Tom Holland: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is it possible the Persians might have had a philosophical tradition that was advanced in the manner that the Greeks were? Maybe not quite as splendid, but have we ruled that out, or it might simply be lost? They completely did, and it was one of the most influential intellectual-spiritual traditions that’s ever existed. I’m reluctant to call it Zoroastrianism. It comes to be institutionalized as what, today, we might call Zoroastrianism in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries AD under a new Persian Empire, the empire that’s governed by a family called the Sasanians. The Sasanian kings, who are institutionalizing Zoroastrianism rather in the way that Constantine institutionalizes Christianity in the Roman Empire — they are clearly drawing on traditions that were very, very current in the earliest Persian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire. These traditions are essentially dualist. It’s the idea that the world can be moralized, that it can be understood as being divided between rival spheres of good and evil, of light and dark, of truth and the lie. This is what’s so influential about the Persian Empire, is that they moralized their own imperialism. This is hugely influential because when the Persian king — Darius would be the person who most potently expresses this — he says that he is the chosen one of Ahura Mazda, the great god, the good lord, and that truth and order are embodied in Ahura Mazda, and that Darius is his deputy. Therefore, the realm that he rules also is in the dimension of truth and order. The corollary of that is that those who oppose Darius are agents of the lie and of anarchy, and therefore, they must be crushed, not just as enemies of the Persian king but as enemies of what is good. When Xerxes leads his campaign against the rebellious cities of Athens and Sparta, he is doing this not just to expand his empire, but because he sees that Athens and Sparta are terrorist states. They are states in which demons have laid siege to the Acropolis and to the temples of Sparta and taken possession of it, and so therefore, they must be smoked out. I wrote about this in Persian Fire, my book about the Persian Wars. I was writing against the backdrop of the NATO attempt to stabilize Afghanistan, which from the view of the West was a remote and mountainous backwater occupied by terrorists. I realized that, [laughs] basically, that’s how the Persians saw the Greeks. We in the West have the conceit that we are the heirs of Athens, but we are at least as much the heirs of the Persian kings as we are of the Athenians. That idea — that power can be moralized — passes into the bloodstream, not just of Zoroastrianism, and the Zoroastrianism of the Sasanian Empire, but the Christian empire of Constantine, the Muslim Caliphate, and it has absolutely passed into the present. We are, in that sense, completely the heirs of the Achaemenid Empire. The ancient Greeks and Persians — how technologically advanced do you think they were? How much do we know about that? I’m sure you’re familiar with finding astronomical computing devices from the ancient Greeks. We don’t quite understand what all these things did. Is it possible they were much more advanced than we realize?…

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