Persian Expedition Research Articles

John Chrysostom on the Roman-Persian Wars

The writings of St. John Chrysostom include numerous information about Persia and the Persians. Some of them relate to military history and reflect the military and military-political realities of Roman-Persian relations in the John Chrysostom’s period. The main part of the information reported by John Chrysostom about the Roman-Persian wars is connected with the Persian expedition of the emperor Julian the Apostate in 363 AD. The Saint explains the unsuccessful outcome of the campaign of 363 for the Romans by the fact that Julian organized anti-Christian persecutions. So, the death of Julian during the campaign is interpreted by John Chrysostom as a Divine punishment. The saint leaves the question of the death of the emperor open, not leaning towards any of the versions that circulated at that time. The description by John Chrysostom of the invasion of the Roman army into Persia in many details coincides with the information of our main source - the “Res Gestae” by Ammianus Marcellinus, who was not only a contemporary of the saint, but also the participant of the events of 363 AD. This indicates a high degree of reliability of the information reported by John Chrysostom. At the same time, the saint demonstrates an ambivalent attitude towards the Persians, considering them, on the one hand, barbarians and opponents of Rome, and, on the other hand, a people demonstrating high moral qualities (in particular, humanity towards the Romans). In addition, John Chrysostom reports some information about the activities of the Persian military intelligence.

PERSONAL CONTACTS OF PETER THE GREAT WITH THE RULING ELITES OF DAGESTAN

A historiographical analysis of the events of the Petrine era in the Caucasus demonstrates that the problem of personal contacts of Tsar Peter I with the ruling elites of Dagestan during his campaign in 1722 remains one of the poorly developed historical aspects. The tsar’s personal contacts with foreign elites were part of his imperial policy of expanding the territories of the Russian state, involving new subjects in the sphere of the political and legal space of the empire, ensuring their loyalty in the conditions of multi-ethnicity and political fragmentation of the Caucasus. Such ensuring was achieved by involving local elites in the social structure of the empire, in its economic system. Peter the Great’s contacts with the Dagestan rulers took place during the Persian expedition – his last major foreign policy campaign, as a result of which the southwestern Caspian region was briefly conquered and annexed to the Russian Empire. The conducted study made it possible to identify the reason that determined the pro-Russian position of one or another Dagestan ruler, their attitude to Peter I, in particular. The contacts of the parties were accompanied by giving each other expensive gifts, awarding ranks to the ruling elite that had passed into Russian citizenship, confirmation in positions, assignment of salaries to its representatives, etc. The study is based on the analysis of retrospective documentary information collected from documents of scientific archives of Russia and historiographical sources. The source base of the study, in addition to archival documents, are the materials of direct participants and eyewitnesses of the meeting of Peter I and a number of Dagestani rulers: “The War Diary of 1722”, compiled in the middle of the XIX century based on the diary entries of Peter I, travel notes of the Scottish doctor J. Bell and Artillery Captain Peter Bruce. The last two sources in this study are used in the original.

