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Persians: The Age of the Great Kings

The central idea of Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians: The Age of the Great Kings is simple. The Achaemenid Persian 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 Darius instead 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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