ready, Pausanias laughed and sent for the Greek commanding officers… he invited them to look at the two tables, saying, ‘Gentlemen, I asked you here to show you the folly of the Persians, who, living in this style, came to Greece to rob of us of our poverty.
Herodotus’ account sets up a stark difference in Greek and Persian approaches to luxury. Indeed, the Persian fondness for indulgent lifestyles – even during the serious business of a military campaign – came to be seen as a key reason why a superpower like Persia could be humbled by a group of Greek city-states. Numerous ancient Greek authors identify Persian luxury as a corrupting force that weakened their empire, hastening its decay. At the same time, Greek valour was seen to owe much to the shunning of such excesses. But just how reliable are these stereotypes? Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece, an enthralling new exhibition at the British Museum (see ‘Further information’ box on p.39), is examining Persian and Greek approaches to luxury from 550-30 BC. It reveals that there was far more to luxury in this period than the Greek historians would have us believe.
Haves and have-nots?
‘There are two main themes in this exhibition,’ says Jamie Fraser, exhibition curator at the British Museum. ‘One examines the role of luxury as a mechanism of power, and how that changed across different ancient cultures. The other looks at the biases of history, particularly for the Persians. We have a lot of Persian documents, mostly in the form of cuneiform documents, but these are generally administrative in nature. If you want to know how many sheep it’ll take to feed a workforce constructing a large civic building, we’ve got that information. When it comes to broad historical narratives – like the Greek and Persian wars – we don’t have that, probably because it was sung and performed, rather than written down. So when it comes to getting a sense of history, we are dependent on the Greek authors – the self-declared enemies of the Persians. I think that because of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when the apparent miracle of Classical Greece was rediscovered and Western Europe positioned itself as the inheritor of this tradition, the Greek pejorative dismissal of Persian luxury is still with us today. You can see it in the way that luxury is something we simultaneously aspire to, but are also suspicious and nervous about. That contradiction, I think, can be traced all the way back to this moment in history.’
‘The ancient Greek authors, though, aren’t telling us the whole story. Rather than viewing luxury as a weakening influence, it is possible to see it as a very effective tool. In the Achaemenid court, and in the Persian empire as a whole, luxury is all about hearts and minds. It can be seen as the sinews holding the empire together, both vertically through all layers of society, and horizontally, stretching out across Persian territory. That makes it a very effective way of binding people together to create a cohesive imperial world.’
‘We have an ancient Greek account of how the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great commanded all of his satraps – that is, the provincial officials sent out to rule on his behalf – to emulate the ways of the court. When it comes to court life, the Persian capital wasn’t in one particular place, and instead the king would travel between five different cities over the course of a year. Because the king’s tent and its trappings were moving, different local aristocrats would be able to come and dine with him. While there, the use of luxury bound them into the king’s authority and, after he was gone, they replicated it using gifts from him. This was the way that they showed they had power, because they were close to the power of the king. Scholars call these goods “court-style luxury”. It is very recognisable to us as archaeologists, and it was also recognisable to the hundreds of different cultures that were stitched together to create the Achaemenid empire: this was supreme luxury that was powerful because of its connection to the court. And while much of the Persian empire had been won at the edge of a sword, you can’t win people over with violence alone. You need ways to co-opt people into the programme you’re selling. Luxury was part of that.’
The objects used at court also provide a sense of the theatricality that accompanied elite dining. Being invited to eat with the king was a big deal, and required careful preparation. After all, putting a foot wrong could see an attendee plummet down the social scale, while a flawless performance presented a ticket to rising fortunes. Drinking was an important part of this delicate dance, and we can see that this was carried out in a very particular way thanks to vessels known as rhytons. These were decorated with the heads of animals or mythical creatures, and are sometimes thought of as cups to sip from. In reality, they were more like modern wine bottles, with the crucial exception that they had curved bases. This meant that once you were holding one, you could not put it down. Instead, you would recline on a couch, holding up the rhyton in one hand, using your thumb to stopper its spout. In your other hand, you would be dextrously balancing a drinking bowl on your fingertips. To fill your bowl, you moved your thumb away from the rhyton spout, allowing the wine to spurt out. Participating in such formal performances involved following social conventions that spelled out what it meant to be elite.
