خشونت و مُثله کردن بدن در ایرانِ هخامنشی
منبع:
پژوهش در تاریخ سال یازدهم بهار و تابستان ۱۴۰۰ شماره ۳۰
37 - 66
حوزههای تخصصی:
It is well recognised by scholars that in the ancient Greek mind the theme of the revengeful woman was as pervasive as it was persuasive. Fiona McHardy, for instance, has noted that the idea of the foreign or barbarian woman enacting gross acts of vengeance is pretty much routinely presented in Greek literature, and that barbarian women are depicted using specific ‘womanly’ tactics of persuasion, deception and patience in order to ensure that their revenge is both effective and devastating. Robert Rollinger’s recent investigation into human violence in Herodotus has noted that throughout the Histories, in which no fewer than ninety-two acts of violence are to be found, forty-two are perpetrated by Greece’s natural enemies, the Medes and Persians. Of these forty-two incidents, five are enacted by women of the royal house of Persia and of those five, four can be assigned as being specifically vendetta-motivated. The connection between the barbarian milieu and violence seems to be essential to the Herodotean view of history, but of all barbarian peoples, it is the Persians who stand out as the perpetrators of the acts of particularly violent despotism. And of all the Persian brutalities, those instigated by women tend to be the most violent, motivated as they are by purely the desire for revenge.