Þe Stakes at Salamis, &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-06-01 We

Jun 01, 2022

Salamis, where it was decided in the year -480 that Greece would not become just another province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

I have long been fascinated by the Achaemenid Persian Empire of -550 to -320 <https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2015/08/musings-on-thomas-malthus-the-hellenistic-age-the-loyal-spirit-great-kings-of-iran-550-330-bce-and-other-topics-the-hones.html>.

And I have just finished a very good book. But I found reading it very strange indeed. The book is: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Persians: The Age of the Great Kings <https://www.amazon.com/dp/1472277287/>, about the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the Near East, –550 to –320. The book is chock-full of wonderfully fascinating facts, connections, and interpretations of what was going on in the Near East in the Achaemenid Persian age.

I recommend it highly.

Yet it has been a long time since I read a book in which the text so undermined the proclaimed moral point-of-view of the book.

The proclaimed point-of-view is, basically, that Greeks have lied about the Persians—created a discourse of “Orientalism” designed to “represent… the ‘colonies’ and cultures of the Middle Eastern world in a way that would justify and support the West’s colonial enterprise…”. Greeks painted Persian as “a fantastical land of mystery, dark shadows, places of intrigue, despotic rulers, enslaved women, and wealth beyond imagination…”, a place of “decadence, luxury, and a certain backwardness of thought…” But this was “a European invention… of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences…”.

It is time, he says, to move away from an invented “Oriental” landscape in which:

The Great Kings are… lustful, capricious, mad tyrants, and the empire is regarded as an oppressive challenge to the Greek ideals of ‘freedom’ (whatever that meant)… the Persians… [are] cowardly, scheming, effeminate, vindictive, and dishonourable…. the epitome of barbarianism…

It is time, he says, to present the “Persian Version” of history.

But the problem is that the book then tells—credits—stories in which:

the Persian Achaemenid Emperors are lustful and capricious (if not quite mad);
the Persian Empire is an oppressive challenge to all who think that absolutist monarchy without any semblance of due process is a thing on the menu they would rather not order; and
the Persians—at least the Persian élite—are scheming, vindictive, and dishonorable (if no more cowardly or effeminate than the standard).

So I left the book thinking, rather, that more was at stake in the three battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea than I had previously thought.

I left the book thinking more strongly that each day was a good day in which the tide of absolute monarchy and casually murderous politics was pushed back by ideas of rule-of-law, due process, and obedience-to-the-laws-we-prescribe-to-ourselves.

And I left the book thinking that when Llewellyn-Jones claims that:

Nothing is reported of Xerxes, Artaxerxes III, Bagoas, or Parysatis which does not find ready parallels in well-attested information about Henry VIII, Ivan IV (the Terrible), or Wu Zetian…

he is saying something that is (a) false, and (b) not to the point. To the extent that we want to proclaim ourselves adopted children of the Athenians, it is not because we see them as precursors of Henry VIII “The Six-Wived” Tudor or of Ivan IV “The Dreaded” Rurik.

Now do not get me wrong. I do like and respect the achievements of the Achaemenid Empire. The Pax Persica was a wonderful thing for the Near East <https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2015/08/musings-on-thomas-malthus-the-hellenistic-age-the-loyal-spirit-great-kings-of-iran-550-330-bce-and-other-topics-the-hones.html>. The artisans and artists are stunning. Their view of a cosmopolitan world was far ahead of its time—even if it was only of a world ruled by one tribe, the Persians, and one dynasty, the Haxamanishya, and one guy in the dynasty, the emperor.

Nevertheless, the story of the Achaemenid Empire as it comes down to us greatly reinforces the following lessons:

There are great benefits to a government of limited powers that must follow procedures.
There are great benefits to a society in which people have rights, and are not just all slaves of the Great King to be tortured and murdered at his pleasure, or just because he is having a bad day.
“Freedom” is not just something to put in scare quotes and dismiss with a “whatever that meant”.
The imperial Persian court was a shitshow.

It was a shitshow from the moment that Darius I overthrew the legitimate Emperor Bardiya, and then claimed that he—Darius—(a) never lied, (b) was the Servant of Holy Truth, and that (c) the real Bardiya had actually been killed earlier by a shape-shifting magician.

