Roger Sandall looks at The Multicultural Persian Wars, the academic conflict over whether Herodotus was sufficiently magnanimous in his treatment of the Persians, and notes that (a) there are no Persian accounts of the war on Greece, and (b) Herodotus is far more even-handed than most modern academics.
I enjoyed this passage on early Greek democracy versus Persian despotism:
All this was happening in the years between about 520 BC and the year of the Battle of Marathon, 490 BC. So just as a matter of interest, while Darius was using blood and fire to impose on his realm “one immense administrative unit” centered on himself — a system resembling Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler — what were the Greeks doing?In Athens, a mercifully different dispensation was laying the foundations of democracy. The reforms of Cleisthenes in 507 BC were nothing less than that. Paraphrasing and summarising Tom Holland’s discussion, on pages 134–135 of Persian Fire, we find the most complete imaginable contrast with Persian imperialism. The new political rules introduced by Cleisthenes made equality before the law the chief political virtue; made Athens a city in which all citizens enjoyed freedom of speech; made government policy something requiring debate in open assembly; and made it impossible to pass new laws except by popular vote.
From an organisational point of view Cleisthenes’ reforms were just as radical. The dynastic feuding of ‘tyrants’ had brought Athens to the point of ruin. It had to be stopped. Cleisthenes’ solution was to firmly suppress a citizen’s political identification with family and neighborhood, with mafia bosses and clan chiefs. He sliced the country into 150 electoral districts called ‘demes’, and it was from these — and no longer from clans and families — that the citizens of Athenian democracy were obliged in future to take their second names. This applied to the haughtiest aristocrat and the humblest plowman alike.
Tom Holland draws a number of historical parallels between the ancient and modern worlds and the continuing clash of East and West. But nothing is more revealing than the determination of Cleisthenes to stamp out despots and despotism by severing the connection between clan power and political representation. This was in 507 BC. Today, 2,500 years later, throughout most of the Middle East and conspicuously so in Iraq, they still haven’t got the point.