‘The degree to which such dining penetrated the imperial system can be seen in some of the more nondescript artefacts in the exhibition,’ says Jamie. ‘One of the things that really excites me is the objects from several soldiers’ tombs from the graveyard associated with a Persian garrison at Deve Hüyük, on the border of Turkey and Syria. Back in the 1910s, T E Lawrence was excavating at a site nearby, and would stay at the dig house during the off-season. One night, there were reports of lights in the distance and tomb-robbing at this cemetery. Lawrence and his men cleared away the robbers, and then had to excavate the tombs fast, because the moment they left the robbers would be back. The materials that he recovered, from soldiers’ tombs in the boondocks of the empire, are the same – in style – as those in the royal court of the king. There’s a rhyton and drinking bowls, they just weren’t made in the same luxury materials. So, even in a military garrison on the edge of the empire, people were buying into that court ideal and being aspirational.’
Luxury break
If luxury, far from being a weakness, helped to bind the Persian empire together, where does that leave the well-documented ancient Greek suspicion of fancy lifestyles? ‘In the exhibition, we focus on Athens,’ says Jamie, ‘so obviously the situation there differs from that in the other Greek city-states, like Sparta. A key dimension is the nature of political power. To the east, you have the Achaemenid empire, which was ruled over by a king with absolute authority. Athens, meanwhile – over the half century or so that the Greek and Persian wars are raging – is a very young, almost neurotic, democracy. This system emerged from a series of laws and developments in the 6th century that responded to social problems in the city. Back then, competing aristocratic families had also used luxury to gain a social edge, often leading to violence. So, when early democratic Greeks looked east to the Achaemenid empire and saw these ostentatious displays of luxury, they found it unsettling, because it reminded them of homegrown violence and tyranny.’
Athenian suspicions of a link between luxury and violence can only have been strengthened when the Persians briefly occupied and sacked Athens during the wars. Unsurprisingly, as the ideals of what it meant to be a good democratic citizen were established against this backdrop, values of discipline and restraint were prized. But this does not mean that luxury was absent, rather that it was used in different ways. Turning once again to the subject of social drinking can help us appreciate this. In Athens, this took place in the symposium: a gathering of citizens – that is, adult male, Greek, Athenians – who would meet in a house or designated dining hall to drink, tell stories, and play games. This institution adopted elements of democracy, as even when a symposium was held at someone’s house, the host for the evening was elected by the participants. The couches that attendees reclined on were also artfully arranged so that no one was above the others. Drinking, in the context of the symposium, became a way of affirming the egalitarian nature of Athenian citizenship. It’s a fundamentally different approach to the Achaemenid court. Which makes it intriguing that there are clear overlaps in style between some drinking paraphernalia used in Athens and Persia.
‘We know Athenians were exposed to Eastern styles in various ways’, says Jamie. ‘Not just through war, but also trade, and other Greeks from different city-states. So far as we can see, the fabulous metal vessels from the East were not themselves being used in Athens, but there is a question mark here, as this might be down to archaeological visibility rather than true absence. Metal vessels normally only survive in tombs, because otherwise their inherent value meant that they were recycled. The Achaemenid world had a tradition of burying people with funerary goods, including these metal vessels. But in Athens the dead weren’t usually accompanied with much stuff. So the really fine material didn’t go into tombs, which might be why we don’t see any metal vessels. There are hints in some of the ancient literature that metal vessels were in circulation.’
‘Either way, we can see that some of the more experimental or imaginative potters working in Athens were making vessels that reference Eastern ones. What really became adopted was the animal head called a protome, which is familiar from the Persian rhytons. The resulting Athenian animal-headed pottery vessels were novelty goods: they never became the normal way of drinking. Even so, these were luxury goods because they were exotic and they were exquisitely made. Over the course of the 5th century, there was an uptake of drinking mugs incorporating animal heads. There were also experiments with rhytons, which were adapted for a Greek audience. You no longer had to hold them up in one hand, because the potters gave them a flat base and a handle, but they didn’t catch on as much as the drinking mugs. These mugs weren’t about showcasing an individual’s power like the Persian vessels, instead there’s more of a joke to them. The mugs work like a mask, allowing them to play with the idea that the more you drink, the more you lose your humanity. Some of the mugs only come to life when you lift them up to your face, exposing the snarling tusks of a boar or the tongue of a lion decorating the base, and transforming the drinker into an animal. My favourite is one with the head of an eagle, with a pointed beak and striking eyes. Of course, there’s no way to make friends faster than to share a joke, and I think these mugs reference shared jokes at the symposium. What we’re seeing is an egalitarian drinking community, rather than the vertical hierarchy of the Persian court.’
