Old Grudges

"Abducting women is not...a lawful act; but it is stupid after the event to make a fuss about avenging it. The only sensible thing is to take no notice, for it is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not want to be."

This was the very pragmatic line taken by Herodotus on the immediate causes of the Trojan war. Of course, if the Greeks hadn't had such a keen sense of reparative justice Homer would have had a lot less to work with.

Herodotus identifies the abduction of Helen and the Greek response to it as the original and defining clobbering of East by West, the ancestral "clash of civiliations". Yet with the start of the British Museum's new display Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia a number of media commentators have instead pointed to the defeat of Xerxes' Persian host (480 BC) as the foundation stone of Western presumption, with Waldemar Januszczak laying much of the blame on Herodotus himself.

"The problem with history is not merely that history is bunk. Bunk we can deal with. The problem with history is that so many believe the bunk, and are persuaded by it to act and think in dangerous ways. A perfect example is the impact on our world-view of the bunk about the Persians spouted by Herodotus, the “Father of History”, and therefore the original spreader of dangerous historical fictions."

It's as if some Westerners are starting to feel that it might have been better if the sophisticated Persians had prevailed at Salamis and Marathon, thereby sparing us from our age-old superiority complex! Amusingly though, Herodotus sees it in reverse - Trojan defeat initiated Asian chippiness: "From that root sprung their belief in the perpetual emnity of the Grecian world towards them."

The kind of dangerous bunk he worked into The Histories includes the notion that the Persians lacked so much as an ornamental pot to piss in: "So rough is their country that they eat as much as they have, never as much as they want. They drink no wine but only water. They have no good things at all, not even figs for dessert"

I will try to go along the museum before my forthcoming trip and will report back here on my findings.