HISTORY
Justin Marozzi
Persians The Age of the Great
Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Wildfire £25 pp448
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, a
professor of ancient history
at Cardiff University, has a bee
in his bonnet. The problem is
this. The history of Persia’s
Achaemenid Empire, the
world’s first superpower from
550–330BC, is told almost
exclusively from a western
perspective. It relies on the
accounts, and tall tales, of
classical authors such as
Herodotus, the world’s first
historian, irrepressible Greek
storyteller and, for Llewellyn-
Jones, an unconscionable
Persian-basher. The result
is nothing less than “a
historiographic smear
campaign” in which the
Persians have been cast as
“the tyrannical oppressors
of the free world”.
What to do? Unlike the
ancient Greeks, the Iranians
did not write formal histories
before the Islamic Middle
Ages. They approached the
past with a more fluid, less
precise blend of song, poetry,
epic and fable. Which means
academics like Llewellyn-
Jones searching for non-
western sources must grope
around to piece together an
alternative narrative.
In Persians, he throws
himself into this quest
with enthusiasm and
impressive, lightly worn
erudition. He hunts down
Achaemenid inscriptions on
tombs and statues, surveys
the artistic and latest
archaeological evidence,
and investigates the literary
record to tell a gripping and
more Persian-centric story.
After a certain amount of
scene-setting, the central
thrust of his narrative takes us
from Cyrus the Great, founder
of the mighty, world-spanning
Achaemenid dynasty, through
the reigns of his successors,
foremost among them —
because they play starring
roles in Herodotus’s Histories
— the Great Kings Cambyses,
Darius and Xerxes. During
his long reign from around
550–530BC, Cyrus, King
of the Four Corners of the
World, and widely revered in
Iran to this day, built up an
empire stretching from the
historical imagination, he
opens up the resplendent
ceremonial capital of
palace-filled Persepolis in
vivid set pieces.
If there is a problem here, it
is that in his understandable
desire to put the Persians
front and centre with their
own stories, Llewellyn-Jones
ends up doing a reverse
Herodotus and indulging insome gratuitous Greek-
bashing, with a spot of class
warfare thrown in for good
measure. He writes
dismissively about “Greek
ideals of ‘freedom’ (whatever
that meant)”. Gardening,
a magnificent Persian art
form, was something “the
pedestrian Greeks” never
understood. When
Artaxerxes II married two of
his daughters, this was not the
“atrocious perversion” most
Greeks considered it but “a
dynastically driven precaution
against imperial blood
dilution”. Hmm.
Sometimes the robust
defence of all things Persian
tips over into unnecessary
apology. Herodotus relates the
disgusting torture of Xerxes’s
sister-in-law after a palatial
love affair went terribly wrong.
The woman’s breasts were cut
off and fed to dogs, and her
nose, ears, lips and tongue
were sliced off. “We must be
careful not to judge it too
harshly,” Llewellyn-Jones says.
When Darius III fled from
Gaugamela as Alexander
personally led a cavalry
charge against him, Llewellyn-
Jones dismisses the charges
of cowardice levelled by most
classical historians. “Darius’
only thought was for the future
of his empire,” he writes. How
can he possibly know that?
Maybe the Great King, as he
abandoned one of the largest
armies ever assembled, was a
coward. More likely we will
never know.
Llewellyn-Jones starts to
bring his story to an elegiac
close, only to then spoil it in a
final flourish by railing against
the “international threats
to Iran’s liberty” and the
“scaremongering” western
media — he has already had a
go at “mainstream western
historians”. Sadly he has
nothing to say about the
domestic threats to Iran’s
liberty from one of the most
freedom-crushing regimes on
the planet, nor can he bring
himself to discuss press
freedom there — Reporters
Without Borders ranked the
country 174th out of 180 in- Perhaps these omissions
are not entirely unexpected
from a scholar who got into
trouble last year after
tweeting: “A Welsh Tory.
The lowest form of life.”
As far as academic views
go these days, this is about as
mainstream as it gets. Stick to
the history, Professor! c
the Hellespont in fury and
throwing iron foot-chains into
the water, as Herodotus had
it during Xerxes’s ill-fated
invasion of Greece in 480BC,
the Great King was more likely
propitiating the waters
with prayers, hymns, gold
necklaces and torques.
The chapters on the
Achaemenid cultural
contribution to world
civilisation are excellent. The
sophistication and tolerance
of imperial administration
were, like the superb roads
that crisscrossed the empire,
hugely ahead of their time.
He takes us along with the
nomadic royal court as
it moves from the cool
mountains of Ecbatana in
the head-roasting heat of
summer, to Babylon and Susa
for winter sun. And through
archaeological evidence andPAUL WILLIAMS/ALAMYMediterranean and the
Dardanelles in the west
to the Indus River in the
east. It was the largest the
world had ever seen.
The story continues with
a consistently entertaining
examination of the far less
familiar monarchs, including
Artaxerxes I to IV, Darius II
and, finally, Darius III, whose
rout by Alexander the Great
at the Battle of Gaugamela in
331BC brought the whole
creaking Achaemenid edifice
tumbling down.
At his best Llewellyn-Jones
is very good at righting the
record. He shows, for instance,
that far from being the
unhinged maniac depicted
by Herodotus, Cambyses
was respectful towards the
bull-worshipping Egyptian
religion when he invaded in
525BC. Rather than whippingKings of the world
The Persians have been the victims of Greek propaganda for
three millennia. But does this revisionist account go too far?
He ends up
indulging in
gratuitous
Greek-bashing
Protecting the empire
Darius I’s royal bodyguards10 April 2022 27