Persian Influence on Greece: Shared Heritage, Loanwords, and Political Thought

Marathon in 490, Thermopylae and Salamis in 480, Plataea and Mycale in 479 — the Persian Wars are central to the Western narrative of the ancient world, and Greek sources from Herodotus onward portrayed Persia as the great Oriental “other” against which Hellenic freedom was defined. The picture of binary opposition, while politically and morally important to the Greek self-image, conceals a much more reciprocal history of cultural exchange. The standard modern treatments are Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander (2002), Josef Wiesehöfer’s Ancient Persia (1996), the relevant chapters of Margaret Miller’s Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC (1997), and the recent The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (2013). For the linguistic side, Émile Benveniste’s Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (1969), Rüdiger Schmitt’s Die Iranier-Namen (and his many studies of Old Persian), and Nicholas Sims-Williams’s work on the Iranian loanwords in Greek are the working tools. Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution (1992, English 1995) is the indispensable book on the broader Near Eastern influence on Greek religion and culture.

The shared Near Eastern heritage

The first element of the Persian-Greek relationship is the shared Near Eastern heritage of both peoples. The Greek world of the archaic period, in the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, was in continuous contact with the civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean, and the Greek adoption of Phoenician, Egyptian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Iranian elements was so extensive that some modern scholars, such as Martin Bernal in his influential but controversial Black Athena (1987), have argued that the “Greek miracle” was in fact a long process of easternisation. The more cautious view, which dominates current scholarship, is that the Greek achievement was real and original but was built on a foundation of Near Eastern borrowings that were mediated, in large part, through the Persian Empire.

The Persian Empire, at its height in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean world from the Aegean to the Indus, and the Greek cities of Ionia, the Aeolid, Doris, Caria, Lycia, Pamphylia, Cyprus, and the European Thracian coast were either members of the Persian Empire or under heavy Persian influence. The Ionian Greek cities, in particular, were major centres of Greek culture, and the Ionian philosophers, scientists, poets, and historians of the sixth and fifth centuries — Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Hecataeus, and Herodotus — were in continuous contact with the Persian world. Herodotus himself, of Halicarnassus, came from a city on the Persian side of the Aegean, and his Histories are as much a book about the Persian Empire as about the Greek city-states.

The Greek adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, the Lydian coin, and the Mesopotamian astronomical and mathematical traditions was, in many cases, mediated by the Persian Empire. The Phoenician alphabet, which the Greeks adopted in the early first millennium BCE, was in use throughout the Persian Empire and was used by the Persian administration for many of the languages of the empire. The Lydian coin, which the Greek cities of Ionia adopted in the seventh century BCE, was imitated by the Achaemenid coin, the daric, and the Achaemenid coin was a major influence on the Greek coinage of the fifth and fourth centuries. The Mesopotamian astronomical and mathematical traditions, which had been developed in the second and first millennia BCE, were transmitted to the Greek world by way of the Persian and Babylonian temples and observatories, and the Babylonian astronomical records of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE were a major source for the Greek astronomical tradition.

Persian political thought and the Greek concept of kingship

The Persian model of monarchy was a major influence on Greek political thought. The Achaemenid king, the Xšāyaθiya Xšāyaθiyānām (King of Kings), ruled a vast multi-ethnic empire with the assistance of a sophisticated bureaucracy, a network of royal roads, a system of satraps, and a standing army. The Achaemenid model of kingship, in which the monarch was the representative of Ahura Mazda on earth and ruled by divine favour, was a major element in the Greek concept of the basileus (king) and the tyrannos (tyrant).

The Greek writers on kingship, from Isocrates and Plato to Aristotle and Cicero, were obsessed with the Persian example. Isocrates, in his Panegyricus and his Philippus, repeatedly invoked the Persian model of kingship as a model for the unification of Greece under a single ruler. Plato, in his Laws (3.694a–698a), discussed the Persian constitution at length and compared it to the Spartan and Cretan models. Aristotle, in his Politics, treated the Persian Empire as a model of monarchy. Cicero, in his De Re Publica and his De Legibus, referenced the Persian model in the discussions of Roman governance.

Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the Education of Cyrus, written in the early fourth century BCE, was among the more widely read books in the ancient and medieval world. The Cyropaedia presented Cyrus the Great as the model of the just ruler, the wise general, and the virtuous prince, and the work was read as a textbook of kingship by Greek, Roman, and Islamic readers for centuries. The Cyropaedia was translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa in the eighth century (and was famously re-translated multiple times after that); the work was a major influence on the Islamic mirror for princes tradition, on the Renaissance concept of the prince, and on the European tradition of the education of the prince. The “translated into Latin by Cicero” claim that one sometimes sees is wrong; Cicero references the Cyropaedia in his own writings, but Xenophon wrote the work in Greek, and Cicero did not produce a Latin version.

Persian loanwords in Greek

The Greek language, in its classical and post-classical forms, contains a number of Persian and Median loanwords. The most important are paradeisos (paradise, from Old Persian pairidaeza, an enclosed park or garden), magos (magician, from Old Persian magush, a member of the Median priestly class), satrap (from Old Persian xšathra-pāvan, protector of the kingdom), and kithara (lyre, of uncertain origin; the standard etymology is from a Near Eastern language, possibly Old Persian or an Anatolian source). The full list of Persian loanwords in Greek is long, and the study of these loanwords, which has been pursued by Benveniste, Schmitt, and Sims-Williams, has illuminated the deep history of cultural contact between the Persian and Greek worlds.

