Hubris Breeds a Tyrant

The guy who sounds like an old lady on the phone Emery invited a few comments on Aeschylus’ Persai. I’ll indulge him with some comments on the historical background of the play before turning to the relevance today of its major theme, hubris. It is indeed the oldest extant play in the western canon and was produced in 472 BC, only 7 years after the Persian defeat at Salamis. It is also the only surviving Greek tragedy based (loosely) on historical events – in this case the Persians Wars.



The roots of those began with the Ionian Revolt in 499, which was basically an insurgency against Persian rule among Greek city-states on the coast of modern-day Turkey. The Athenians and Eretrians were the only two Greek mainland city-states to send some help to support the revolt. In 498 the insurgents managed to fire Sardis, the capital of a the Persian satrapy. Eventually Darius put down the revolt in 494 at Lade.



In 492 Darius then sent his general Mardonius into north of Greece (Thrace, Macedonia) to reduce the towns there in preparation for a punitive expedition against Athens and Eretria. Mardonius was successful on land, but Poseidon wrecked the Persian fleet at Mt. Athos, and that delayed his revenge by a couple years.

But Darius was plucky, and readied another fleet by 490, this time island-hopping across the Aegean rather than getting caught on the rocks at Mt. Athos.



This culminated in the famous Battle of Marathon in 490. The Persian fleet landed on the coast there, Pheidippides/Pheilippides ran 150 miles to Sparta to get their help (note, he did not run 26.2 miles to Athens; later historians didn’t think someone could run 150 miles in a day, as Herodotus reported, so they changed the story, but the Spartathlon is now run today, usually between 22 and 26 hours; Emery, if you want to really be an iron man, you’ve got to be like Yannis Kouros and run the Spartathlon). The Athenians, however, charged down the hill and surprised the Persians as they were disembarking from the ships, and they defeated them. So the Darius and the Persians went back home, with their tails between their legs.

Darius then died in 486 and was succeeded by Xerxes.




After consolidating his power for a few years, Xerxes then set about reversing the ignomious stain of his father’s defeat. [Just a side note: as Emery well knows, I have long thought that W’s entire political career was built around the Oedipal urge to outwit his father’s ghost. So, if George 41 raised taxes once, George 43 lowered them 5 times; George 41 tried to balance the budget, George 43 let it balloon; George 41 didn’t finish off Sadam, George 43 would; George 41 was cool towards the evangelicals, George 43 embraced them; even George 43’s nickname “W” is reflective of this urge to distinguish himself from his father].



Xerxes led another land/sea attack on Greece. In doing so, he spared no expense, building a bridge across the Hellespont for his army and digging a canal at Mt. Athos for his navy to pass safely through. He also forced most the Greek city-states to “Medize”. But a loosely-knit rag-tag group of 33 resisted, led by Athens and Sparta. They were able to defeat the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis in 480, and then 1 year later they defeated the Persian army at the Battle of Plataia. Xerxes and his army eventually returned home, completely humiliated. Local insurgencies always have the upper hand, a lesson our own American Revolution should have taught us.

So that’s the historical backdrop of the play. Obviously there are a many differences about the Persian Wars that one could point to when comparing them to the American invasion of Iraq. Nevertheless Greek tragedy is timeless, and the Persai in particular, precisely because of its (how better to say it?) “tragic” vision of life, which did not remain confined to the stage, but it spread from there to other media, most notably underwriting the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. One of the well known lessons of Greek tragedy and history that we all learn in high school is that hubris causes a downfall. Hackneyed though that lesson now be, it may be worthwhile to pause over the word hubris for a moment to understand the context of this conceit. Hubris is usually translated into English simply as “pride”, but that just doesn’t do it justice. Greek hubris is not merely an attitude, it is specifically an attitude of disdain that leads to a wanton act of violence. The Greeks, being practical above all else, focused more on the action than the attitude, so hubris for them was not divorced from the violent act that grew out of the attitude. They were part and parcel. It was also a technical legal term, the usage of which can shed light on its meaning. So, for instance, if a man raped a girl, he was prosecuted for hubris (that which he committed against the girl’s father). We get a better handle on the word with its Latin counterpart superbia – again a haughtiness and disdain that lead to an arrogant act of violence. Thus Tarquin is forever known as Superbus, because he raped the virtuous Lucretia.

The mention of Tarquin brings in another famous aspect of hubris – it’s associated especially with tyrants. That, of course, is the association Aeschylus makes use of in his Persai. Xerxes had hubris because he thought so little of using violence to subdue Greece. Sophocles perhaps said it best in the Oedipus: “Hubris breeds a tyrant” or some manuscripts have the reverse, “A tyrant breeds hubris.” Either way, tyranny and hubris go hand in hand. And who could forget that hubris was later dubbed the worst of the 7 deadly sins in Christian thought? Well, unfortunately the evangelical community in the US. For what else other than hubris could one fairly call the Project for the New American Century and its first substantiation in the preemptive war in Iraq? What else could one call but tyrannical hubris than little George setting aside the constitution and laws to do as he pleases? Those of us who oppose these hubristic imperial policies do so, not because we want to see America fail, but because we know that America will fail if she follows such ideology. It will fail because people do not like or trust anyone who uses violence preemptively; they instinctively run from it and resist it. The opposition to US imperial dreams has long since begun and created a strong headwind. Jose Maria Anzar was defeated in the Spanish elections because he joined the coalition of the willing. After his defeat Spanish troops were withdrawn from Iraq, leaving the coalition smaller. Berlusconi has now been defeated, in no small part because he was close to Bush. Watch for Italian troops to be withdrawn from Nasyria by the end of the year and the Italians moving closer to the EU, leaving the US further isolated. Tony Blair is suffering open rebellion from his own party and his role as PM is in its last, bitter throes because of Iraq. British troops will be out soon too, maybe within a year, maybe longer, but when it happens it will leave us virtually isolated in Iraq. Condi Rice visited Greece last week and there were massive riots in the streets, not unlike when Powell tried to visit the Olympics there in 2004. The American World Cup squad is the only one that must travel with no flag on their bus in Germany, due to security reasons. Meanwhile, there is a growing group of Latin American countries that are openly fighting back against American imperialism right in our own back yard. And in the midst of all this, W and his neocon friends are kicking around the idea of preemptively nuking Iranian nuke sites. If they do, as I said before, they will take us down through every spiral of the Aeschylean fall. Wouldn't Barbara Bush be a great Atossa?