Perhaps it was a shitshow even before then…

There is a story about Achaemenid Persian Emperor Artaxerxes II, Empress Dowager Parysatis, and Artaxerxes’s faithful and effective servant Mithridates. With a straight face, in his Persians: The Age of the Great Kings <https://www.amazon.com/dp/1472277287/>, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones credits this story:

Mithridates… came to a bad end through his own stupidity….. Mithridates… declared, ‘You lot can say what you like but I tell you, Cyrus was killed by this hand….’ A sudden hush filled the room as the other guests, already sensing Mithridates’s fate, bent their heads to the ground….
Parysatis… told the king…. With his arms and legs bound, Mithridates was placed into the boat on his back, his head propped up at, and out of, the prow. Three guards approached, carrying another small boat…. They placed it over the skiff in the ground and made it to fit on top of the other and fastened both together with ropes. Then they covered the whole structure in mud…. Mithridates’s head was left projecting outside, the rest of his body concealed inside the hollow buried chamber.
Over the next days, Mithridates was force-fed with all sorts of food, and plenty of it…. The guards forced him to swallow by pricking his eyes with splinters…. They gave him a mixture of milk and honey to drink and they liberally poured the mixture into his mouth and all over his face…. Swarms of flies, wasps, and bees covered his face, entered into his mouth and crawled up his nostrils and filled his ears. His enforced milk-and-honey diet caused severe diarrhoea…. Slowly his living body began to decay and putrefy within the cocoon, as maggots and worms swarmed out of the excrement and began to consume him from the inside. More days passed….
It had taken Mithridates seventeen days to die. The ‘Ordeal of the Boats’, as it was known, was one of several institutionalised forms of the death penalty in the Achaemenid era….

Mithridates’s crime? Boasting about the role he played in saving Artaxerxes II and his throne from the rebellion led by Artaxerxes’s younger brother (and Parysatis’s favorite son) Cyrus.

First, did this actually happen?

I believe that our only source for this story is Plutarch, writing 500 years after the events.

Plutarch’s source may be a contemporary of the events: Ctesias. But Plutarch says that Ctesias “filled his books with a perfect farrago of incredible and senseless fables”.

I tend to think that this story belongs with the stories of the people who have only one leg, and hop about, and whose single foot is so large that at lunchtime they use it as a sunshade. With those about how Hillary Rodham Clinton had sexual congress with a two-headed alien and birthed a two-headed alien baby.

But Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones credits the story. And yet from it, and other stories, he draws this view of Empress Dowager Parysatis:

The powerful Achaemenid women…[were] dynastic guard dogs…. They did indeed maim, hurt, or destroy… protecting the household of the monarch…. Parysatis… was one of the great women of ancient history…. Parysatis’ tragedy lay in the fact that the Persian imperial system afforded no official space to women of her ability…. She dominated court life for more than sixty years, and if no tears were wept openly at her passing, the empire must have acknowledged that with the death of such a formidably great lady, an era had come to its end…

And he writes, about the torture, that:

The Persian Version of the punishment is far more complex and must relate to the Persian views of religious purity. The thought of slowly rotting away in one’s own excrement, gnawed on by vermin and infested with worms, must have ranked as a hellish nightmare among the Persians, who valued the religious connotations of cleanliness and purity so very highly. It was an ending to life deserved by those who had willingly followed the Lie—traitors, rebels, and other perverters of Arta. Death through scaphism, with its flies, faeces, milk, and honey, effectively brought about a hell on earth…

And so Llewelyn-Jones calls on us to reject:

an Orientalist reading of the execution process… [as] cruel despots concocting sublime, elaborate punishments to thrill and delight…

To this I say: NO!!!! No matter what your view of “religious purity” is, this is not just something you do, like saving 15% or more on car insurance. This is not just something you do even to a servant of the Great Lie.

But there is more! Indeed, Llewellyn-Jones credits many more Empress Dowager Parysatis stories:

Without [Artaxerxes II’s ]…knowledge, [Parysatis] acquired… names of persons she held accountable for her son [Cyrus’s] demise. Their persecution could begin…. The Carian was put on the rack for ten days as his body was stretched and broken to the point of death; his eyes were gouged out and, finally, molten bronze was poured into his mouth and ears until he died in agonised convulsions…

And:

Tithraustes… cut off [Tissaphernes’s] head and sent it to the king. The king sent it to his mother, Parysatis…. Tissaphernes had been the most loyal … a nobleman of great honour and renown who, sadly… [had] made a deadly enemy of Parysatis. Artaxerxes made no move to protect the man…

Plus:

Parysatis… played boardgames…. She suggested… the stake… a eunuch, who would become part of the winner’s household staff. Artaxerxes consented…. The dice fell in her favour…. She claimed Masabates… handed the eunuch over to the executioners and gave them the order to flay him alive, impale his body sideways on three stakes, and separately peg out his stretched-out skin…. When Artaxerxes finally plucked up enough courage to rebuke his mother… she feigned ignorance and with a smile (so Ctesias puts it) said cheerfully, ‘How sweet you are! Good for you that you get angry on account of a useless old eunuch! On the other hand, I lost 1,000 gold darics at dice, and have just accepted my loss without saying a word’…

Remember: Ctesias. People with one foot, who hop around. And the one foot is big enough to serve as a sunshade at noon.

