A new exhibition of ancient Persian material at the British Museum has brought out the usual affirmations about how wonderfully humane and civilised Persians were, and how vicious the Greeks were in painting a picture of them as slavish, effeminate subjects of an oriental despotism that has helped pervert Western views of the East ever since.
It is true that, since the Persians left no accounts of themselves except the usual boastful lists of royal achievements (Darius talks merrily about the number of enemies he impaled), we largely rely on Greeks for information about them, especially Herodotus (died c. 430 bc), who investigated why Greeks and Persians fought the Persian Wars (490-79 bc). He has much of interest to say about the Persians. He claims that they learned only how to ride, hunt and tell the truth and tells us, ‘Their habit is to debate their most important decisions when they are drunk. Whatever they agree is submitted for a second opinion by the head of the household the next day, when they are sober. If they still agree on it, it is done, but if not, they abandon it. And whatever they agree on sober, they reconsider drunk.’ This, of course, is a policy advocated by the new government ‘Respect’ adviser Louise Casey, who recently suggested some ministers might perform better if ‘they turned up in the morning pissed’, adding, ‘Doing things sober is no way to get things done.’
The Persians under Cyrus the Great and Cambyses certainly built up their empire, stretching from the Oxus to Egypt and Turkey, in an incredibly short time (c. 550-520 bc), and learned fast how to administer it. Cambyses’ successor Darius was instrumental in developing speedy communication networks, secure fiscal controls and so on.
But in two senses critical to ancient Greek (and subsequently Western) understanding of how states should be run, there is no evidence that Persians had any sense of citizenship and its associated rights and duties — they were not an urban people anyway — nor of the importance of the freedom of the individual either. These deficiencies are at the heart of the Greek case against them.
Greeks are constantly accused of ‘unthinkingly endorsing a negative stereotype of the barbarian Other’. Doubtless the barbarian Other repaid the compliment: but the question is, were the Greeks right? In these respects, they were.
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