4 ms·

> it’s quite hard to know exactly what happened back then! For instance, the Greeks would never admit that Alexander was the son of the King of Persia and grand

by Keysh 4y ago

> it’s quite hard to know exactly what happened back then! For instance, the Greeks would never admit that Alexander was the son of the King of Persia and grandson of Philip. Yes, it’s unlikely but it’s not implausible… Given that we know about Alexander's parentage from multiple contemporary sources, the idea that a pro-Persian epic poem written 1300 years later is plausible when it tells us something different is not very sensible. What's probably going on is a bit of retconning to resolve two contrary ideas. On the one hand, by the time Ferdowsi was writing, several hundred years of Arab rule in Iran had made stories about Alexander (who the Arabs thought was pretty awesome) popular. On the other hand, Persians remembered that Alexander had conquered an ancient Persian empire. (We know the pre-Islamic Sassanid Persians hated Alexander.) How do you reconcile this in a patriotic Persian poem? Solution: make it so Alexander was secretly Persian! (I have no idea whether this was Ferdowsi's innovation or something that had evolved over a few centuries of storytelling prior to Ferdowsi coming along.) There's a nice discussion of the background to this (including why Ferdowsi did things like refer to Alexander as "Caesar of Rome") here https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/20f0yh/historical_bad_history_alexander_caesar_of_rome/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/20f0yh/historic...

yamtaddle 4y ago
> On the one hand, by the time Ferdowsi was writing, several hundred years of Arab rule in Iran had made stories about Alexander (who the Arabs thought was pretty awesome) popular. Indeed, it's sometimes overlooked in the West that much of the Middle East and Southwest Asia consider their cultures at least in part descended from Greece, much as Europe and places like the US consider Greece the starting point of their cultures. And that's mainly because of Alexander. So you see some of the same stuff there that you see in Europe with Greek (and, by the transitive property, Roman) history, not seeing Alexander so much as a conqueror who defeated them, but rather as a vital part of the fabric of their history and society, as the British celebrate their Roman ruins rather than being angry or ashamed of them despite the Romans being, at one time, foreign conquerors, and even freely tie major cultural founding-myths to Rome (e.g. King Arthur), much as the Aeneid ties Roman culture to Greek.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  I wonder how much of that is an effect of the English being conquerors themselves. (Normands and Saxons.)

by Keysh 4y ago

yamtaddle 4y ago

> On the one hand, by the time Ferdowsi was writing, several hundred years of Arab rule in Iran had made stories about Alexander (who the Arabs thought was pretty awesome) popular. Indeed, it's sometimes overlooked in the West that much of the Middle East and Southwest Asia consider their cultures at least in part descended from Greece, much as Europe and places like the US consider Greece the starting point of their cultures. And that's mainly because of Alexander. So you see some of the same stuff there that you see in Europe with Greek (and, by the transitive property, Roman) history, not seeing Alexander so much as a conqueror who defeated them, but rather as a vital part of the fabric of their history and society, as the British celebrate their Roman ruins rather than being angry or ashamed of them despite the Romans being, at one time, foreign conquerors, and even freely tie major cultural founding-myths to Rome (e.g. King Arthur), much as the Aeneid ties Roman culture to Greek.

actionfromafar 4y ago
I wonder how much of that is an effect of the English being conquerors themselves. (Normands and Saxons.)