And there is the bonus queen-poisoning by Parysatis of her daughter-in-law-Stateira:

Parysatis invited Stateira to an informal dinner to confirm their new-found harmony… ordered … Gigis to cut the precious roast bird in two with a small knife… smeared with poison on one side, and Gigis wiped the poison off on just one part of the bird….. Back in her own bedchamber… Stateira died, writhing in convulsions of pain. Parysatis had bided her time, carefully and purposefully choosing a poison that would cause Stateira a leisurely and wretched death so that she would be fully conscious of the fate that had befallen her…

Yet in the same book in which he tells these Parysatis stories, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones denounces histories that take:

an orientalist gloss… castigate… Persian monarchs for… having been ruled from the harem by the machinations of castrati and courtesans…

We have, in Parysatis, not a courtesan but an Empress Dowager. How about the castrati? Llewellyn-Jones credits the stories of the eunuch Bagoas:

Prince Arshu… began to itch for more substantial royal duties…. Late in the second year of his reign, in the summer of 336 BCE, Arshu was assassinated at the hand of the very disgruntled Bagoas. For good measure, Arshu’s wives, sons, and daughters were slain too…

And, I confess, I have never read a more “Orientalizing” paragraph than this one:

Artaxerxes III… the victim of a bold plot hatched by a high-ranking court eunuch named Bagoas, a veritable creature of the court, born to corruption, whose ambitions were for the very highest office of state. He murdered the king…. In spite of the authority and affluence he enjoyed through Artaxerxes’ kindness, Bagoas yearned for more…. The eunuch’s chosen weapon was poison, which was applied liberally in one deadly draught to the king’s wine. The old man perished slowly and agonisingly. His throat contracted, then closed, and within minutes the Conqueror of Egypt asphyxiated and died…

Indeed:

Physical proximity to the Achaemenid kings gave eunuchs an unrivalled opportunity to act as assassins. Rivalry was endemic at the Achaemenid court…

But, says, Llewelyn-Jones, “none of this was unique to Persia…” So we should not “continu[e]… to indulge the Orientalist fantasy of eunuch ‘puppet-masters’…”

However, I do think that of English kings, starting with William I of Normandy, less than 1/4 wound up assassinated or executed. That is a ratio far, far short of the "at least seven of the twelve Achaemenid Great Kings [who] met their deaths at the hands of an assassin… and to this we can add the murder (or execution) of at least two crown princes…”

And we have not yet gotten to the harem politics, or to:

Ochus took the throne name Artaxerxes III… commanded the execution of all of his nearest kin…. In one day alone, eighty of his brothers were killed. On another day, more than a hundred Achaemenid princes… were herded into an empty courtyard and massacred in a hail of arrows. Atossa, the calculating sister who had worked so hard at putting Ochus into favour with the late king, was not made queen. She was buried alive on the instructions of her brother-lover…

Do note that Llewellyn-Jones’s narrative accepts this—accepts all these—at face value, as things that happened more-or-less as we are told by our sources.

Now it would be one thing to say that our sources are hopelessly corrupt, and full of malicious lies. It would be one thing to say that history “as it really happened” is unrecoverable. It would be one thing to say that we can work with Livy and Tacitus (although perhaps not Seutonius) and Thucydides, but not with Herodotus and Ctesias. It would be one thing to say that to get a clear view of Persia we can only go through the archaeology, through the stones—not the recopied manuscripts.

(Of course, if we do that, we still have to deal with Darius I’s Behistun inscription, 80’ x 50’: declaring that he, Darius, never lies, is the Servant of the Truth, did not kill the legitimate Emperor Bardiya, but instead killed the shape-shifting magician who had earlier killed Bardiya, and that all who say otherwise serve the Lie.)

