This is an exhibition with a thesis. The layout and design, the structure, the choice of topics addressed and even the selection of individual artefacts, have all been made to support the central argument. What is this thesis? It’s another one of those ‘undermining received opinion’ exhibitions, so common nowadays.

In this case the received opinion goes like this: in the fifth century BC, from roughly 500 to 450 BC, the federation of Greek city states, led by Athens, fought off repeated attempts to invade and conquer them mounted by the huge Persian (proper scholarly name, Achaemenid) Empire, under its kings, Darius the Great (ruled 522 to 486 BC) and Xerxes the Great (ruled 486 to 465 BC).

You can see from this map how the Achaemenid Empire, at its height around 500 BC, covered a large swathe of south-central Asia and how vexing it was for its rulers that it swept through the Middle East, all of Turkey and up into the Balkans only to be blocked by the obstinate city states of Greece (at the far left of the map).

The Achaemenid Empire at its Greatest Extent, about 500 BC. Created by Mossmaps, accessed from Wikipedia

Contemporary Greeks, notably the historian Herodotus, but many other politicians and playwrights whose works have survived, portrayed the conflict as a desperate struggle against the odds of free, democratic states battling oriental tyranny.

In particular – and the focus of this exhibition – is the way that Greek leaders, politicians, writers and historians, but also artists, sculptors and craftsmen, routinely associated the Persians with luxury, with excessive wealth, which they went on to associate with moral failings such as decadence, greed, corruption, effeminacy, and so on.

The legendary King Midas (originally an actual ruler of Phrygia in central Anatolia) and how he was curse to turn everything he touched into gold, became associated with the Persians, a symbol of the punishment incurred by unlimited greed.

Recreation of an Achaemenid court robe, made with expensive dyes, rich embroidery and gold applique, designed to be draped and belted across the middle. Designed by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University (2022)

According to Greek writers all this Oriental extravagance and decadence starkly contrasted with their own pure, restrained and high-minded art and culture, which was summed up in the inscription above the famous oracle at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess‘.

East versus West

This stark dichotomy or binary view of civilisations, of a fundamental opposition the West and the Eastern Mediterranean, was to have a strong influence on the Roman Empire, whose leaders and writers also associated themselves with lofty principle and morality, and their opponents in the East – the successors to the Persians, the Parthian Empire – in identical terms. We are brave, they are warlike. We are high-minded and principled, they are lawless and treacherous. We live lives of dignity and restraint, they wallow on luxury and sensuality. All tropes which would again be revived when, in the late Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then pushed on into Thrace, eventually conquering Greece itself in the 1700s.

These tropes lived on into 18th and 19h century scholarly works, of history, art and anthropology, as what the American critic Edward Said called ‘Orientalism’ i.e. associating the empires, states and peoples of the East with luxury, corruption, decadence, sexual profligacy and so on.

Arguably, this great founding binary between noble democratic West and tyrannical barbarous East underwent another enormous revival in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, in aftermath of which loads of American leaders and opinion-makers revived all these old tropes, painting the Middle East as a land of wild-eyed religious fanatics, with the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington going as far as claiming the terrorist attacks had revived an age-old, unchangeable and inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’.

The only thing problem with this long and hallowed tradition is that, right back where it started, with the polar opposition between Greeks and the Persians… it’s wrong. And this exhibition at the British Museum sets out to show why.

Undoing the stereotype

It does so by presenting two counter-claims:

1. Persian luxury wasn’t what the Greeks claimed it to be
2. the Greeks were far from being as spartan and luxury-free as they claimed, but themselves valued luxury goods and incorporated many aspects of Persian craftsmanship and style into their own artefacts

To put it another way, for over two thousand years scholars and writers in the West have tended to take the Greeks’ at their own valuation of themselves, not least because our own power structures (of Christendom versus the Turks, of the European powers when they created their empires, of the modern 21st century American empire) found the Greeks’ binary tropes useful to confirm the superiority of the moral West. But the actual objects from these two supposedly distinct cultures tell a different story. They reveal a far more complex and messy picture of cultural interaction, interpenetration, influence and involvement than the official documents.