Salamis After Twenty-Five Centuries

Salamis After Twenty-Five Centuries John Psaropoulos (bio) 1. What Salamis Achieved The marble doorway leading in and out of the Acropolis offers the departing guest a framed view of the Salamis Strait, thirteen kilometers away. The University of California archaeologist John Papadopoulos, who made this observation, believes that is deliberate. The Battle of Salamis, which took place twenty-five hundred years ago in that strait, successfully pitted an Athenian-led navy of three hundred ships against a Persian-led one of twelve hundred. It was perhaps the unlikeliest Athenian military victory of all time but gave Athens mastery of the Aegean. She used it to build a maritime empire offering Greek city-states Athenian-style democracies and security guarantees against Persia. The doorway itself is part of the Propylaia, or foregate, of the Acropolis: a grand, colonnaded passage built, like the temples behind it, with the proceeds of that empire. It also happens to stand [End Page 297] on the spot where an aristocratic-led party of landlubbers who, having refused to give up the city and entrust their fate to the navy, erected a wooden palisade against the invading Persian army and were killed beside it. It is irresistible to imagine that Perikles, the Athenian general who commissioned the Propylaia, meant to create a permanent pointer to the city's greatest victory upon the site of its greatest miscalculation. The Greeks at the Battle of Salamis were nominally led by Sparta. In reality, Athens was the source of Greek strategy and strength. It provided two-thirds of the Greek fleet. The battle's winning strategy came from an Athenian general, Themistokles. Athens was the extraordinary component of the Greek forces for other reasons, too. Its punishment was the ultimate goal of the Persian expedition under Xerxes. Athens had sent twenty ships to assist her colonies in Asia Minor in a revolt against the Persian Empire fourteen years earlier. On a fennel-rich plain called Marathon, she had had the temerity to defeat the first Persian expeditionary force Xerxes's father, Darius, sent to punish her in 490 BC. When that failed, Darius issued orders for a larger-scale invasion he did not live to lead. "All Asia was in uproar for three years, with the best men being enrolled in the army for the invasion of Greece, and with the preparations," the Greek father of journalism, Herodotos, tells us at the beginning of Book VII of The Histories. There were also political transformations afoot in Athens, which defeat at Salamis might well have quashed. Its experiment of constitutional democracy was not yet thirty years old. Persia, certainly, did not look kindly upon rule by the people; but neither did Sparta, whose king Kleomenes had marched on Athens no fewer than four times in the previous century to restore tyranny—one-man rule—under Hippias. Even now, on the eve of Salamis, the eightyyear-old Hippias and his family were waiting to return to power, this time under the sponsorship of the Persian Empire. [End Page 298] The contest was not only highly uneven in military terms—it was politically asymmetrical, too. For Persia, these were largely wars of prestige, shoring up discipline in other parts of the empire that might be entertaining thoughts of revolt. For Athens they were existential. Every able-bodied man was conscripted to hold an oar or a spear. Women and children were evacuated to the Peloponnese and the island of Salamis. Temples, ancestral homes, and productive fields were abandoned to the invader's torch. It would be no exaggeration to say that these Persian Wars were the driver of all subsequent Greek history until the Roman occupation four-and-a-half centuries later. They confirmed the irreversibility of democracy in Athens; they established the primacy of the Athenian thalassocracy throughout the Greek world; they stanched Persia's expansion into Europe and established a European power on the world stage for the first time; they incited the jealousy of Sparta and helped trigger the twenty-seven-year-long Peloponnesian War, through which she defeated Athens with the help of Persian gold and briefly restored her title as leader of Greece; and they engendered the...

The reception of Plutarch in George Pisides’ panegyrical poems

This article examines Plutarch's reception in George Pisides’ poetry. The first section argues in favour of Pisides’ familiarity with Plutarch's writings, mainly in view of verbatim quotations and other thematic connections or allusions. The second section explores Pisides’ more creative use of Plutarch by discussing his direct addresses to the Chearonean philosopher and comparing them with Pisides’ similar apostrophes to Homer and Demosthenes in The Persian Expedition and the Heraclias. By seeking to ‘rewrite’ the heroic past, Pisides presents himself as a skilled emulator of his ancient predecessors, thereby enhancing his self-fashioning as the imperial spokesman par excellence.

Xerxes’ Deliberate Expedition

Book Seven of Herodotus’ Histories contains his account of the Persian expedition against Greece led by King Xerxes in 480 BCE. This campaign followed from the one undertaken ten years earlier on the orders of his father, King Darius. That Persian force had landed at Marathon and been defeated by the Athenians in a famous battle that has ever since been considered a victory of European freedom over Oriental despotism. Xerxes, determined to avenge his father's defeat, raised a force reported by Herodotus to be of as many as two and a half million fighting men, only to come up against the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. This narrative of these and the subsequent battles of Salamis and Plataea has been well known from its Herodotean source ever since; and the muscle-bound and blood-drenched deeds of the 300 have recently been made famous again by the movie of that name. The more recent sequel to 300 begins with a less accurate account of the Battle of Marathon; and, where the first movie ended with Plataea under way, Rise of an Empire ends with victory at Salamis all but won. Courses in Western or World History are likely to come upon the Persian Wars, and the recent popular movies might serve as an accessible and engaging introduction to these historical events and developments. But Herodotus’ account of how Xerxes came to his decision to invade Greece, with its consideration of politics, rhetoric, and religion, is, if not as thrilling, at least as telling. It tells the standard narrative of the conflict between East and West, and it tells of many ways in which the conflict was more complicated than that. It tells not just how the Greeks and Persians came to fight each other, but who the Greeks and Persians were that they might have fought, or not, but did.

