Those that survive, including later accounts, are not history or biography in our sense but tracts with their own agendas-ones that don’t necessarily break along east-west lines. Instead, Briant says, “he was obeying the rules of the Persian monarchy, which stipulated that the survival of the king and of the state had to be ensured first of all.”Ĭompounding our difficulty in understanding Darius-and Alexander-are the Persian and Greco-Roman texts upon which our understanding is based.
When Darius quit the battles of Issus and Gaugamela, leaving the Persians to fight vainly against Alexander and his men, he wasn’t acting the coward. Unlike the dynamic Macedonian kingdom that nurtured Alexander, Persia was a cultivated, centralized, and relatively static empire. Of course Darius was outwitted, but it’s more complex than that, Briant observes. After his victory over Persia, Alexander treated the royal family well, marrying Darius’ eldest daughter Stateira and marrying off Stateira’s sister Drypetis to his soul-mate and right-hand man, Hephaestion.Īlexander was a military genius, perhaps the greatest field commander the world has known, who could read a battlefield as a grand master reads a chessboard. By all accounts, Darius was a loving husband and father whose thoughts in wartime were for the safety of his family.
Enter Darius, who proved to be a formidable obstacle to Alexander’s irresistible force. Before Alexander, civilization had generally flowed from east to west Alexander reversed its dominant direction for the next few centuries.Īlexander had been trained by Aristotle to think on his feet and to have a “Plan B.” From his father, the crafty Philip II of Macedon, he inherited a superb fighting force, the hegemony of the Greek city-states, and the dream of Persian conquest that was born some 150 years earlier when the Persians destroyed the Athenian Acropolis-Greece’s 9/11. The fact that we call Jesus “Christ,” a Greek word, is a result of the export of Hellenism to regions conquered by Alexander, whose empire stretched from the Balkans to northern India. Introducing the book and elaborating on its title, Briant acknowledges that his subject is not only Darius III, the last of the Achaemenid rulers of Persia, but also Alexander the Great, the bisexual Greco-Macedonian king whose conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 BCE at the age of 25 ushered in an age of Hellenistic influence and a geopolitical sea change that reverberates to this day. Here, Pierre Briant, emeritus professor of ancient history at the Collège de France in Paris, seeks “to explain why Darius, along with so many others, is condemned to haunt the realm of historical oblivion.” The result is a fascinating meditation on the nature of power and the role of words and images in shaping and maintaining it. Such an approach is announced in the very title of Darius in the Shadow of Alexander, a 2003 work newly translated into English. HISTORY is written by the winners, but in recent years there’s been a trend toward considering history from the viewpoint of those who found themselves on its losing side.