Thus, with disarming simplicity, the exhibition reflect this binary worldview, starting with two rooms: the first one displays a range of objects from different parts of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, some to explain the history and structure of the empire, some to demonstrate how luxury objects were used to express and support political and cultural power.

Room two focuses on the other half of the dyad, classical Athens of the 5th century BC, again with some objects used to explain the history and cultural highpoints of the period (of which the construction of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 BC is the most notable item), before going on to display cases which indicate how the Athenians incorporated, remodelled and adapted influences from the East through a variety of handicrafts and objects.

Hellenistic

And then, to prove its point that there was always more complex interplay between cultures right across the region, the third and final room looks in detail at the culture which arose after the conquest of Alexander the Great.

Alexander turned the tables on the Persians for, after conquering all of Greece, he swiftly took Anatolia, conquered Egypt and then pushed on into modern Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan. It was here that his dazzling ten-year career of ceaseless conquests came to an end with his untimely death in Babylon in 323 BC.

On his death Alexander’s short-lived empire quickly collapsed into individual kingdoms ruled by his various generals and there’s a display of coins with heads of those who managed to emerge as new rulers including the Antigonids (who emerged to rule Macedonia), the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Persia. Nonetheless the Greek culture, literacy, models of poetry and writing, models of sculpture and architecture, lived on after him across the whole region.

Because some Greeks called their homeland Hellas and its inhabitants Hellenes, scholars have for hundreds of years referred to the period from 323 until the Romans conquered Egypt in 31 BC, as the Hellenistic period, and art historians refer to the style which developed across it as the Hellenistic style.

The curators include a room on post-Alexander Hellenistic culture in this exhibition because they want us to arrive at it with fresh eyes: instead of the Hellenistic style representing a new synthesis of opposing traditions – which art historians have traditionally seen it as – this exhibition argues that Hellenism was more like the logical continuation of complex cross-cultural contacts and currents which had been swirling across the region for centuries before, despite the insistence to the contrary of Greek propagandists, who scholars for too long have taken too literally.

Room 1. The Achaemenid Empire

So room one attempts to show that the so-called ‘luxury’ of the Persians wasn’t indicative of moral failings, as Greek propagandists liked to claim, but was an intrinsic aspect of their statecraft. In other words, artefacts and objects, ceremonies and rituals which involved or highlighted wealth were important tools in keeping together such a huge and heterogeneous empire. When the Achaemenids conquered a territory, they went out of their way to appease populations. They often left native rulers in place (such as King Arbinas of Lycia for whom the Nereid Monument was built which is viewable elsewhere in the museum) or replaced them with regional administrators called satraps.

The new Persian rulers let their subject peoples continue to practice their religions – but they insisted on the pomp and pageantry which established them firmly as the ultimate rulers, distributing largesse and gifts to confirm the hierarchy of client king or satrap, and emperor. Satraps in turn collected taxes and tributes, and then granted largesse on a local level.

Thus the Persian administrative system court used objects of exquisite luxury not only as markers of authority but as intrinsic means to the administration of the empire. In doing so, a distinctive Persian style developed that was copied by different social classes throughout the empire and spread far beyond, into Greece itself and up into the Balkans. To quote one curator, the ‘Persians wielded “luxury” as a political tool across a vast and complex empire.

The Greek interpretation of Persian ‘luxury’ was a misreading: the Greeks interpreted it through a moralising prism and failed to understand that ostentatious displays of luxury were central to the Persian Empire’s administrative methodology.

Power was demonstrated not just by luxury objects but ceremonies and activities such as holding public audiences, banquets for subject kings and courtiers, and hunting expeditions. The court moved seasonally between the capital Persepolis, Babylon, Susa and Ecbatana, to hold court, administer justice, and confirm his power around his huge multicultural empire. The king travelled with a vast camp including a royal tent equivalent to a palace throne.

According to the Greek writer Xenophon, the Persian emperor would reward client kings and courtiers with gits such as a horse with a gold bit, a necklace of gold, a gold bracelet, a gold scimitar, a Persian coat, and so on.

