Darius in the Shadow of Alexander by Pierre Briant (PDF)

Description

Darius III ruled over the Persian Empire and was the most powerful king of his time, yet he remains obscure. In the first book devoted to the historical memory of Darius III, Pierre Briant describes a man depicted in ancient sources as a decadent Oriental who lacked Western masculine virtues and was in every way the opposite of Alexander the Great.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I have read the author’s prior translated works. this tome is just as great as the others in all respects including its length.

⭐I have not read this book,but love histories of great military leaders.Table of contents is great information on Persian leader,Alexander the great defeated

⭐Not much history in this book. Mostly an explanation of the difficulty of determining history because of conflicting information. Interesting reading even so.

⭐By the greatest living historian of the Achaemenides, a very ambitous and schollarly book

⭐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.

⭐A brilliant work, unmasking, to a large extent, the true personality of Alexander of Macedon.

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