The last Achaemenid king
Athenian democracy, of course, was not destined to last. Instead, Philip II came to power in Macedon in 359 BC, and went on to conquer Greece. He then set his sights on the greatest superpower in the world: the Persians. Philip died before he could take on this challenge, so it was his son Alexander, whom history remembers as ‘the Great’, who brought down the Achaemenids. Once again, the Greek sources evoke an empire that was enfeebled by luxury, aiding Alexander in his victories. Alexander’s actions in the aftermath of the Achaemenid defeat, though, suggest that he saw luxury in a rather different light.
‘In reality, the Persian empire was not weak, it was still very strong,’ says Jamie, ‘and luxury was part of the reason for that. You can see this in the way that Alexander adopted Persian luxury – he even retained some of the Persian-appointed satraps – because he saw the value of luxury and power as a political tool. So he continued to use it to bind local elites into a political authority, in this case his own. The parallels in terms of behaviour are so strong that one scholar has even described Alexander as “the last Achaemenid king”. While Alexander’s conquests are accompanied by a Hellenising influence that penetrates as far east as Afghanistan (with trickles of Hellenistic-inspired materials even appearing in western China), it is once again different to what had been seen before. It picked up and adopted and rummaged through the pockets of the local cultures. All of this was woven together to create something new, which is neither East nor West. It is a hybrid of both. The end result is a wonderful pastiche of luxury culture.’
‘We see this in the crescendo of the exhibition, which is the celebrated Panagyurishte Treasure from Bulgaria. The Treasure was discovered in 1949 by three brothers who were digging in a clay pit for one of the local brick factories, when they discovered a cache of nine exquisitely made gold vessels dating to around 300 BCE. These included a large offering platter or drinking dish, an amphora with two spouts coming out of the bottom – meaning it’s really an amphora rhyton – and seven rhytons. This ensemble is a drinking set that almost certainly belonged to a king. It is one of the most astonishing finds to ever come from south-east Europe.’
‘Bulgaria, of course, was ancient Thrace, which served as a crossroads between East and West. You have Greek colonies founded on the Thracian coast of the Black Sea, but this region also became part of the Achaemenid empire, and then the Macedonian empire, so it’s a real cultural melting pot. This is also why the Panagyurishte Treasure is so important for this exhibition – it brings everything together. You can see that the rhytons and dish are Achaemenid forms. These are court-style drinking vessels made to the highest standards of craftsmanship and from the finest metals. And yet they are decorated with scenes out of Greek mythology. It creates a really interesting hybrid. We know from the ancient Greek writer Xenophon, who visited the court of one of the Thracian kings, that royal gifting and feasting was done in a very Persian style. So we can see how ostentatious luxury was still used in Europe after the withdrawal of the Achaemenid presence to further local royal programmes.’
‘The object that I really love is the spouted amphora, with its two outflow spouts. I think this design is because, if you are drinking with the king – perhaps because you’re celebrating a marriage, or a truce, or a trade deal – you are both drinking a draught that has come from the same vessel. Now, this is a period and a region where poison was used in royal courts to eliminate people – it’s real Game of Thrones stuff. So, if you’re drinking from the same vessel, you are showing trust and you are showing that the contents aren’t poisoned. That in itself speaks of power, while objects of supreme luxury drawing on so many influences also show what it meant to be Thracian in this period: you’re part of a connected world.’
All of this goes to the heart of how we should understand these extraordinary artefacts. Today, luxury is often seen as something that goes beyond what is strictly needed. As French fashionista Coco Chanel once famously remarked, ‘luxury begins where necessity ends’. But these glorious ancient masterpieces do not fall into that category. For all of their finery, as tools to bind people together and express power, these luxuries were an absolutely necessity.
Further information
The exhibition Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece will run until 13 August 2023 at the British Museum. For further information and to book tickets, visit www.britishmuseum.org/luxuryandpower.
A fascinating, lavishly illustrated catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition: J Fraser (2023) Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece (British Museum Press, £35, ISBN 978-0714111964).
CWA is grateful to Jamie Fraser and Barry O’Reilly.
