Alexander the Persian – 05/08/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

The fragility of human memory is a thing that gives me chills. And sometimes it also gives me an overwhelming urge to hand out plecos — for example, when I see people talking about the Covid-19 pandemic as if it were ancient history, situated somewhere between the woolly mammoths and the reign of Alexander. , the big. There’s nothing easier than turning the memory of the living to dust: the only ingredient needed is time.

I was awestruck by an extreme example of this risk at the very end of reading the monumental “Persians: The Age of the Great Kings”, by Welsh historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. The work is a delight: an account of the first incarnation of the Persian Empire—roughly between 550 BC and 330 BC—that manages to adopt an essentially “persocentric” perspective on that imperial history. And this despite the inevitable use of Western sources (primarily Greek and, to a much lesser extent, Roman) to reconstruct what happened under Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and other rulers.

No, King Xerxes had nothing to do with the bald, androgynous figure in a golden loincloth embodied by Rodrigo Santoro in the “300” films and in the homonymous comics created by Frank Miller. The blatant fabrications of “300” are just the latest stage in a process of distortion that began with the Greek Herodotus of Halicarnassus, patron of Western historians.

Don’t get me wrong: Herodotus was far from demonizing or dehumanizing most Persians. When we check its basic information—names, dates, places—with archaeological data, Greek is right more often than wrong. But he places the wars between Greeks and Persians at the center of his narrative and portrays Xerxes’ defeat of Greece in 480 BC as an immense disaster for the empire. From the Persian perspective, however, it was little more than a border skirmish—so much so that the imperial domains continued to function quite well for another 150 years.

Astonishing indeed is what happened later, when Alexander the Great and his Macedonians conquered the Persian Empire in 330 BC—and much later, when a new incarnation of the Iranian empire, after lasting four hundred years, was destroyed by the advance of Islam, in 651 AD

As far as we know, the Persians of these periods did not develop a tradition of narrative history such as that of Herodotus. Or else what was left of that tradition disappeared in the midst of the disaster of the invasions.

What is certain is that the historical memory of the first Persian Empire has simply gone up in smoke. In the epic poem “Shahnameh” (“The Book of Kings”), written around AD 1000, there is simply no mention of Cyrus, the first emperor, or even of Xerxes. All that was left was “Dara” – Darius III, the king defeated by Alexander.

In the poetic version of the story, however, Iskandar (Alexander) would be half brother of Dara, having been begotten by the father of the Persian emperor with the daughter of the king of “Rom” (Rome: even the Macedonians and Romans had been made one by the narrative). Iskandar would have been raised by his mother in the West and returned to Persia, to regain a throne that, strictly speaking, was rightfully his. Betrayed and wounded by his followers, King Dara would have gladly handed the empire over to his half-brother when he was on his deathbed.

It is noteworthy that this poem is, to this day, the national epic of Iran. I can hardly imagine the shock of the Persian emperors if, revived, they saw how their distant descendants reimagined their ancestors. The links that bind us to the past are too tenuous. Every effort to keep them from fraying is precious.

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