of the “Corpus dei testi urartei” (five volumes, 2008–2018).
Rüdiger Schmitt, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Philology and Indo‐Iranian Studies at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, is a specialist in ancient Iranian languages and onomastics, but has worked also on the Greek and Armenian languages. He is co‐editor of the Iranisches Personennamenbuch of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Gundula Schwinghammer holds a PhD in Ancient History at the University of Innsbruck. Her research deals chiefly with the Achaemenid Persian empire and regime changes in the Ancient Near East.
Sören Stark is Assistant Professor for Central Asian Archaeology at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. His research focuses on Central Asian archeology and history from the Early Iron Age to the Islamic Middle Ages, in combination with archeological fieldwork in Bukhara/Uzbekistan.
Matthew W. Stolper is the John A. Wilson Professor Emeritus of Oriental Studies and Director of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
David Stronach was Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has directed excavations at Pasargadae, Tepe Nush‐i Jan, Nineveh, and Erebuni. He had a particular interest in the archeology and history of the early Achaemenids, the Medes, the Neo‐Assyrians, and the Urartians.
Jan Tavernier (PhD 2002, KU Leuven) is professor in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research axes are Elamite history and linguistics, Achaemenid history, Ancient Near Eastern onomastics, and Ancient Near Eastern linguistic history of the first millennium BCE.
Gocha Tsetskhladze taught at London and Melbourne, specializing in ancient Greek colonization and the archeology of the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus, and Anatolia in the first millennium BCE. For 30 years he has excavated Greek colonial sites around the Black Sea and at Pessinus in central Anatolia. He has published extensively. He is affiliated to Linacre College, Oxford.
Günter Vittmann studied Egyptology and ancient Semitic languages. He earned his PhD 1977 in Vienna (Priester und Beamte im Theben der Spätzeit, published 1978) and his Habilitation in 1994 at Würzburg (Der demotische Papyrus Rylands 9, published 1998). He was appointed Associate Professor at Würzburg in 2001. His special fields of research are Egyptian philology, Demotic and Hieratic, and relations between Egypt and her neighbors.
Melanie Wasmuth is a Docent in Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Helsinki and affiliated to the Egyptology Section of the University of Basel. She specializes in the impact of cross‐regional migration, cultural encounters and political expansion on material culture and identity constructions in the first millennium BCE.
Josef Wiesehöfer received his PhD in 1977 (Mu¨nster) and Habilitation in 1988 (Heidelberg). From 1989 to 2016 he was Full Professor of Ancient History at the Department of Classics at the Christian‐Albrechts Universität Kiel. His main research interests are the history of pre‐Islamic Persia and intercultural exchange between East and West in antiquity. He has published extensively on ancient Persia, with a special interest in Parthian and Sasanian history.
Michael Zahrnt was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cologne. His research has focused on Greek History from the Archaic Age to the expansion of Rome, with special emphasis on Macedonia and Alexander the Great; and on the emperor Hadrian.
SECTION I
INTRODUCTION
Bruno Jacobs and Robert Rollinger
In 262 CE an army of Roman and Greek forces, led by the Roman Marianus (then probably governor of the Roman province of Achaea/Greece), gathered at Thermopylae to ward off an expected attack by Gothic invaders from the north.1 In the wake of the military preparations to defend the pass, Marianus addressed the assembled Greek soldiers and fired up their emotions by referring to the achievements of their ancestors. This splendid episode was discovered only recently on a palimpsest in the Austrian National Library and convincingly identified as a fragment of the lost Scythica of the Greek author Herennius Dexippus (third century CE). The episode runs as follows:
(7) ‘O Greeks, the occasion of our preservation for which you are assembled and the land in which you have been deployed are both truly fitting to evoke the memory of virtuous deeds. For your ancestors, fighting in this place in former times, did not let Greece down and deprive it of its free state, for they fought bravely in the Persian wars and in the conflict called the Lamian war, and when they put to flight Antiochus, the despot from Asia, at which time they were already working in partnership with the Romans who were then in command. (8) So perhaps it may be good fortune, in accordance with the daimonion, that it has been allotted to the Greeks to do battle against the barbarians in this region (indeed your own principles of fighting the wars have turned out to be valid in the past). But you may take confidence in both your preparation for these events and the strength of the region – as a result of which, in previous attacks you seemed terrifying to the enemies'.
(Codex Vindobonensis Hist. gr. 73, ff. 192v–193r after Mallan and Davenport 2015: p. 206)
The passage is remarkable for many reasons. On the one hand, it reveals a specific lieu de mémoire where the Persian Wars (actually the “Median [Wars]”: tois Me&c.macr;dikois) still had some relevance during the Roman Empire. On the other hand, at least in our text, this relevance is of somewhat reduced significance. Whereas from a modern perspective a battle at the famous site of Thermopylae would above all call to mind the celebrated event of 480 BCE, the Roman perspective of the third century CE is a rather different one.2 To be sure, Thermopylae is still a battlefield that recalls the invasion by the Achaemenid Persian Empire, but this is just one event among others, and, as it appears, not the most important one. Thermopylae seems to be about equally significant as the location of a comparable event during the Lamian War (323–322 BCE), and both occurrences are far outstripped by the Syrian War (192–188 BCE): this was the war that Rome fought against the Seleucid king Antiochus III (223–187 BCE), and it is Antiochus – and not primarily the Persians – who is introduced as the ultimate representative of Asian hubris, threat, and outreach. What can we learn from this episode and what is its relevance in the introduction to a new Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire?
Historians are nowadays well aware of the fact that their understanding and reconstruction of history are shaped both by tradition and by the view of past and present current in their own time. But it is not always easy for them to escape from this situation and find their own perspective.
From the very beginning, reconstruction of the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire was affected by a point of view that focused primarily on two events: the first was the Persian Wars at the beginning of the fifth century BCE and the second the downfall of the empire at the end of the fourth century BCE. Both events became part of well‐designed master narratives that presented the empire as a colossus with feet of clay, and the empire's defeats were celebrated as the heroic deeds of opponents fighting for freedom against an Asian craze for the huge and spectacular. Thus, the Persian Wars became a climax in the conflict between Greek (and European) liberty and Asian despotism, and Alexander III was staged as “Alexander the Great,” a heroic conqueror king, while
