The underrated main antagonist of the last Book of Herodotus’ Histories: Mardonius, son of Gobryas
Achaemenid nobleman. Source: https://www.livius.org/articles/person/mardonius/
“Mardonius’ propensity to conceptualize his own and others’ actions in accordance with heroic or ‘mythicizing ’ paradigms is evident from the first, in his enlarging of Xerxes and his expedition in a timeless, heroic mode, as he seeks to convince the king to undertake a campaign against Greece. A land of such excellence as Europe, he claims, is worthy to belong to the king alone of mortals (basileï te mounōi thnētōn axiē ektēsthai, 7.5.3). Xerxes is the best (aristos) of Persians of all time, past and future, for, as well as uttering the best and truest (arista kai alēthestata) sentiments in other respects, he will not allow the Ionians—unworthy as they are—to laugh at the Persians (7.9.1). The Greeks—if they dare to fight at all—will soon learn that the Persians are of humankind (anthrōpōn) the best (aristoi) with respect to war (7.9ª). As well as reflecting a characteristic tendency of Mardonius as Herodotus depicts it elsewhere, such mythicizing amplification may be expected to appeal to Xerxes, for it matches the traditional Persian requirement for display, as manifested especially in active imperialism—and this is a tradition to which Xerxes is particularly sensitive.25″
Limestone relief head of a Persian ca. 330–300 B.C. Greek, Tarentine On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 162 This finely carved relief head depicts a Persian, identified by the distinctive head scarf tied around the neck and pulled over his chin. The relief, once part of a pediment or metope adorning a Tarentine funerary naiskos, probably depicted a battle or hunt. Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/630999
“We again see Mardonius’ inclination to enlarge his actions on a mythic model once he has taken control of the remaining Persian army after the battle of Salamis. He strives to cast his second-wave expedition against Greece as heroic, in resolving to die honourably (kalōs teleutēsai ton bion) while playing for high stakes (huper megalōn) in the case of failure, rather than suffering punishment at Xerxes’ hands (8.100.1). His choice recalls that of Homer’s Achilles or Hector, but equally Leonidas, whose conscious decision to sacrifice himself for the sake of Sparta’s survival Herodotus recounted at length (7.220) in a narrative abounding in resonances of epic, including a hexametric Delphic oracle.32 The equation of Mardonius and Leonidas finds dramatic expression when Xerxes points him out to the Spartan heralds as the one who will ‘pay suitable recompense’ for their king’s death—a transaction over which the Delphic oracle presides (8.114; cf. 9.64.1).33 Much as Xerxes’ pointed advice that Mardonius ‘make your deeds match your words’ ( poieein toisi logoisi ta erga. . .homoia,8.107.1) was a fittting response to the commander’s inflated claims, the king ’s gesture at this point, even as it is in tune with divine will,34 seems as to respond to and extend the rhetoric of Mardonius himself.
Mardonius’ association with Leonidas is pressed further by Herodotus’ inclusion of an expressive prolepsis, which presents his slayer Aeimnestus as a Leonidas figure:35
Mardonius was killed by Aeimnestus,36 a famous man among the Spartans, who later in time after the Persian Wars, during a time of war, with a force of three hundred men made an attack on the whole army of the Messenians at Stenyclerus, and both he and the three hundred met their death [kai autos te apethane kai hoi triēkosioi]. (9.64.2)
The 300 is a Spartan fighting unit, but it also recalls Thermopylae in particular—which has been a symbolic presence through the Plataea narrative;37 and here the number is accentuated through its repetition and emphatic placement at the culmination of the clause, and within a weighty kai. . .kai construction that singles out the heroic leader alongside his 300 men. The specification of place (en Stenuklērōi) perhaps even exploits a further possible resonance of Thermopylae, with its central theme of ‘straights’/‘narrows’ (steina).38 This narrative strand presents Mardonius not so much consciously mythicizing himself, as caught up in mythicizing patterns beyond his comprehension: patterns that figure him as the counterpart of Leonidas, and reflect the broader theme of Plataea as vengeance for Thermopylae.39
Mardonius’ mythicizing tendency is also evident in a more general way, in his conception of the Persian expedition in terms of a larger pattern of retributive justice. Lateiner has brought out how repeatedly he is the subject of the dikas didonai concept in the Histories.40 By envisaging Persian victory over Greeks in these terms, Mardonius glamorizes, enlarges, and justifies it, for dikas didonai can have archaic or epic overtones. It occurs, for example, in reports of oracular utterances.41 This claim against the Greeks ‘comes home to haunt him’42 when his own death in battle compensates the Spartans for that of Leonidas.
Mardonius’ heroizing of his secondary campaign and himself as its commander from one perspective—read as directly reflecting his actual thinking —thus seems delusory: he has misunderstood the real significance of Thermopylae as a moral victory for Greeks that displayed Spartan excellence in war.43 And yet the insecurity revealed by one of his motives for continuing the campaign—the desire to avoid punishment for having urged Xerxes to the expedition (8.100.1)—opens up an additional, different possibility. Mardonius’ self-mythicizing may in part represent a response to his acute awareness of the need to promote a heroic image of himself vis-à-vis Xerxes in particular, so as to compensate for his compromised position at the Persian court.44 This will have been exacerbated by the failure at Athos of the first expedition he had championed. The portrayal of his mythic thinking thus helps Herodotus bring out an aspect of Mardonius’ psychology as a subordinate.
But the heroic image is not merely rhetorical or a figment of Mardonius’ imagination. Ultimately Mardonius meets his end at Plataea in genuinely heroic—epic—fashion: fighting bravely from a white horse, it is he who holds off Persian defeat so long he survives (9.63), and it is he whom Herodotus acknowledges as the individual who, of all the foreigners, fought most bravely (ēristeuse, 9.71.1). Ēristeuse here evokes the epic aristeia, intimating that his action recalls those of Homer’s heroes. Thus Mardonius lives up in truth both to Xerxes’ command to ‘make his deeds match his words’ (8.107.1) (in accordance indeed with the heroic code 45) and to his own resolve ‘to risk either subduing Greece or dying nobly in failure’ (8.100.1). Of the different traditions available, Herodotus has memorialized the most positive.46 The way in which ēristeuse (‘he was the best’) responds to and corroborates Mardonius’ earlier heroizing of himself (cf. above, p. 297) unsettles our assumption that those claims were deluded. In the end the text thus invites a complex rather than straightforwardly negative response to Mardonius’ character;47 and I shall suggest that Herodotus invites a similarly nuanced and reflective, rather than straightforwardly dismissive, response to the mythic discourse in which Mardonius conceptualizes his secondary campaign.”
Emily Baragwanath Returning to Troy: Herodotus and the Mythic Discourse of his own Time in Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus, pp. 287-312. Edited by E. Baragwanath and M.P. de Bakker. Oxford University Press
https://www.academia.edu/4488653/Returning_to_Troy_Herodotus_and_the_Mythic_Discourse_of_his_Own_Time
Emily Baragwanath Source: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/emily-baragwanath-2020-21/