Persian armlet © The Trustees of the British Museum

The room starts with historical background to the Greco-Persian wars: with Cyrus the Great (died in 530 BC), founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then Darius I (550 to 486 BC) who launched the first invasion of Greece (492 to 492). This failed, he began preparation for another one, but died before it could start and handed on preparations to his son, Xerxes.

Xerxes (486 to 465 BC) led the second attempted invasion of Greece, invading via a bridge he had constructed across the Hellespont (480 BC), and mounting a military campaign marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Although he at one point captured Athens and burned the buildings on the Acropolis (480), Xerxes was defeated at Plataea and, facing revolts in various provinces back in the empire, was forced to retreat from Greece. The defeat of his huge campaign spelled the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenian Empire.

Room 1 displays

Having given a brisk overview of the historical background, the exhibition moves on to cases devoted to various aspects of the central topic, ‘luxury’.

One of the most numerous types of object are so-called rhytons. These are drinking vessels but, the exhibition tells us, were part of a surprisingly ornate ritual. You’re a very senior Persian official and, at a banquet, you hold the rhyton in one hand while a slave fills it with wine. When it reaches a certain level you tip it with one hand and a stream of wine gushes forth from a small hole at the bottom, often concealed amid an elaborate design, and the thing is, you had to direct this stream of wine towards a shallow bowl you’re holding in your other hand. You don’t drink from the rhyton, you drink from the bowl. The rhyton is a luxury object designed to showcase your power and prestige, as is the entire ritual.

Gilt silver rhyton shaped as a griffin © The Trustees of the British Museum

Sound unlikely? Well, there’s a carved stone relief showing precisely this action being carried out at a banquet and there’s several cases full of beautifully worked examples of these wine pourers, crafted into all kinds of animal motifs.

Detail of the Nereid Monument showing Arbinas, king of Lycia, at a banquet using a rhyton and drinking bowl. In multicultural fashion, he sports a Persian beard but is wearing a Greek gown © The Trustees of the British Museum

Other aspects of Persian ‘luxury’ include bottles created to contain rare and precious spices and oils and objects such as the exquisite gold armlet (above), details of peacocks and parasols, jewellery and make-up. The king wore fur-lined coats, a golden torc around his throat, all markers of supreme power.

Persian rulers used chariots for hunting but also as symbols of power and dominance. The most common animals in Persian imagery are the mightiest animal then known, the lion, and the mythical creature, the griffin, both of which are depicted across all media from the Persian Empire.

Gateway 1. The Persian wars

You pass from room 1 to room 2 through a kind of gateway, angular upright and lintel painted jet black to distinguish it from the dazzling white of the rest of the show. In each of these there is an animated map and a couple of artefacts reflecting war. The first one is a 30-second animation showing the path of the two Persian invasions into mainland Greece: the first one from 492 to 490, ending in defeat at the Battle of Marathon; the second one, from 480 to 479, which featured the battle of Thermopylae, the naval battle of Salamis (480) and the Persians’ definitive defeat at Plataea. To set the tone the animation is accompanied by a classic Greek helmet and a figurine of a warrior.

Room 2. Ancient Athens

Again, the room starts with the basic history, describing the development of the Greek city states, especially Athens, which rose to have an empire of its own, complete with an enormous population of slaves and a flock of smaller cities who paid her handsome tributes, as well as wealth from the silver mines discovered in 483.

Bust of Pericles (about 430 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a bust of Pericles the great statesman (495 to 429 BC), whose noble speeches are recorded by the historian Thucydides, and who oversaw the development of Athenian democracy and the building of a new, astonishingly beautiful and mathematically precise temple to Athena Parthenos atop the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was not only a temple but a treasury, a storehouse, packed with treasures of all kinds.

The exhibition backs this up with an illustration of the original Parthenon, brightly painted and decorated, and photos of the modern reconstruction of the enormous statue of Athena Parthenos (‘the virgin’) which was the focal point of the Parthenon and which was a gaudy, brightly painted figure, 12 metres tall, made of ivory, wood and gold.