But Llewellyn-Jones’s attitude to his sources is, by and large, to credit them (shape-shifting magicians, one-footed hopping people, and two-headed alien babies aside). And yet he then denounces previous historians who drew what seem to me to have been very natural conclusions from the same stories:

The classical authors… [who] depict Persia in an almost wholly negative light… Great Kings… lustful, capricious, mad tyrants… the empire is regarded as an oppressive challenge to the Greek ideals of ‘freedom’ (whatever that meant)…

What is he denouncing them for?

It is, rather, someone who is not horrified by Parysatis—who, instead, regards her as a mere “dynastic guard dog… protecting the household…” as she deals death and terror and torment to the loyal servants of her son Artaxerxes II—who needs to rethink things.

And I think Mithridates could tell Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones something about what “freedom” meant…

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Very Briefly Noted:

Tobias Adrian & al.: The Great Carbon Arbitrage: ‘The world can realise a net gain of $77.89 trillion by shifting to renewable energy. The benefits from ending coal are so large… <https://voxeu.org/article/great-carbon-arbitrage>
Konrad Putzier: Dreaded Commute to the City Is Keeping Offices Mostly Empty: ‘Urban areas where people live closer to work have a higher return-to-office rate, WSJ analysis shows: It isn’t the office that workers heading into the city despise. It’s the commute… <https://www.wsj.com/articles/dreaded-commute-to-the-city-is-keeping-offices-mostly-empty-11653989581>
Joshua J. Mark: Behistun Inscription: ‘A relief with accompanying text carved 330 feet (100 meters) up a cliff in Kermanshah Province, Western Iran. The work tells the story of the victory of the Persian king Darius I (the Great, r. 522–486 BCE) over his rebellious satraps when he took the throne of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BCE) in 522 BCE… [in] Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian… <https://www.worldhistory.org/Behistun_Inscription/>
Doug Irwin: Explaining the Trade Reform Wave of 1985–1995: ‘Ideas were changing about the merits of exchange rate adjustment over import controls… more economists were appointed as senior policymakers… the ‘third wave’ of democratisation… <https://voxeu.org/article/explaining-trade-reform-wave-1985-1995>
Chris Anstey: Biden Team Debates Removing China Tariffs: ‘Tariff relief could slow inflation by at least a few tenths of a percentage point, “if not more,” Rouse said…. On the other hand, China hawks both inside and outside the administration want to keep the pressure on the US rival even if it hasn’t changed Beijing’s own economic behavior—or shrunk the trade deficit… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-06-01/global-economy-latest-biden-team-debates-removing-china-tariffs?cmpid=BBD060122_NEF>
Ran Abramitzky & Leah Boustan: Why the Children of Immigrants Get Ahead <https://time.com/6182715/immigrants-children-us-mobility/>
Dylan Matthews: About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why? - Vox_: ‘bout 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why? Two economic historians [Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin] explain what made the Industrial Revolution, and modern life, possible… <https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/6/1/23138463/how-the-world-became-rich-industrial-revolution-koyama-rubin>
Duncan Black: Happy “Suck On This” Day: ‘[Tom Friedman:] “I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie… <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/05/happy-suck-on-this-day.html>
Jen Wieczner: The Rise and Fall of Cathie Wood <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-rise-and-fall-of-cathie-wood.html>
Nicholas Bloom & al.: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?<https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338>
John Winthrop: A Model of Christian Charity: ’He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England”… <https://web.archive.org/web/20110705134913/https://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_charity.php>

Twitter & ‘Stack:

Noah Smith: Ideas to Boost Japanese Growth

Noahpinion

Ideas to boost Japanese growth (Part 1)

Greetings from Tokyo! This is the second in my series of Japan-related posts. The first one was about how Japanese living standards are too low. I recommended that Japan address its high poverty rate by creating a cash-based redistributive welfare state, on top of the creaky, failing corporate welfare state that it has traditionally relied on…

3 years ago · 90 likes · 35 comments · Noah Smith

Ed Brophy: Ukrainskii Mir: ‘Given the stakes for the world, would a flawed peace be preferable to a prolonged conflict?…

Fault Lines

Fault Lines #7: Ukrainskii Mir

Endgame Three months after Putin’s illegal invasion, we have learned much we did not fully understand at the time. Russia’s military campaign has been incompetent at best, a fiasco at worst. It has sacrificed huge numbers of lives and materiel for no meaningful advance on the territories it controlled on February 24th. For now, it has dialled its war aim…

