The Immortals

[hoplite14gr]

Good anlaysis. But there is more. It doesn't matter if you are Greek Persian or other....
If you come to Asia Minor coastline geopolitical situation forces you try control the Aegean basin. I started in the Bronze Age and it continues....

Kind regards

[Sean Manning]

Paralus\\n[quote]Thucydides does not escape either. For whatever reason the Persians seemed not to interest him. Why, one screams as one reads book eight, after the debacle of Sicily would Athens involve itself with the revolt of Amorges against the Great King? Thucydides cares not to say. It beggars belief that Athens would actively court another enemy for the sake of it. As well, we’d dearly love the revised and fully franked version of the perfidious alliance between Sparta and Persia, the price of which was “the territory of the King, such as is in Asia, is to belong to the Kingâ€

[Paralus]

Hi Shaun.

One would dearly love an account from the Achaemenid view. Unfortunately, aside from the Babylonian Chronicles (which are indeed formulaic) and the even more arcane "Astronomical Diaries", we are bereft. Left with Ctesias (and his wonderful tales), Xenophon (and his idealised Cyrus, written with a point Anabasis and other writings, Thucydides, Herodotus and others (Pausanias, Polyaenus, et al), we are ensconced within a Helleno-centric cloud.

As I wrote, it isn't all at Xenophon's door. It would hugely valuable were Thucydides to have taken an active interest in Hello-Persian relations. Although he includes several drafts of the treaty of alliance between Persian and the Lacaedemonians in his "unrevised" book eight, he seems not to grasp the significance of what this means. It might be that, at the time he wrote of it, he was unaware of the decisive effect of this agreement. Perhaps he was writing of these events at the time of his death and all that survives are the “unpolishedâ€

[Paralus]

Artabanos, it's best to buy Cyrus to Alexander from the publisher, Eisenbeauns (it's where I ordered mine from some considerable time back). If you can stump to the dollars and lay hands on a credit card you'll find a brand new (paperback) version for some 34 Euro (49.50 USD) and the hardback for 49 Euro (71.55 USD).

That second-hand merchant's a rip-off merchant! He's quoting Greek figures at you (of Persian numbers).