Historical Studies (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2019

 

The Greek Ancestry of the Persians: An Eponymic Myth That Transcended Ethnic Boundaries (Abstract)

 

Xu Xiaoxu

 

In Greek, the invented names denoting the Persians and Medes and the name of the royal house of Achaemenids, from the eponymous Achaemenes, all came about via folk etymology. In a lineage myth of the early archaic period, the name of Perse/Perseis, daughter of Oceanus and wife of the sun-god Helios, may already have been an eponym for Persian, while her granddaughter Medeia and Medeia’s son Medeios furnished an eponym for the Medes. As the Persian empire expanded into the Aegean world, a myth emerged under which Perses, son of that Perseus who was born to Zeus and Dana, gave his name to the eponymous Persians. The Persians were not only aware of this myth but made use of it in their relations with the Greek city-states, arguing with the Greeks about their ancestral line. As a classic eponymous ancestry, this generated the myth that Achaemenes was the son of Perseus. The version which had it that Perses was the son of Medea may have been created in the early phase of the Persian invasion of the Aegean region. The confrontation between the Athenian Empire and Persia then gave rise to the myth that Medea and Aegeus had had a son, Medeius, circumstances that also produced the version of the lineage which made Achaemenes the son of Aegeus. The Persians’ eponymous genealogy is a myth that challenges the theory that imagined kinship ties are the decisive criterion for defining an ethnic group.