Persian Counsels

Late last year, I took the Vice  President's Classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, since honored with the National Medal Of the Humanities along with such worthies as Louis Auchincloss,  to task for  an echt-Neocon National Review Online piece expressing the view that ,in my words

"the National Intelligence Estimate shows that Iran's inability to realize its nuclear ambitions is but one of the many fruits of our wise invasion of Mesopotamia. As presumably is Libya's failure to send a manned mission to Mars. The scholarly world awaits Hanson's magisterial essay demonstrating that Xerxes turned tail on learning of Athens threat to weaponize Democritus' atomic theory."

I am now reduced to cognitive dissonance by belatedly  reading his far more balanced, indeed Classical take on matters Oriental --

July 21, 2007
Bad Persians
Myth and reality in wars between East and West
by Victor Davis Hanson
Times Literary Supplement

The principal cause of my chagrin is his reminder that  the Ionian  seat of pre-Socratic thought , including the the physics of Anaxamiter  and Democritus  languished under Persian satrapy  even as the Parthenon was being erected. So I sincerely  hope  ( one can dream ) that  they read this issue of the TLS at the White House, because it  is way above NR's current pay grade.

Comments

[wkwillis]

We should be so lucky as to have Bush Jr. read Xenophon.