Esther and the Politics of Negotiation: Public and Private Spaces and the Figure of the Female Royal Counselor

4. Esther and Representations of Persian Royal Women

4 Esther and Representations of Persian Royal Women We cannot overestimate the implications of the actions of royal and noble wives could take. Their independence can be observed in the Fortification texts. Royal women enjoyed a position which allowed them free disposition of the produce of their estates reflected in their ability to give their own orders to officials, to use their own seals and to employ their own bureaucratic staff to execute their affairs. These women also had their own centres of manufacture and their workforce. Babylonian evidence suggested that similar economic activities were untaken by noble women. . . . With the information provided by our primary source, the Persepolis Fortifications texts, it has become evident that royal women acted within a clearly defined spectrum of activities, being involved in the administration of economic affairs, and engaging the same officials as the king. Their ability to travel, the travel rations, the variety of places they controlled require us to recognize the organization and structure that lies behind such a division of wealth. . . . On the basis of this evidence it is unthinkable that the women at the Achaemenid court were only an undifferentiated mass leading a life behind 83 palace walls without any function or purpose. –—Maria Brosius, WOMEN IN ANCIENT PERSIA (559–331 BC) As we saw in the preceding chapter, the book of Esther represents a highly fictionalized account, one that deliberately employs exaggerations and absurdities about Persian life for literary purposes. Thus, it is likely that there is little correspondence between Esther’s narrative portrayal and the lives of actual Persian royals. There are, however, two significant reasons to look at various sources about Persian royalty and, in particular, at the way gender figures into them. First, we have already seen that the writer of Esther is familiar with at least some details of Persian life. There is enough of a verisimilitude to certain aspects of the Persian court to make the setting seem plausible, even if the historical details do not hold up under scrutiny. This suggests some knowledge about life in Susa under the Persian Empire, whether this information was taken from written sources, personal knowledge, or secondhand experience. Second, Esther draws on a variety of literary conventions. This narrative is not told in isolation from other literature but, rather, borrows motifs and stylistic features from a variety of texts and genres. Thus, there is reason to suspect that the author of Esther was familiar with tropes about Persian royal women. Both the familiarity with the general historical context and the use of literary tropes allow us to examine whether the indigenous Persian sources or Greek historiographic texts provide a framework of public and private that might have impacted the story of Esther. Sources for Persian History Finding sources for the history of the Persian period presents an interesting challenge. Pierre Briant notes this challenge: “One of the remarkable peculiarities of Achaemenid history is that, unlike most conquering peoples, the Persians left no written testament of their own history, in the narrativesense of the word.”1 The Persians did leave written records, including administrative archives and royal inscriptions, but nothing in the way of historiography. For 1. Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 5. 84 | Esther and the Politics of Negotiation this reason, historians have often relied on Greek accounts of Persia. Use of Greek sources to reconstruct Persia’s history is not without challenges, however, because of the ongoing wars and hostility between Persia and Greece, finally ending with Alexander’s conquest of Persia in the fourth century bce. Briant points out the irony that this situation has produced: “One must reconstruct the narrative thread of Achaemenid history from the writings of their [the Persians’] subjects and their enemies.”2 Despite this challenge, we can examine the way gender is represented in Greek texts and observe whether this representation corresponds to the picture that we have from various Persian records of royal women’s activities. Persian Royal Women in Greek and Persian Sources STEREOTYPES ABOUT PERSIAN MEN AND WOMEN The reliance on Greek sources for Persian history has had a significant impact on the way in which royal women of the Achaemenid period have been portrayed by scholars. As Maria Brosius demonstrates with respect to Persian royal women, the stories Greeks told not only were based on the perceived...