Some thoughts on the debate about the Persian Empire, the ancient Greek Classical authors, and the “New Achaemenid historians”
The debate between the “New Achaemenid historians” and their critics is very interesting, as it has not only scholarly, but also ideological implications. So, here are my thoughts about it:
1/ I agree that one should not see today the Persian Empire exclusively through the eyes of the ancient Greeks and that the civilization of ancient Iran deserves fully to be studied for its own importance and merits, not just as some kind of historical opposite of the Greek civilization (this is I think particularly true not only concerning the political and social history of ancient Iran, but also and perhaps above all concerning the very interesting intellectual developments linked with the formation, expansion, and consolidation of the great Iranian religion of zoroastrianism). On the other hand, there is a wealth of information on the Achaemenid Empire in the Classical Greek sources and it would be a serious loss if these sources were simply discarded from the historiography of ancient Persia for essentially ideological reasons. Moreover, the Iranian record is so fragmentary and selective that, without the Greek sources, we would have had practically no knowledge not only about the Persian Wars and other wars of the Achaemenids in the West of their empire, but also about very important events of the domestic history of Persia, like the serious crises after the death of Artaxerxes I and of Darius II. We should not forget also that, in the cases in which events of the Persian history described by the Greek sources are also described by extant non-Greek sources, despite some differences the non-Greek sources tend to confirm what the Greek sources say, as it happens for example with the events from the last year of Cambyses to the consolidation of the power of Darius in Herodotus and in the Behistun inscription, or with the murder of Xerxes in the Greek and Babylonian sources. This confirmation, although partial, corroborates more generally the reliability of the Greek sources on ancient Persia.
2/ Of course the Greek sources are not totally unbiased toward the Persian Empire. But the Iranian sources are not unbiased either, as they are dominated by Achaemenid royal ideology and propaganda. The same is true with other non-Greek sources, mainly Egyptian and Babylonian, which mostly express the attitudes of the local elites toward the Persian rule, attitudes either of eagerness to collaborate with the Persian masters or, on the contrary, of covered criticism toward them.
To return to the Greek biases, obviously most Greek authors see the Persian Empire from outside (with the exception of Ctesias, who lived for some years in the Persian court, and partially of Xenophon, who was for a brief period of time mercenary in the army of the wannabe usurper of the Persian throne Cyrus the Younger). Therefore, they don’t have experience of the inner functioning of the Empire and of the Persian heartland. Moreover, the cultural differences between Greeks and Persians were the cause of not few confusions and misunderstandings in the “translation” of information from the one culture to the other. But of course the most important cause of negative biases toward Persia in the Greek sources is the antagonism between Persians and Greeks, an antagonism caused by the expansionism of the Persian Empire and its efforts first to subjugate and, after the failure of this attempt, to divide and control the Greek city-states. From this point of view, the Greek attitudes toward the Persian Empire have, despite their biases, their value, as they express the outlook on the Achaemenid Empire of a people who managed to resist the Achaemenid expansionism. Or perhaps should we reject more generally as prejudiced and valueless what peoples who managed to resist powerful empires have said and preserved about these empires? But I think that it would be absurd and historically dangerous to adopt such a position.
Moreover, there is not just prejudice in what the Greek sourses say about the Persian Empire and the Persians as people. The ancient Greeks of the Classical era were a people who appreciated knowledge, but also a people having the intelligence to understand that it is better to know your enemy or adversary. That’s why there is often in the Greek classical sources a serious attempt to convey genuine information, to clarify things, and to understand the Persians and their empire. The seriousness of such endeavors varies of course in each author, and for instance Herodotus’ engagement with the Persians as historian of the rise of the Persian Empire and of the Persian Wars is much more serious than that of Isocrates, orator and propagandist of Panhellenism and of a Greek campaign of conquest of Asia. Of course, even in Herodotus unreliability of intermediaries and cultural differences cause in several cases distortions in the transmission of information from Persian sources. But even in these cases most often a kernel of truth is preserved and there is the possibility of reconstruction of a better image, through combination and comparison of what Herodotus says with what results from other, non-Greek sources.
3/ The ideological underpinning of the efforts of the “New Achaemenid historians” is a negative view on the ancient Greeks as forefathers of the racism and colonialism of the modern era, the purported need of de-hellenization and decolonization of the historiography of ancient Persia, and the supposed collective guilt of the field of Classics for the propagation of racist and imperialist ideas in history.
