“Herodotus was the authority for Persian history,” Arnaldo Momigliano retrospectively mentioned, looking back at his youth. “It was a dogma that if you wanted to study Persian history you had to know Greek.” He went on to say, “Persian history is still in the hands of Herodotus.”Footnote ¹

Today, however, Herodotus is no longer the authority figure he was when Momigliano delivered his lecture in 1961/62. The study of Persian history, especially its association with Greek literature, was involved in a serious dispute in the 1980s, the age of post-colonialism. The Achaemenid History Workshop, which was organized in 1981, actively questioned the validity of Greek sources for Persian studies. Its initiator, Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, published her ideas to that effect in the early volumes of the proceedings of the workshop's conferences. The traditional picture of Persian history was, according to Sancisi-Weerdenburg, a one-sided or “Hellenocentric” image, due to its exceeding dependency on Greek historiography; it was full of clichés such as decadence, harem-life, luxury and intrigues. She urged us to “dehellenise and decolonialise” this “Europe-centered perception,” by laundering prejudiced Greek texts.Footnote ² Is this method, which is extremely sceptical and distrustful of Greek sources, nevertheless really useful for understanding Persian history? In his book, Thomas Harrison intends to critically examine this new approach, which has come into being over the last thirty years.

This essay consists of a preface (pp. 11–18) and six main chapters, of which the final one is the conclusion. The first chapter, “Against the Grain” (pp. 19–37), discusses the view of modern historians on Greek literature, the “grain”. Historians sometimes complain about Greek writers' transmission of distorted information pertaining to the Persian Empire, and their ignorance of what modern historians are really interested in. Yet Harrison considers these statements of criticism as unreasonable; according to him, some Greek writers must have had better knowledge of the Persian Empire than modern historians give them credit for, and we would be well served by a closer reading of their sources. In front of the “grain” in the barren field of information, not to “harvest” that which does exist would be unprofitable for the further understanding of Persian history, he contends.

Due to the scarcity of sources left for us, modern Persian historians have to fill in gaps by their acts of imagination. This means that a number of negative judgements of the Persian Empire can be easily converted into positive ones, not necessarily by the introduction of new evidence but by the “slightest rhetorical redirection”. For instance, Xerxes' withdrawal from Greece after the sea battle of Salamis used to be characterized as a reckless “flight” before, but nowadays, some scholars describe it as a “strategic decision” from the perspective of the Persian Empire. The second chapter, “The Persian Version” (pp. 38–56), points out that this shifting of scholarly viewpoints and judgements shows the new emergence of “Iranocentrism”, which takes the place of the “Hellenocentrism” that came before it.

“Family Fortune”, the third chapter (pp. 57–72), is focused on the behaviours of kings and queens in Greek literature. Greek writers, like all other writers, have a strong interest in those things which seems strange and therefore curious to them. They recorded events which may at first sight appear to be cruel executions and absurd activities on the part of kings, as well as apparent political interference and intrigues orchestrated by queens at the court, with the support of eunuchs. Modern Persian historians, who are usually sceptical of these kinds of Greek accounts, try to distill and rationalize them in a Near Eastern context, or go even further by dismissing them as fiction altogether. Harrison, in contrast, reminds us that Greek writers did not invent their accounts in the absence of any foundation; we need to distance ourselves from any extreme vision, by looking at Greek sources through a “dispassionate lens”. The discussion of this chapter is based on the author's belief in Greek writers and their superior knowledge, which is a main subject of this essay.

Previous scholars sometimes dealt with the Persian Kings as Oriental despots, but this image has now been altered into one of a tolerant and benign ruler; Cambyses and Xerxes in particular experienced a significant change in scholarly assessment. As Harrison mentioned already in the second chapter, the image of the Persian Empire is infected and coloured by what modern scholars want it to portray. In the fourth chapter, “Live and Let Live” (pp. 73–90), he points to the multiple aspects of the Persian Kings – they sometimes rule their subjects fiercely, and at other times treat them generously; which aspect takes precedence is contingent on the viewpoints of modern historians.

The fifth chapter, “Terra Incognita” (pp. 91–108), which stands slightly apart from the preceding chapters, explores the reports and writings of nineteenth-century British travellers and historians. The scholars of the Achaemenid History Workshops severely criticized their intellectual predecessors, and thus emphasized their originality in the field. Directly contradicting this notion, Harrison successfully found forerunners of the Achaemenid History Workshops in descriptions more than a century old. Some of the writers in this period already held views from the perspective of the Persian Empire and identified with them, although they could not be completely free from their British imperial context. In Harrison's opinion, the approach of the Achaemenid History Workshops was not as novel as they claimed.

In the final chapter, “Concluding Hostilities” (pp. 109–27), Harrison reviews the discussion so far, and comments on the influence of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) on the study of Persian history. Said attributed the first example of Orientalism to Aeschylus' Persae, which preceded Herodotus' Histories by some forty years, thus showing that Greek writers were responsible for its inception. Harrison asserts that after Said, Greek sources on Persia were mechanically characterized as biased, and as a result, students of Persian history were required to avoid excavating this rich mine of information. Here, Harrison repeats the topic of his book that Greek writers understood Persia more properly than modern scholars presume, and therefore we should pursue a more detailed investigation of Greek accounts and a more sympathetic engagement with them in their original contexts.

This book can be said, in a word, to propose a “post-post-colonial” theory for the study of Persian history. This refers to how we can break away from the dominant pejorative view on Greek sources, not “from the dominant Hellenocentric view”.Footnote ³ The next step to take is of course how each of us can draw a new picture of Persian history, by exploiting Greek sources in all respects as Harrison suggests.

Lastly, I would like to make a small addition by stating that, although Said's Orientalism had a great influence on the distrust of Greek sources and restraint from using them, their limitations were already recognized before Said. For instance, Chester Starr states in his article in Iranica Antiqua, published two years before Orientalism, “In ancient history we are accustomed to look at events from the vantage point of Rome or Athens … Our histories are so deeply impressed by a Hellenic stamp that even careful scholars are not aware of the distortions which they introduce.”Footnote ⁴ In her Dutch article in 1979, Sancisi-Weerdenburg also questioned whether it was possible to reconstruct Persian history from Greek sources, without referring to Orientalism (I suspect that she had not yet been introduced to it).Footnote ⁵ The new approach to Persian history was never derived from outside the discipline, but emerged spontaneously from within. This might have been the result of the intensive investigation and exploitation of Greek sources at that moment in time, which is what Harrison suggests is something we should now continue with.