War and Peace in Achaemenid Imperial Ideology

Abstract

Military activity played a determinative role in the history of the Achaemenid empire. This chapter considers some ideological dimensions of this fact. It does so through a separate examination of Persian and Greek representations of the role of war and warriors in the imperial setting. The place of war in the elite Persian psyche does remain rather elusive, but the Persian and Greek data-sets, radically different in content and character, are not far apart in their depiction of an ideological environment in which military values played a larger role than is sometimes acknowledged but were less fundamental than one might have expected. What is sometimes called the pax Achaemenica is certainly an artificial construct, but nothing compels us to replace it with the vision of a truly militarist society.

Yau̯nā and Sakā: Identity Constructions at the Margins of the Achaemenid Empire

“…This policy, although probably culturally integrative, did not imply that the imperial authority did not resort to violence when needed. Recent studies have showed that the pax Achaemenica was basically an ideological construct and that military campaigns, punishments, and executions were very important for the consolidation and maintenance of the Achaemenid Empire (seeJacobs 2009;Tuplin 2017). 2 On the privileged position of the Medes among the other peoples of the empire under Darius and his predecessors; seeBalatti 2017: 168-172; …”