But, first of all, all these notions about the roots of modern colonialism and racism in ancient Greece are for many reasons unfounded. The Greeks were the people of the Antiquity the most intellectually engaged with the foreigners, going beyond the caricature and vilification which so often characterized the picture of the foreigner in other civilizations like Egypt and Babylonia, and, even if one can find proto-racist aspects in some Greek sources, such attitudes are far from being found only among the Greeks (expression of racist mentalities toward foreigners is for instance so frequent in the official Pharaonic record). Moreover, the engagement of the Greeks with the non-Greeks was something far more complex than just the expression of a superiority complex and of snubbish rejection, as the most superficial reading of Herodotus can show. On the other hand, Western colonialism and racism of the modern era have their roots in the interests and mentalities of Western European nations and it would be ridiculous to admit that slavers and colonizers have chosen their path of action because they were assiduous readers of the Greek classics (it is another question that intellectual proponents of racism, colonialism, and modern slavery have tried to appropriate the Greek heritage for their own reasons). Anyway, I find unscholarly the rejection of the ancient Greek classics as historical source on the ground of purely ideological and unfounded reasons, of the type that the Greeks would be the inventors of racism and colonialism…
To return to our more specific subject, the purpose of some to “decolonize” the historiography of ancient Persia through the rejection of the ancient Greek sources is a bizarre inversion of the historical reality. I say this because obviously the Greeks of the classical era (before Alexander) did not try to colonize Persia and most Greek classical sources reflect either the fight of the Greek city-states to maintain their freedom face to the Persian imperial expansion, or its historical aftermath. It would be thus ridiculous to read the Greek accounts of the Persian Wars as colonial history (with the Greek as colonizers and the Persians as colonized!). On the contrary, the story of this fight of the Greeks to preserve their independance and freedom face to the most powerful empire the world had known till then and its ambition for further expansion and domination is a great story which has inspired and will continue to inspire people fighting for freedom and for dignity around the world. I don’t think that we have the right to misinterpret and distort this story, transforming it into some kind of archetypal myth of the modern Western colonialism and racism, as some do today. And of course what I say has nothing to do with stereotypical distinctions between “West” and “East”: tyranny in its different forms was a Western phenomenon too, and history proves that Eastern peoples can be excellent fighters for freedom. But we should not lose from sight the real stakes of the Persian Wars and of their historiography.
Moreover, despite clichés and exaggerations, Ι believe that the ancient Greeks got some important things right in their views on the Persian Empire. I say this because, if the Greek reports about the Persian “decadence” may be exaggerated and the Persian Empire remained very powerful despite its defeat in the Persian Wars, historical experience shows that in the courts of in theory all-powerful monarchs you find more often than not arrogance, corruption, sycophancy, dishonesty, and intrigues, a reality which corroborates to an important degree the reliability of much of the Greek accounts about the Persian court. More essentially, although the Greek claims that the Persians were “slaves” of their kings were exaggerated (and very probably meant as literary devices), it is true that the political structure of the Persian Empire was characterized by overconcentration of huge power in the hands of one person (the Great King), whereas the Greeks valued rule of law, freedom of the citizens, and distribution of power among several bodies, and in the more advanced cases of city-states, ideas of political equality among the citizens and of popular government. To put it a bit differently, the Persians have resolved the problem of political authority through recourse to the regime of monarchy, moreover a monarchy which with the expansion of the Persian Empire and the accumulation of power and wealth in the hands of the Great King took more despotic characteristics, whereas the Greeks have experimented with a broad range of political regimes, that one could qualify as constitutional/republican and in some cases democratic. Now, despite the important flaws and limitations of these experiments (above all the existence of slavery- but all the important ancient civilizations knew slavery and similar situations of dependence and oppression), I believe that the Greek political experience expressed something more advanced and far more promising for the political and intellectual progress of humanity than the Achaemenid monarchy, and I think that we should not forget this ideological aspect of the Persian Wars. This does not mean that the ancient Iranian civilizations were not very important and it does not make accurate stereotypical views about some eternal and essentialist opposition of a republican/democratic “West” to a despotic “East”. But I think that what I have written desribes well the ideological dimension and historical importance of the Greco-Persian hostilities of the 5th century BCE.
4/ I don’t want to be totally dismissive of the school of “New Achaemenid historiography”, I sympathize with efforts to study the civilization of ancient Iran for its own importance and not just as the enemy of the ancient Greeks, and I don’t reject the contributions of the same school to the better understanding of ancient Persia and Iran. But what I see is that some of the “New Achaemenid historians” not only lose from sight some critical historical, intellectual and ideological aspects of the Greek-Persian conflict, not only are totally unsympathetic toward the Greek struggle for freedom face to the Achaemenid imperial expansionism, but they tend to idealize the Persian Empire and to see the Greco-Persian conflicts through exclusively Persian (imperial) eyes. However, the Persian Empire has been founded on the violence of conquest and, although the Achaemenids had remarkable political acumen and flexibility, they could also be ruthless and cruel when such attitudes could serve their imperial agenda. Moreover, I don’t think that the presentation of rose-tinted images of benevolent imperial absolute monarchy and the idealization of imperialisms of the past are in our days intellectual attitudes political neutral and without serious dangers.
