A Certain Slant of Light

I really love the outsider view of The Persian Boy, and was actually thinking recently that in the context of the wider cultural tropes of Greek vs. Persian/ west vs. east, it’s actually pretty unusual? Specifically, I was listening to the History of Persia podcast (https://historyofpersiapodcast.com/), and there was an AMA episode where someone asked the host (who is a historian specializing in the Achaemenid period, I think?) why he thinks the history of Persia is so overlooked in schools and general culture. And his answer was along the lines of a) the Greeks wrote a lot more stuff down that survived, b) Greek and Roman history and literature have undergone several centuries of deliberate white supremacist centering in the study of ancient history, and c) there are relatively few in-depth, sympathetic fictional portrayals of this era of Persian history in English literature. And he cited Gore Vidal’s Creation as one of the few examples in recent times of Persian history being treated as… as literarily useful as Greek and Roman history, which reminded me that Vidal read and praised The Persian Boy ten years before the publication of Creation. So the fact that FFH takes place before any of the real meat of Alexander’s career, and FG takes place entire after his death, and basically all of the important events of the campaign are told from a Persian perspective where Persian culture is solid and civilized, Greek culture is strange and barbaric, and Alexander becoming more Persian is evidence of good influence instead of the Greek narrative of increasing moral dissolution, seems like it was a somewhat unique perspective for a book written in English and thus aimed at readers who have undergone a general cultural conditioning to identify with “the greeks” to take!