2 years ago · 2 likes · Ed Brophy

Dylan Matthews: ’This is a really incredible year for economic history targeted at laypeople: Koyama and Rubin’s “How the World Became Rich,” Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky’s “Streets of Gold,” Brad DeLong’s “Slouching Towards Utopia”…

dylan matthews @dylanmatt

This is a really incredible year for economic history targeted at laypeople: Koyama and Rubin's "How the World Became Rich," @leah_boustan and Ran Abramitzky's "Streets of Gold," @delong's "Slouching Towards Utopia"

dylan matthews @dylanmatt

I talked to @MarkKoyama and @jaredcrubin about the factors that enabled economic growth to take off 200 years ago (and for us to add decades to our lives, dramatically reduce extreme poverty, etc) https://t.co/dppUMX6pvX

Paragraphs:

Dylan Matthews interviews Jared Rubin and Mark Koyama as they give their take on why the world is now rich and is every day becoming more rich:

Dylan Matthews: About 200 Years Ago, The World Started Getting Rich. Why?: ‘In the United Kingdom… GDP per capita grew about 40 percent between 1700 and 1800. It more than doubled between 1800 and 1900. And between 1900 and 2000, it grew more than fourfold. What today we’d characterize as extreme poverty was until a few centuries ago the condition of almost every human on Earth. In 1820, some 94 percent of humans lived on less than $2 a day…. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that 8.6 percent of people lived on less than $1.90 a day. And the gains were not solely economic. Before 1800, average lifespans didn’t exceed 40 years anywhere in the world. Today, the average human life expectancy is more like 73…. [Jared Rubin:] "The question is why it took so long for the rate of technological innovation to grow…. There is not one “silver bullet” answer…. Institutions that limit confiscation by the government (and protect other property rights more generally)… cultural values that support innovation and encourage understanding of how the world works. Societies in which work is looked down upon are unlikely to experience sustained innovation…. It took a while for all of these preconditions to coalesce in one nation. But once it did, economic growth took off…. Colonization likely played some role, and it likely played a much greater role in keeping large parts of the formerly colonized world poor. But there are many key features of the onset of growth that cannot really be accounted for by colonization. Most importantly, explaining how the world became rich requires an explanation for why the rate of technological change rose so rapidly…. One thing the history of technology has taught us is that as long as the incentives are there for innovators to innovate, we will continue to be [positively] surprised…
LINK: <https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/6/1/23138463/how-the-world-became-rich-industrial-revolution-koyama-rubin>

Invading a country and casually putting it through a decade of increased hell just because we could. And Tom Friedman approved, sadistically:

Duncan Black: Happy “Suck On This” Day: ‘Almost forgot. 19 years ago today!: [Tom Friedman:] “I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie…. We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it…. What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, ”‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?’ You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well Suck. On. This.’ Okay. That Charlie was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth…
LINK: <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/05/happy-suck-on-this-day.html>

Grifters gotta grift, and gotta double-down on grifting:

Jen Wieczner: The Rise and Fall of Cathie Wood: ‘Cathie Wood sat onstage at the storied Fontainebleau hotel in Miami…. ARK Innovation ETF had lost roughly half of its value over the prior year…. A year earlier, she’d thought her firm, ARK Invest, would deliver annualized returns of 15 percent, she acknowledged, setting up what seemed like a mea culpa for her poor performance. Instead, she doubled down: “Now we think 50 percent.” So far, she’s been wrong—her main fund is down another 34 percent since her comments—but her firm still has more than $16 billion in assets…
LINK: <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-rise-and-fall-of-cathie-wood.html>

Yes: our R&D labor force is so much greater now than it was in 1870, when it was so much greater than it was in 1000, that ideas must be massively harder to fight. If they were not, we would have been talking "singularity" a generation or two ago:

Nicholas Bloom & al.: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?: ‘Research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find…
LINK: <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338>

So, Noah, why hasn’t Japan already done ALL THE THINGS?:

Noah Smith: Ideas to Boost Japanese Growth: ‘Redistribution isn’t going to be enough to give Japanese people the kind of material welfare they deserve…. Low-ish per capita GDP means there are just fewer resources to redistribute…. Growth policy is hard, especially for rich countries that are close to the technological frontier…. Fixing… broken corporate culture is an important part of the story…. But it’s only part of the puzzle…. I want to list some steps I think Japan can take to boost growth above and beyond corporate culture reform…. 1. Export more…. 2. Build a globally competitive alternative energy industry…. 3. Create a defense-research-industrial complex…. 4. Increase late-stage funding for new companies…. 5. Institutionalize the immigration system…. Bonus Idea: Create a Japanese Hong Kong…. Though this idea is probably too wild and wacky to ever happen, the others on the list are all very feasible and definitely worth doing…
LINK: