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Writing Ancient Persia . By Thomas Harrison. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011. Pp. 190. ISBN 10: 071563917X; 13: 9780715639177.

“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.”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, haremlife, luxury and intrigues. She urged us to “dehellenise and decolonialise” this “Europe-centered perception,” by laundering prejudiced Greek texts.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.