Reconstruction of the statue of Athena Parthenos at the reconstruction of the entire Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Luxury permitted when it enhanced the prestige of the city.

There’s an inventory of some of the treasure the temple once contained, carved in stone (including the throne of King Xerxes, captured at the Battle of Salamis); and part of a relief from the Elgin Marbles showing women processing towards the temple carrying luxury plates and objects, possibly captured from the Persian army, to devote to the goddess.

This section explains how the Athenians struggled to reconcile their self image as noble, egalitarian democrats with their growing wealth. One solution was to decide ‘luxury’ was permissible so long as it wasn’t attached to individuals but was used to honour that state.

It also explains the socio-political reasons for this aversion to luxury. Democracy was a response to civil conflict. Competitive displays of wealth among Athens’s richest families had led to tensions and violence at the end of the 6th century. When the statesman Kleisthenes introduced his reforms in 508 they were designed to defuse these tensions by enforcing greater equality between citizens. The laws he introduced distributed political responsibility among all adult male citizens in a system they came to call the rule of the people, demos-kratos.

Thus the animadversions of so many writers against personal displays of ‘luxury’ wasn’t based on morality alone, but on a very real fear that they would revive the social conflicts of the late 6th century which had threatened to plunge the city into civil war. Banning private displays of wealth was a political necessity.

Room 2 displays

Take peacocks. Peacocks were a very Persian marker of luxury and caste. They arrived in Athens sometime during the 5th century BC. Expensive to keep and with no practical purpose, they were classic markers of wealth and luxury, which meant their owners had to be careful not to raise democratic hackles. One aristocrat publicly displayed his peacocks once a month: luxury was acceptable so long as it was presented as benefiting the community.

As to Athenian views of the Persians, there’s a hilarious display case showing how the Greeks portrayed them on the many, many vases they made, decorated with line drawings of characters and animals. On earlier pots Persian characters are depicted as wearing trousers and jackets, very barbaric from a Greek perspective, but dignified and noble warriors.

After the triumphs of the Persian war, the depiction of Persians became more mocking and derisive, notably in the image of a defeated Persian sitting side-saddle (effeminate) on a donkey (not a warlike horse) facing backwards.

Green pot showing a Persian warrior seated side-saddle, facing backwards on a donkey (about 470 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Or take the Persian habit of having slaves carry a parasol to protect you from the fierce Middle Eastern sun. In Greek depictions, this was turned into parasols for delicate ladies, associating the Persians with effeminacy. In part this was because women played no part in Athenian politics and so were, in a sense, free to toy with decadent habits. Another one the exhibition points out, is the use of make-up and eyeliner, something Persian men wore but would be unthinkable in a fine, upstanding male Greek citizen.

Fish were another pressure point. Rich Athenians imported from the Persians a taste for rare and exotic fish, something which was publicly disapproved of, as shown here by a vase illustration and a disapproving quote from the playwright Aristophanes. (Compare and contrast with Roman moralists from Cicero onwards singling out ownership of rare fish ponds as one of the first markers of the Roman Republic’s slide into decadence and decay.)

Remember the rhytons which figured largely in the first room? This room has half a dozen examples showing how the Greeks adapted and undermined their grandiloquent originals. For a start they’re generally made from the Greeks’ favourite material, good democratic clay not ostentatious silver. And , as in this example, the bombastic use of an animal’s head (a lion’s) is undermined by the realistic and very Greek narrative depicted on the main body of the vase, above it.

Lion head drinking cup © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a case explaining that the Persians used images of bulls, lions and griffins in their power objects, but that these characteristically Persian motifs were also incorporated by Athenian designers. The exhibition features examples including beautifully crafted jewellery such as pendants and bracelets, and even a wonderful pair of earrings with tiny deer-heads in the shape of rhytons. What had been exemplary markers of Achaemenid royal court have been transformed into high-end fashion accessories for wealthy Athenians.

