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Darius in the Shadow of Alexander, by Pierre Briant
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The last of Cyrus the Great’s dynastic inheritors and the legendary enemy of Alexander the Great, Darius III ruled over a Persian Empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indus River. Yet, despite being the most powerful king of his time, Darius remains an obscure figure.
As Pierre Briant explains in the first book ever devoted to the historical memory of Darius III, the little that is known of him comes primarily from Greek and Roman sources, which often present him in an unflattering light, as a decadent Oriental who lacked the masculine virtues of his Western adversaries. Influenced by the Alexander Romance as they are, even the medieval Persian sources are not free of harsh prejudices against the king Dārā, whom they deemed deficient in the traditional kingly virtues. Ancient Classical accounts construct a man who is in every respect Alexander’s opposite―feeble-minded, militarily inept, addicted to pleasure, and vain. When Darius’s wife and children are captured by Alexander’s forces at the Battle of Issos, Darius is ready to ransom his entire kingdom to save them―a devoted husband and father, perhaps, but a weak king.
While Darius seems doomed to be a footnote in the chronicle of Alexander’s conquests, in one respect it is Darius who has the last laugh. For after Darius’s defeat in 331 BCE, Alexander is described by historians as becoming ever more like his vanquished opponent: a Darius-like sybarite prone to unmanly excess.
- Sales Rank: #258555 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-05
- Original language: French
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.90" h x 1.60" w x 6.20" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 608 pages
Review
Briant is the world’s leading authority on the Persian empire that Alexander conquered, one of few living scholars with the linguistic mastery to study both the Greco-Roman and Persian sources and hence examine the reign of Darius from European and Asian perspectives. In the intensely thorough analysis he conducts here, he finds reasons to mistrust both traditions and thereby qualify the charge of cowardice that has shadowed Darius for more than two millennia…His insights are penetrating and his mastery of the evidentiary record is unsurpassed…Having deftly taken down much of the edifice supplied by the ancient accounts of Darius, Briant finally turns architect and shows us how the rebuilding might begin. (James Romm Wall Street Journal 2015-01-16)
[An] intrepid, imposing book… This is a masterful book… [It] shows Briant to be a master of the longue durée of Iran’s history… As a display of how to approach the reception history and image-building of any historical personage, it is unshakeable in its methodology. (Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones Times Higher Education 2015-01-22)
In the minds of many Darius III, the most powerful king of his time with a vast empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus River, exists only as Alexander’s legendary Persian enemy. Pierre Briant tackles this issue head on in his book Darius in the Shadow of Alexander…Briant provides excellent analysis of the sources, as scarce and biased as they may be in some cases…Despite [Briant’s] open declaration that ‘this book is not a biography,’ it does provide valuable information on Darius’ public and private lives, as well as on the perils of an ‘Alexandro-maniacal’ viewpoint and the persistence of images in general. (Lucia Marchini Minerva 2015-01-01)
How refreshing to read a book on Alexander that avoids the familiar clichés of historical scholarship. Pierre Briant is one of the most distinguished scholars of Alexander the Great and his masterly book provides an original and important analysis of the tumultuous confrontation between Alexander and Darius III. The author presents a range of evidence here that is unmatched in other works on Alexander. His insights into the study of Greco-Persian antiquity are superb, and his disquisitions on historical method are incisive and perceptive. (Phiroze Vasunia, University College London)
From a review of the French edition: Though the Achaemenid Empire has been one of the important forces of the ancient world, its role and achievements have been generally rather underexposed and undervalued… This book ranks among the finest examples of…historical analysis: it is elaborate, eloquent, and full of displays of erudition. (Bryn Mawr Classical Review)
Anyone interested in Alexander or the end of Persia’s first empire will need to engage with Briant’s thoughtful and at times provoking text…This big book is a remarkable testimony both to the shifting afterlife of the last king of the Persian Empire and to its ultimate satrap, Pierre Briant, who has transformed studies of its legacy. (Robin Lane Fox Literary Review 2015-03-01)
Pierre Briant [is] the greatest living historian of the Achaemenids, and the scholar who has probably done more than any other to make sense of how their empire actually functioned…[This is a] detailed and incisive analysis of every conceivable tradition told about the last king of Achaemenid Persia…It is, for anyone interested in ancient history, as brilliant a demonstration of its mingled frustrations and fascinations as one could hope to read. (Tom Holland The Spectator 2015-02-14)
In a search for the historical Darius, Briant brings to life specialist work tracing the war against Alexander through images on coins, as well as through the Babylonian astronomical diaries, classical histories and many versions of the Alexander Romance. (Jad Adams The Independent 2015-02-17)
The book is a magnificent work of classical scholarship, and Briant rewards readers with insights the source authors either failed to see or deliberately omitted. He also gives Alexander biographers reason for pause, reiterating that the five sources on which Alexander scholarship is based are simply not reliable. Darius in the Shadow of Alexander is an important book that makes a major contribution to our understanding of ancient Persia and the narrative of Alexander the Great, and we highly recommend it to students of the classics. (Richard A. Gabriel Military History 2015-04-30)
Briant’s work, as always, is a significant contribution to Achaemenid studies, a display of historiographical learnedness whose methods can benefit historians across ancient studies. (Jennifer Finn Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015-10-14)
About the Author
Pierre Briant is Emeritus Professor of History of the Achaemenid World and Alexander’s Empire at the Collège de France.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Historical character assassination for specialists
By JPS
This is an interesting and, at times, a fascinating piece of scholarship demonstrating how little we know of the very obscure Darius III and to what extent his image has been distorted. The character has been maligned and portrayed to be Alexander's opposite in every respect. This seems to have begun with the Greco-Macedonian sources, illustrating once again to what extent history is written by the victors. This very unflattering and highly prejudiced picture has been picked up and further developed by the Roman sources, and, in a slightly different way, by the medieval Persian sources which deemed Darius III deficient.
When progressing through this - at times - hard to read book, I could not help wondering if any other loser throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages had ever had to suffer so much from character assassination. He is depicted in ways that are so prejudiced that they make sure that he did just about nothing right, deserves no credit whatsoever and has just about every character flaw that makes a "bad" king: weak, militarily incompetent, a coward, decadent, vain, addicted to pleasure.
As the author shows rather excellently, the character assassination has been systematic and rather unanimous or, to put it differently, there is not a single lenient, yet alone favourable, source that has something to say for him. The conclusion drawn by the author is a bit of a pessimistic one: it is just about impossible to know who the real Darius III was and totally impossible to write a biography about him. As he suggests, Darius seems doomed to be Alexander's "vanquished opponent", with the most favourable assessment being that he was no match for the great conqueror.
There are however a couple of problems with this book.
One is that it should probably be read after the author's other book on the history of the Persian Empire. This is because there is a whole piece missing here, with this volume being essentially an exercise in source analysis showing how the character has been denigrated. In particular, there is little or no analysis of the actual historical events showing to what extent the contest against Darius and the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire was neither "easy" nor as "one-sided" as it is portrayed to be.
The second problem is that this book is essentially a piece of hard to read scholarship. At times, and for a general reader, it is not very accessible. It may even feel and sound tedious with the author laboriously quoting and analysing each passage of each source for each relevant event and showing, in each case, how the image that is constructed of Darius is so negative. Four stars because of the remarkable scholarship involved.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Ana
By the greatest living historian of the Achaemenides, a very ambitous and schollarly book
4 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Not much history in this book. Mostly an explanation ...
By Shelby E Barnes
Not much history in this book. Mostly an explanation of the difficulty of determining history because of conflicting information. Interesting reading even so.
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