P.’s new monograph on Persians in Herodotus’ Histories challenges recent readings that have argued against the idea that Herodotus portrays the Persians as the Other. P. contends that Herodotus’ Persians are akin to the sophists of the fifth century b.c., deploying sophisticated argumentation that is based on nomos phuseôs (‘law of nature’), rather than the Greek culture of nomos basileus (‘rule of law’). His Persians are thus a highly literary construct, largely the product of Herodotus’ own imagination, and divorced from the real Persians of the fifth century, whose hierarchical model of society derived from an Ahuramazdan theology of kingship, by which the monarch looks to maintain justice on behalf of the human community. Ultimately, it is P.’s view that Herodotus consistently represented Persians (especially their kings) and Persian culture as sophistic in ideology. According to this interpretation, Herodotus was not interested in perceiving the Persians as they really were, but rather in portraying them in such a way as to fit his model of the Persians as the Greek Other. This, P. suggests, was all done so that his work could ‘hold up a mirror to the Athenians [of the later fifth century] … the new “Persians” of Greece’ (p. 10).

In Chapter 1, P. builds on a significant strand of Herodotean scholarship by arguing that Herodotus was writing his Histories not from the vantage point of the 480s b.c. (i.e. the Greeks’ improbable triumph over the Persian Empire), but from the perspective of Athens’ subsequent emergence as an imperial power in the Aegean world, along with the civil war that bedevilled the Greek world in the last quarter of the fifth century. The chapter offers a concise overview of Herodotus’ intellectual background and the overall argument of the Histories, as well as setting up one of P.’s central propositions: that the Persians are consistently represented specifically as the Greek Other, just as the Scythians are the Other to the Egyptians on Herodotus’ multidimensional cultural grid (p. 24).

P. commences Chapter 2 with a survey of some of the major sophist thinkers of the fifth century, before moving on to examine the extent to which Herodotus (who does not name any of these figures in his work) displays an awareness of the sophists’ teachings. For P., while Herodotus is indeed aware of particular sophistic concepts, such as Protagoras’ and Gorgias’ agnosticism and scepticism respectively concerning the gods, his traditional views of religion, law and governance consistently diverged from those of contemporary sophists. In contrast to Herodotus, however, P. argues that the Persians are well equipped in the methods and theories of the sophists; the initial logos on the Persian logioi (‘learned men’, 1.1–5) and the so-called Constitutional Debate (3.80–2) are selected as case studies in order to illustrate P.’s view that Herodotus’ Persians function as the sophistic Other.

In Chapter 3, P. changes the perspective by examining the extant (predominantly archaeological) evidence for Persian history and culture. The discussion convincingly demonstrates the Mesopotamian origins of Persian kingship, as well as the Ahuramazdan roots of the style of kingship practised by Darius and Xerxes. Chapter 4 then orientates the focus of the discussion back towards Herodotus, and develops the thesis that in Herodotus there exists a multidimensional cultural grid; on the lower axis are found Scythia and Egypt while on the upper axis are Greece and Persia. Here P. continues to reinforce his view that a sophistic ideology undergirds every aspect of Persian society in the Histories, thus reinforcing the Persians’ status as the Greek Other.

The final substantive chapter turns to a more detailed presentation of the different Perso-sophists that inhabit the Histories. There is some brief discussion on adviser figures such as Mardonius, Atossa and the Magi – characters that deploy sophisticated modes of argumentation in order to persuade or appease their interlocutors. The bulk of the chapter, however, is dedicated to investigating the prevalence of sophist kings in Herodotus. The Median king Deioces, who, Herodotus tells us, formed a desire for tyranny (1.96.2), is read as the archetypal sophist king (pp. 223–5), before the subsequent Persian kings are all interpreted in light of their ostensibly sophistic characterisation in Herodotus. Curiously enough, the analysis closes with a section on Perso-sophist Greeks (pp. 243–50), in which P. argues that a select number of Greek tyrants/medisers resemble Persian kings. (Indeed, P. asserts that ‘the profile of the sophist kings is actually derived from Herodotus’ knowledge of the Greek tyrants’, p. 244.) The book finishes with a brief conclusion, which postulates that Herodotus was in fact aware of the ‘Achaemenid ideology of the Persian[s]’ (p. 251), but that he rejected this material as royal propaganda, which suppressed the sophistic ideology that coloured the Persians’ imperial rule. In the closing pages, P. returns to one of the central theses of his study: Persian despotism and imperialism serves as a metaphor for the Athenians’ betrayal of to Hellenikon (‘the collective Greek identity’; cf. Hdt. 8.144.2).

This is a densely argued volume, which draws out well the idiosyncrasies of Herodotus’ different Persian characters, and the subtle shifts in characterisation between Persian kings, for example, the insatiable imperialist Cyrus versus the homo furens Cambyses. That being said, the book contains multiple sub-categorisations, and this does not always make it easy for the reader to follow the flow of the argument; what is more, the structure allows for repetitive statements on, for instance, the lower and upper axes of Herodotus’ cultural grid (pp. 162, 170, 172, 177–8, 185–7, 201–2, 205). Another frustrating aspect is the sheer number of typographic and formatting errors. There are numerous misspellings (portrayal, p. 234; climactic, p. 235) and some clear issues with the endnotes for Chapter 2, which do not appear to cohere with the text. (I note, too, that n. 4 on p. 253 does not appear in the endnotes.) Such problems would need to be dealt with in any future edition.

P. brings a fresh urgency to broad questions surrounding Herodotus’ presentation of different cultures, his awareness of various peoples based on their own terms and the degree to which his account is the product of a complex set of interactions between author and historical agent. It is pleasing to see P.’s rejection of an essentialist, orientalising cultural framework in the Histories, though I remain not wholly convinced by his rigid view that the Persians are ‘specifically represented as the Greek Other’ (p. 5). There are of course multiple examples in Herodotus that can be adduced to support such a thesis, yet there is no dearth of cases that can be used to destabilise fixed notions of Persian and Greek identity in the Histories. A particularly telling case, I think, is that of Xerxes, who in Book 7 congratulates himself before suddenly bursting into tears, having gazed at his infantry and armada in the Hellespont and plains of Abydus respectively. After his uncle enquires into his changeable mood, Xerxes announces that the vista filled him with a profound grasp of the transient nature of human life (7.46.2; cf. 9.16). These reflections on the mutability of fortune and the precariousness of human existence in fact align Xerxes closely with the Herodotean narrator, who begins his work proper by announcing that while some previously small states have become great, others have now fallen from a position of strength to one of weakness (1.5.4). This example is one of numerous moments in Herodotus that could be cited to illustrate the point that unbending distinctions between Greek and Persian do not always hold true, and that Persians do not perform exclusively as a negative foil for the Greeks. Similarly, while Herodotus’ account clearly offers some implicit criticism of the Athenians of his own day, it is worth recalling the special emphasis that the historian places on their unique contribution to the Greek cause during the Persian Wars (7.139) – a point of view that he explicitly acknowledges as being a controversial one. Herodotus’ work is one replete with multidimensional representations of different individuals, poleis and nations, all of whom transcend fixed ideological constructs.