Not so long ago, when an adjective immediately preceded the word “despotism” in an English sentence, the adjective in question, if it were not either “enlightened” or “absolute,” was most likely to have been “Oriental.” While Europe has had no shortage of its own tyrannical monarchs and totalitarian dictators, it is with the Near and Middle East that imperious, ruthless and absolute rule in its pre-modern forms has been particularly associated in the western imagination. Perhaps the locus classicus for this western apperception, described by Edward Said as the “barbarian stereotype” of the Asiatics, can be traced all the way back to the fifth century BCE, and Aeschylus’ Persae. With the defeat of the Persian forces at Marathon, the chorus of Persian nobles sings this refrain:

Thereafter, the West suspected the Persians of being “sensual, irrational, effeminate, cruel and weak—in short, servile by nature.” Herodotus, too, admiring though he was of some of the virtues of the Persians, likewise remarked upon their public display of obeisance to power, noting that a man of much lower rank prostrates himself when coming in the presence of a dignitary. Guardedness of speech, Aeschylus’ passage makes clear, was seen as a necessary corollary to such gestures of servility. Afterwards, Aristotle would formulate the matter categorically, contrasting four types of kingship: that of heroic times; the Greek elective dictatorship (aisumnēteia); Spartan kingship or “hereditary permanent generalship rule”; and that of the Barbarians: