Persians

The Persian learned men say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the dispute.

” For the Persians claim Asia for their own, and the foreign peoples that inhabit it;

but the Greeks, for the sake of a Lacedaemonian woman, recruited a great armada, came to Asia, and destroyed the power of Priam.

But Cyrus, finding the nations in Asia also independent in exactly the same way, started out with a little band of Persians and became the leader of the Medes by their full consent and of the Hyrcanians by theirs;

Over each of these divisions there are twelve officers, for the Persians are divided into twelve tribes.

and no one of these is by law excluded from holding offices and positions of honour, but all the Persians may send their children to the common schools of justice.

And he says this teaching and exhorting that good men ought to take care also of the table, since he was not inexperienced in food of every kind and in extravagance, so that the Persians and Syrians who are now agog over such things, and among the Greeks the Italiote Greeks and the Ionians, do not even come close to the abundance and luxury found in Homer.

So Homer is plainly no praiser of wearing gold, and that into battle—of bracelets and torques, and besides of golden frontlets and bits, such as they say the Persians affect;

When, at any rate, Xerxes and Darius drove from up-country, from Susa, a great crowd of Persians and Medes and Sacae and Arabs and Egyptians, hither into Greece to perish, were they doing a kingly or a cook's work, driving a prey to be cut up?

In the same manner, in the time of Cimon, the Persians were bound by a treaty, made with the Athenians, not to sail with any ship of war between the Cyanean rocks and the Chelidonian islands;

thus among the Persians giving the right hand was considered the firmest tie.

When the Greeks were at war with the Persians, in one part of their military oath they swore to bury all the dead belonging to the allies, and when they were victorious, to bury even the barbarians.

And one of the kings of the Persians said:

The sage of the Persians has said:

And it was said among the maxims of the Persians:

We have heard, too, that the Persians were the first to make the carriage and the couch and the footstool, and the Sidonians to build the three-banked ship.

The Brahmans all, and the Odrysae and the Getae and the race of the Egyptians, treated their own matters as theology with exactness;

At its head stood the prophets of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans among the Assyrians, the Druids among the Galatians, the Samanaeans among the Bactrians, the philosophers of the Celts, and the Magi of the Persians (who by their magic foretold the birth of the Saviour, coming into the land of Judaea led by a star), and among the Indians the gymnosophists, and other barbarian philosophers besides.

When Cyrus had read it, he had Orontas arrested, and summoned to his tent seven of the noblest Persians among his attendants, while he ordered the Greek generals to bring up hoplites and bid them station themselves under arms around his tent.

For all the sons of the noblest Persians are educated at the King’s court.

At this time Orontas, a Persian, who was related to the King by birth and was reckoned among the best of the Persians in matters of war, devised a plot against Cyrus —in fact, he had made war upon him before this, but had become his friend again.

the Persians even smear them with wax before burying, that the bodies may last as long as possible.

The diet of the Persians is set forth by Xenophon, who says they apply nothing to their bread beyond cress.

for it is not possible for people who are reared and governed as are the Persians, either to have a part in any other form of virtue or to set up on the field of battle trophies of victory over their foes.

What in our world is not hateful to them who did not shrink in the earlier war from rifling even the images and temples of the gods, and burning them to the ground?

So it is that those of the Persians who come down to the sea, whom they term satraps, do not dishonor the training which they receive at home, but cling steadfastly to the same habits:

and, sending word to the generals of the Persian king, he promised that he would do this.

Then again, Cyrus (that we may take account of the barbarians also), not withstanding the fact that as a child he was exposed by his mother on the public highway and was picked up by a Persian woman, so completely reversed his fortunes that he became master of all Asia.

For example, if at the present moment one were to say that the King of Asia was plotting against the Hellenes, and had made preparations to send an expedition against us, he would not he saying anything disparaging of him;

Courage and industry and a spirit ready for war are found among the Persians as well as among the high-girt.

Not the Persians, nor the far reaches of the Medes, nor whatever warlike thing lies beyond the Dahae, but greed, but ambition, but the fear of death, which has conquered the conquerors of nations.

Plainly the Persians, as Ctesias relates, live freely with their mothers, as knowing as they are unshuddering.

A kingdom all nations have had, each in its own times, as the Assyrians, as the Medes, as the Persians, as the Egyptians;

Ctesias relates that the Persians have intercourse with their own mothers.

We shall be reckoned among the Persians, if anything — though we do not adore the sun painted on linen, having him everywhere in his own disk.

( the counsel (waṣīyah) of the Persians ) Be truthful, that you may be trusted in what you say;

Arithmetic and the instituting of the register (*al-dīwān*) belong to the sciences of the Copts and the Persians;

After passing this decree, and exchanging solemn pledges and oaths, they fearlessly took up their stand as the protectors of the whole of Greece, and met the Persians at Marathon;

First of all, I will point you to the cock, who governed the Persians before all other monarchs, before Darius and Megabazus.

For this reason also, even to-day, he alone of all the birds wears his tiara straight on his head, like the Great King.

It's in memory of his reign that he is called the Persian bird.

Among the Persians paternal rule is tyrannical, for the Persians use their sons as slaves.

Nor is it in this alone that I am drawn on, but I must with great speed overtake the land of the Persians and put to flight that Sapor, who has become the descendant of Darius, until he becomes tributary and subject to me;

But with a serene mind I decree that ten hundred pounds of gold be sent to me by you on my passage by Caesarea, while I am still upon the highway, coming with great speed to the Persian war;

especially when assisted by the passions.

let there be no less pleasure in that cress on which Xenophon writes the Persians were wont to feed, than at Syracusan tables, which are gravely censured by Plato;

then, in Greece, as among ourselves, magnificent shrines consecrated with human images, which the Persians held abominable;

But afterward both Philip, who planned it, and Alexander, who waged it, brought this cause of war against the Persians, that he wished to punish them for the shrines of Greece;

After many cycles of years, however, they too came to reverence statues of human form, as Berossus shows in the third book of his Chaldaic Affairs, this having been introduced by Artaxerxes son of Darius son of Ochus, who first set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaïtis in Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana, and showed the Persians and Bactrians and Damascus and Sardis to reverence it.

Or take Perdiccas, who was reigning in Macedonia at the time of the Persian invasion, and who destroyed the Persians on their retreat from Plataea, and made the defeat of the King irreparable.

When they caught Themistocles presumptuously setting himself above the people, they banished him from Athens, and found him guilty of siding with the Medes.