The politics of the One

Two often repeated assertions about Plotinus are that he was not interested in mathematics or politics. A recent book has clearly demonstrated his strong attraction to numbers though not necessarily mathematics, but the second theory has not been challenged as seriously as it could be. O'Meara, an expert on Neoplatonic politics, discusses Plato and the later Neoplatonists more than he does Plotinus, yet some unsettling facts remain. Plotinus, after taking part in the emperor Gordian's ill-fated Persian expedition, went to Rome instead of Athens. It is likely that he wanted to avoid any philosophical competition in Athens, but it is also possible that he was to some extent drawn to Roman politics. Most troubling of all is the rationale behind his aborted Platonopolis project.

La comunità degli Elleni: cultura e potere alla corte dell’imperatore Giuliano

Emperor Julian achieved two important parts of his reform project in different times. The first part consisted in the renovation of the consistorium, aimed at forming a new ruling class to help him in administrative and military affairs, and he did this in the period between the Augustan proclamation and his arrival with the army in Illyricum (waiting for the final battle with Constantius II, his cousin: spring 360-November 361).But soon after he had the news of his cousin’s sudden death (November 361), being free to act, he engaged himself in the re-institution of an Hellenic community, gathering around himself philosophers and other pagan intellectuals whom he had met at the time of his studies in Asia Minor and Athens, in order to help him restore traditional cults. This was his preoccupation until the time he left for the Persian expedition (March 363).My paper traces back these phases and identify the people invited by Julian to collaborate with him in the two periods, identifying the reason behind h...

The Role of the Comes Lucillianus during Julian's Persian Expedition

The Role of the Comes Lucillianus during Julian's Persian Expedition

Julian's Persian Expedition in Ammianus and Zosimus

The nature of the bond connecting the work of Ammianus Marcellinus with the now fragmentary history of Eunapius of Sardis or with Zosimus' Νέα Ἱστορία is an old and intriguing problem rather more notable for the multiplicity than for the finality of its hypothetical solutions. The question arises out of the perception that Ammianus and Zosimus provide coincidental material in their accounts of Julian's Persian expedition. Eunapius figures in the equation because, as we generally assume, it was he whom Zosimus followed. Since all scholars but Dillemann are satisfied that these correspondences indubitably require some hypothesis of literary affiliation, all of the formal possibilities have one by one been tried. Sudhaus, whose investigation of the similarities proved influential, denied that Ammianus could have been used either by Zosimus or by his source (Eunapius); he affirmed instead that Ammianus and Eunapius must have been linked by their own use of a common source, namely, Oribasius, the physician of Julian and his companion on the Persian expedition.

Confidence in Crisis

The importance of confidence, of reciprocated expectations of non-hostile behavior, and of measures that may generate such confidence was exquisitely expressed 2400 years ago, as reported by Xenophon in his chronicles of the Persian Expedition. Mutual suspicion arose between the Greek army departing Persia and the Persian army escorting them. The Greek leader called for an interview with the Persian try to put a stop these suspicions before they ended in open hostility. When they met, he said,

Festus' Source on Julian's Persian Expedition

Festus' Source on Julian's Persian Expedition

ヘラクレイオス帝のペルシア遠征

Since 614, when the Holy Cross in Jerusalem fell into the Persian hand, the time was getting ripe for taking back it, and was strengthening the spiritual unity of the Roman Empire with the doctrine which was proposed by Sergios.The Roman Emperor Heracleios (610-641) went on an expedition into the Persian territory from 622 to 629, and took back the Holy Cross. In the Christian world, before the expedition, the Monophysist in Syria and Egypt opposed the proporsal of Sergios, but during the expedition they changed to agreed to it, and the Pope Honorius I (625-638) recognized the Monotheletism.We can point out that the Persian Expedition of Heracleios went a long way toward strengthenning the unity of the Empire in the early part of the seventh century.

With the Persian Expedition

With the Persian Expedition

The Persian Expedition to Delphi

The Persian Expedition to Delphi