China alway captured its captors. But, what did the Persians actually learn from other nations they conquered? My impression was that they preferred just to install a satrap – preferably the local hereditary king, political conditions allowing – and post a garrison and collect their taxes, and otherwise keep their distance. They never tried to Persianize the locals, nor did they let the locals localize the Persians.
Come to think of it, Platonism, with its concept of “two horses” pulling the same chariot, representing a person’s (well, really, a man’s) human/intellectual and animal/instinctive souls, might mesh well with Zoroastrian moral dualism. [cue Richard Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” aka the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey]
Exactly. It’s much like the difference between predicting climate and weather; I can confidently predict it’ll be hotter on average in summer than in winter, but I can’t predict that a particular raindrop will hit my nose next December 18th at 6:48 pm.
The point isn’t that they had the ships and crew, it’s that they didn’t think like a maritime power. Real (Scottish?) maritime powers don’t decide that the best use of your decimated fleet is to hold up bridges.
Eventually they may have gone the Roman route of changing their attitude (a direct response to Carthage and piracy, it seems) but they certainly weren’t showing any signs of it after Salamis.
Ah, but they had already conquered half of Greece - Greek Asia Minor. And according to Olmstead at least it was “the wealthiest, the most populous, and the most advanced half of the Greek world.” What difference would, to quote Olmstead again, “the more backward Greek states,” have made ;)? What couldn’t the Persians get from Ephesus, site of the Temple of Artemis ( one of the Seven Wonders of the World ) or Miletus, birthplace of Thales of Miletus ( one of the Seven Sages of Greece and the first traditionally acknowledged Greek philosopher ) and the largest and wealthiest city in Greece, that they could have gotten from Athens or Sparta?
Because of the literary/intellectual tradition handed down to us we tend to lionize the likes of the Athenians and Spartans because of their greater prominence later in classical history. It tends to be forgotten that at the time of the rise of Cyrus they were far, far less dominant culturally and politically. We also seem to forget in esteeming those freedom-loving mainland Greeks that some of them ( the city of Thebes in particular ) fought as allies of the Persians :D.
Great post.
Ionia was were where the cerebral action was for a long time, and there was tremendous cross-fertilization between all the ancient empires (“build a better slave trap and the Eastern Med will beat a path to your door”).
I don’t know enough about the Persians to know whether they were already in the process (like the Greeks) of evolving from the militarist-clan environment of Agamemnon to the juridical-political environment of The Eumenides, but it’s a pretty good bet that their enemies’ propaganda, from which we have derived most of our Western knowledge of them, was suspect.