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Historians have often overlooked the stoning of the Athenian Lykides in Herodotus 9.5, despite it being a rare and shocking event. Those who have treated the topic of Greek stoning have tended to present it as somewhat “democratic:” it involves a judgment of the demos against a threatening individual (Pease 1907; Gras 1984; Rollinger 2004). But this normalization of stoning as an acceptably Athenian form of violence ignores the fact that it seems to have been extremely rare, and the repetition of Lykides’ story through the Roman period demonstrates the shock value it carried. Judging by the staying power of the story and our earlier dearth of evidence, Lykides may have been the first person stoned in Athens. Only one scholar, Vincent Rosivach (1987), acknowledges the cruelty and extremity of the execution, and he demonstrates that the Athenians rapidly recast the event as legal rather than mob violence in order to assuage their collective conscience. However, no scholar has yet asked why the Athenians would turn this unprecedented form of execution against Lykides. I build on Rosivach’s analysis of this action as unusual and subsequently revised in the cultural mindset in order to argue that the stoning of Lykides was inflicted as a Persian punishment on a Persian sympathizer. Herodotus and later authors do not present the stoning as Persian because they reflect a revised understanding of this event through which the Athenians cast themselves as acting in a legitimately Greek fashion.

Herodotus may reflect the revised version of this event, but elsewhere in his Histories he clearly associates such violent punishments with non-Greeks. Pausanias’ scandalized reaction to the suggestion that he should behead a Persian enemy (9.78-9) reveals the idea that certain forms of violence are cast as either socially acceptable or barbaric in the Greek mindset. These depictions of undue violence most often involve the Persians, who commit more than double the number of cases than any other ethnic group (Rollinger 2004). In particular, two of the three other cases of stoning in Herodotus are directed against Persians (5.37-9; 9.120). There is also a suggestion in Aeschylus’ Eumenides that stoning is associated with barbaric, and specifically Persian, execution techniques; it is included in a provocative list of practices known to be Persian (186-90). I conclude that stoning was viewed by early 5th century Athenians as Persian, and that the impetus to stone Lykides came from the desire to give a Persian sympathizer a demonstration of the society he had embraced. This interpretation also helps to explain the stoning of Lykides’ wife and children, who might have been more likely to suffer this fate in a Persian context. Subsequently, stoning began to be presented as acceptable within Greek culture in order to avoid the taint of having committed Persian violence. There is a contrast in the presentation of stoning in authors who predate Lykides, such as Aeschylus, and those who followed. Lykides, by inspiring the importation of a Persian practice, fundamentally and permanently changed the Greek attitude toward stoning.