Interestingly, Persian motifs and depictions of characters wearing classic Persian dress became slowly more stylised and generalised, over time. A century after peace had been made with Persia (i.e. by 350) Persian motifs had been generalised into images and symbols of the vague East, including griffins, Amazons and other legendary animals and peoples.

Gateway 2. Alexander’s conquests

As with the passage from room 1 to room 2, so the passage from room 2 to room 3 is through a narrow, relatively low archway painted jet black in which is embedded a screen showing an animation, in this case showing the path of Alexander’s astonishing victories across Anatolia, into Egypt and then across Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan.

Map showing extent of Alexander’s conquests in 323 BC. As you can see, it almost completely replicates the extent of the Achaemenid Empire at its height (source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Room 3. Hellenistic culture

Born in 356 BC Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia on the death of his father, Philip II, in 336, at the age of 20, and almost immediately set about fighting his rivals in northern and central Greece, wars in which he enjoyed unparalleled success, uniting all of Greece under his rue before pursuing campaigns in Asia Minor, into Egypt and then east into Mesopotamia.

The period from Alexander’s death in 323 down until the overthrow (suicide) of Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 31 BC, is generally referred to as the Hellenistic period.

Alexander not only swept aside the Persian empire but the range and cosmopolitan nature of his empire ushered in a new age in which eastern and western styles of luxury were fused, hence the need for a distinct adjective, ‘Hellenistic’ style, a style which originated in Greece but freely incorporated eastern and oriental subject matter and styles.

Alexander has, of course, been traditionally viewed as a great Greek hero. The curators ask the teasing question, was he? Or could he more accurately be described as the last Achaemenid king? Because when he conquered the Persian Empire he inherited a highly organised, centralised administration. He maintained the existing system of provinces and retained some Persian governors. And then he remodelled images of his rule on the Persian style. He held court in the tent of his foe, Darius III and ordered suppliants to kneel before him, in a most ungreek manner.

In the era after Alexander’s conquests, cities across Asia developed as trading hubs for precious materials such as gold, silvery and ivory, housing specialist craftsmen. True to the spirit of Hellenism, they mixed motifs from Greece, Persia and Egypt.

Room 3 displays

Again there are a couple of panels summarising the history before we move on to look in detail at a range of objects. One of the most stunning is a gold wreath from Turkey, similar to those found in elite tombs in the kingdom of Macedonia. The gold oak wreath consists of two branches, bound together at the front by a model of a bee and with two gold cicadas concealed among the leaves. From the tomb of a local aristocrat in western Turkey, it epitomises the spread of ‘luxury’ across the region and the evolution of cosmopolitan styles in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.

Gold wreath: can you spot the two cicadas hidden among the leaves? One is just above the bottom-left leaf; the ‘bee’ is at the top of the thin circle of gold, with 3 triangular wedges at the bottom, looking more like a tiny owl © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a display case about ivory, explaining the culture’s attitude to elephants, the trade in tusks and the ‘luxury’ good made from them. There’s a set of clothes, trousers and a jacket, representing Hellenistic cultural synthesis. It’s actually a recreation of a Persian riding costume. Persians wore a costume which included cap, coat, tunic and trousers. Alexander liked to mix Persian and Macedonian costume. He adopted the tunic, cap and sash but not the trousers which, as a good Greek, he considered barbaric.

Persian riding costume as recreated by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (2022)

The Panagyurishte Treasure

But pride of place in the third room goes to extraordinary Panagyurishte Treasure from Bulgaria (roughly equivalent to ancient Thrace). Accidentally discovered by three brothers in 1949, these treasures are outstanding examples of ancient metalworking and demonstrate the influence of Persian and Greek luxury across the Balkans.

Remember the Persian rhytons from room one, and how we saw them being echoed and rework by the Athenians in room two? Well, of the nine pieces in the Panagyurishte Treasure, no fewer than eight are rhytons, beautifully crafted gleaming gold. The ninth object, the big circular plate, is one of the shallow bowls which you poured wine into from a rhyton and actually drank from. Still can’t really imagine how you’d do this without spilling loads of wine down your front, unless you were exceptionally dexterous.

