Amazonomachy scene, from Daphne, a suburb of Antioch-on-the-Orontes, second half of the 4th century CE, Louvre Museum. Image from Carole Raddato’s flickr.
“The Amazones of the Doiantian plain [by the river Thermodon on the Black Sea] were by no means gently, well-conducted folk; they were brutal and aggressive, and their main concern in life was war. War, indeed, was in their blood, daughters of Ares as they were and of the Nymphe Harmonia, who lay with the God in the depths of the Akmonian (Acmonian) Wood and bore him girls who fell in love with fighting.”
The central idea of Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians: The Age of the Great Kings is simple. The AchaemenidPersian Empire, which flourished from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, was unjustly smeared by its Greek enemies as barbaric and effeminate. Greek propaganda was then repeated, and amplified, by subsequent generations of European colonialists, who used it to justify their own views of racial superiority and imperialism. Now, however, we possess enough native accounts to get at the “Persian Version” (the phrase is borrowed from a poem by Robert Graves) of Achaemenid history. It is this version that Llewellyn-Jones aims to give us.
Now, however, we possess enough native accounts to get at the “Persian Version” … of Achaemenid history. It is this version that Llewellyn-Jones aims to give us.
There is a good deal of truth in the author’s idea, but in his eagerness to set the record straight, Llewellyn-Jones has produced a work that often feels less like a fresh perspective on a misunderstood people and more like an extended polemic against Western historiography in general and the Ancient Greeks in particular. Usually, this polemic takes the form of overly harsh comments (the fact that Westerners today say Dariusinstead of the more authentic Dārayavaush, for instance, is “a sad indictment of the corrupting process of Western historiography,” [p. 8]), which are annoying - as in the severeness that the author describes is debatable - but can ultimately be accepted. More consequentially, the author sometimes misrepresents his sources while raising these harsh comments. Consider, for example, Llewellyn-Jones’s paraphrase of a scene from Herodotus:
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