Up to this point, we have concentrated mainly on Greek relations with other Greeks, but, despite their deeply entrenched insularity, the Greeks did live in a world peopled by non-Greeks as well, and were often brought face to face with cultures with quite different cultural assumptions from their own. This often complicated political relations as the Greeks were forced to grapple, with limited success, with new kinds of relations based as they were on different types of exchange, and different exchange repertoires from their own.

In this chapter we shall look specifically at relations between Greeks and Persians, to consider why they were successful when they were, but more particularly why they so often failed, and the role of different repertoires of exchange in contributing to this failure.

Persian gift-giving

Diplomatic activity between Greece and Persia in the hundred or so years we are considering was dominated by the interaction of individuals, and not just any individuals, but men who were in a personal relationship with each other. Persia was a monarchy in which the King, although not divine, ranked far above his subjects.