Panagyurishte Treasure © National Museum of History, Bulgaria

The Panagyurishte treasures rarely leave Bulgaria, and were last seen in the UK in 1976, so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see them.

Information cabinets: raw materials and techniques

The exhibition is punctuated by information ‘boxes’, white cubes with text printed on them and a little glass pane showing samples of the material being explained. So there’s a box devoted to frankincense which contains samples of the aromatic gum from frankincense trees which was used in antiquity as medicine and incense. Apparently rulers of Arabia sent to the Achaemenid emperor every year about 26,000 tonnes of frankincense as tribute, which was then distributed to rulers across the empire as a symbol of the emperor’s largesse.

There’s a box about silver and its role in Persian artistry, which contains some actual silver ore, ingots and silver coins.

There’s one about the marble the ancient Greeks used to build the Parthenon and other temples, explaining that the particular type they used (‘Pentelic’ marble from Mount Pentelikon, 10k from Athens) contained traces of oxidised iron which gives the buildings that warm glow around sunset time, with some examples of marble fragments.

There were other similar explanations and samples of alabaster (‘a soft, luminous stone prized for its coloration and distinctive veining’) and ivory (the role of elephants in Persian and Greek culture, and the use of ivory, having a display case to themselves, including a cute ivory carving of a satyr’s head, which once decorated the head-rest of a couch).

Some of these info boxes are complemented by videos, each only about 60 seconds long, which give you insight into methods and techniques. There’s an interesting one about techniques used to manufacture a stunning Persian robe (displayed next to it), another one about how to create black glaze pottery ancient Greek style, one showing how the Greeks used glazes to give ceramic pottery a finish which mimicked Persian metalware. Persian metalware = decadent luxury; Greek pottery = democracy and morality.

But the standout one for me, one of the highlights of the exhibition, was a 60-second video showing how the Tyrian purple dye, famous across the Mediterranean for over for millennia, is actually made. I’ve read about it hundreds of times but never before seen a craftsman take one of the murex sea snails, crack it open with a hammer, dexterously extract its hypobranchial gland from the gloopy body and add this to a load of others kept in a jar, where sunlight and decay make them turn a rich purple colour. Once the coloration process is complete, the jar of glands is laid out in the sun to dry, then ground to a fine powder to create the basis of the purple dye, for over a thousand years associated with royalty and power. Because of its labour-intensive production, pure Tyrian dye was more expensive, pound for pound, than gold.

Conclusions

Does the exhibition succeed in its aim of persuading me that there was less of a binary opposition between Greek abstemiousness and Persian ‘luxury’ than previously thought? To be honest, it’s difficult to say. I imagine that most visitors, like me, are just not qualified enough to judge and are entirely in the hands of the curators. If they say so, I guess it must be so.

What does come over, for me at any rate, was a related but different conclusion, which is to do with the profound disconnect between official discourse (Greek texts) and the evidence of the objects on the ground, of the life of people in the broader culture which, the curators claim, strongly contradicts official Greek propaganda.

It made me wonder if it’s always true, if it’s a rule of human societies, that governments, almost by their nature, have views and official versions which fetishise a nation’s culture and heritage and so on – but that these will always clash with the far more messy and complex realities of life on the ground, of how people actually live, with the language and artefacts and habits and customs of actual populations, which often don’t fit into anybody’s neat categories.

To put it another way: that, throughout history, societies are always more multicultural than their leaders want or imagine them to be.*

Other rooms

The Greeks and Persians are favourite attractions at the museum, and at the end of the exhibition there’s a list of rooms where you can see objects related to the exhibition, being:

• Nereid monument (room 17)
• Parthenon (room 18)
• ancient Athens (room 19)
• The world of Alexander (room 22)
• ancient Iran (room 52)
• Mesopotamia 1500 to 539 BC (room 55)

* This thought has behind it the evidence and analysis presented in Michael Ignatieff’s trilogy of books about nations and nationalism.

Related links

• Luxury and power: Persia to Greece continues at the British Museum until 13 August 2023

More British Museum reviews

• More British Museum reviews
• Tyrian purple Wikipedia article