The word paradeisos (παράδεισος), which entered Greek in the fifth century BCE, is . The Old Persian word pairidaeza (literally, an enclosure, from pairi = around and daiž = to build) referred to the enclosed parks and gardens of the Persian kings, and the Greek word was used to translate the concept of the Persian royal garden. The Greek paradeisos entered Latin as paradisus and gave rise to the English word paradise, which now refers in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology to the garden of Eden and the heavenly reward of the righteous. The image of paradise as a walled garden with flowing water is, in fact, a Persian image, and the Persian four-fold garden, the chahar bagh, with its central water channel, four axial paths, and surrounding walls, is the architectural model of the earthly paradise.

The word magos (μάγος), which entered Greek in the sixth century BCE, is another major Persian loanword. The Old Persian magush (Median maguš) referred to a member of the Median priestly class, the Magi, who were the priests of Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid period. The Greek magos originally referred to a Median or Persian priest, then to a magician, an astrologer, and a member of a religious mystery. The Greek magos entered Latin as magus and gave rise to the English words magic, magician, and magus. The Magi of the Gospel of Matthew, the wise men who came from the East to worship the infant Jesus, are described in the Greek New Testament as magoi, and the English word Magi is a direct borrowing from this Greek term.

The word satrap (σατράπης) is . The Old Persian xšathra-pāvan (literally, protector of the kingdom) was the title of the provincial governors of the Achaemenid Empire, and the Greek satrapes was a direct borrowing. The English word satrap now means a provincial governor or, by extension, a subordinate official or a person who serves a powerful master. The institution of the satrap was widely imitated in the Hellenistic successor states and the Roman Empire, and the word was used to describe the provincial governors of the Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Roman empires.

The word kithara (κιθάρα) is a musical instrument of Near Eastern origin, possibly from Old Persian or from a related Anatolian language, which gave rise to the Greek kithara and the Latin cithara, and from there to the English words guitar and zither. The Greek kithara was a major instrument of ancient Greek music, and the instrument was associated with Apollo, the god of music, poetry, and prophecy. The claim in some older popular works that the English word angel comes from an Old Persian root is incorrect: angelos is a native Greek word, and angeion, with which it is sometimes confused, is also a native Greek word. The Persian connection is to the concept of a yazata as a divine messenger, not to the etymology of the Greek word.

Persian influence on Greek art and religion

The Persian influence on Greek art was substantial. The Greek adoption of monumental stone architecture, the Greek use of the Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian orders, the Greek convention of the carved relief on temple friezes, and the Greek use of monumental sculpture were all influenced, in part, by the architectural and sculptural traditions of the Persian Empire and the wider Near East. The Persian convention of the processional relief, in which tribute-bearing delegations are depicted in ordered rows, has been compared to the Greek Parthenon frieze and the Greek Siphnian Treasury frieze, but the direct line from Achaemenid to Greek relief sculpture is debated; the Greek tradition had its own conventions, and the similarities may reflect parallel development rather than direct borrowing.

The Greek religion of the classical period, while distinctively Greek, contained many elements of Near Eastern, Anatolian, and Persian origin. The cult of Apollo, the cult of Artemis, the cult of Dionysus, the cult of Cybele, the cult of Mithras, and many other Greek cults were either of Near Eastern origin or contained Near Eastern elements. Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution (1992, English 1995) is the most thorough treatment; Burkert is careful to distinguish actual borrowing from parallel development. The Greek philosophical concepts of the four elements, the chain of being, the eternal soul, and the cosmic battle between order and chaos have been compared to Persian and Babylonian sources, but the four elements are Greek (Empedocles), and the chain of being is Aristotelian/Neoplatonic. The Zoroastrian influence on these specific concepts is overstated in the older literature; what is real is the broader exchange of religious vocabulary across the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE.

The Hellenistic period and the Persian inheritance

The conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE brought the Greek and Persian worlds into a single political framework, and the Hellenistic successor states, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies in particular, inherited elements of both traditions. The Seleucid Empire, which ruled Iran and Mesopotamia for more than two centuries, was a major centre of Greek-Persian cultural fusion, and the Seleucid capital of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and the Parthian and Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon were major centres of this fusion.

The Hellenistic art of the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian periods was a distinctive synthesis of Greek, Persian, Mesopotamian, and Central Asian elements. The Parthian art of the first and second centuries CE, with its frontality, its hierarchical composition, its elaborate dress, and its use of Greek, Aramaic, and Middle Persian inscriptions, was a major tradition in its own right, and the Sasanian art of the third to seventh centuries, with its investiture reliefs, hunting scenes, and equestrian portraits, was one of the great traditions of late antique art. Matthew Canepa’s The Two Eyes of the Earth (2009) is the recent standard for the cross-cultural context.

For further reading

Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander (2002).
Wiesehöfer, Josef. Ancient Persia (1996).
Miller, Margaret. Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC (1997).
Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution (1992, English 1995).
Benveniste, Émile. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (1969).
Schmitt, Rüdiger. Die Iranier-Namen and his various studies of Old Persian.
Sims-Williams, Nicholas. His articles in the Encyclopaedia Iranica and in Iran.
Canepa, Matthew P. The Two Eyes of the Earth (2009).
Rollinger, Robert. Der Alte Orient und die Anfänge der Eisenzeit (in press; with his many articles on Greco-Persian relations).
Tuplin, Christopher. “Persian Empire” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (2002) and his many articles on the Achaemenid sources.