The second question we may ask is whether it is fortuitous that both our blocks of narrative center on a particular type of episode, the foundation of a dynasty, on origins and accessions. This at least might seem a genuine Persian trait that has had a continuing impact on world literature from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia onwards.(1) It looks as if the royal preoccupation with legitimacy and the validation of power had a significant effect in the process of selecting earlier Mesopotamian motifs and molding the oral traditions of Persia, by providing a narrative framework which came to dominate them. Again this scarcely suggests that there existed any specifically Persian form of royal chronicle: the references that we have to such chronicles surely pertain to non-Persian records kept in one or more of the languages of the imperial bureaucracy, in ‘the usual impersonal style of Eastern annalistic writing’.(2)
By comparison with Greek and other oral traditions we can say that these Persian traditions are not clearly aristocratic as one might expect, given that they were preserved in an aristocratic milieu. The account of Darius’ accession, it is true, shows a typical interest in the rights and privileges of a particular group of families (3. 84); but in general the stories are marked by a recourse to the folk-tale motifs and repetitive use of stock situations that is more often thought characteristic of popular traditions. It should not perhaps surprise us if the Persian aristocracy is seen to submerge itself here as elsewhere in the existing cultural forms of the empire; but Karl Reinhardt was surely right to recognize differences between the general traditions of the Greek logos and eastern storytelling. These Persian stories lack the moral or religious dimension of their Greek counterparts; in Reinhardt’s formulation, the Persian Novelle is a pure form, ‘a story capable of being told as a unity with beginning and end, without regard to how perfectly or imperfectly it corresponds to an alleged “historical” reality which may lie behind it’.(3)
In terms of content the Persian stories in Herodotus are also composed of typical elements’ and deal in stock situations absent or rare in his Greek stories. They are court novels, of palace plots, of cruel punishments and even crueler vengeance, of faithful viziers and treachery, of harem intrigue and bedroom scenes, where women have equal power with men to decide history. This is particularly obvious in the two blocks of narrative under discussion, where we see two great historical events of different nature, the rise of Persia and the usurpation of Darius, retold within the framework of the Palastgeschichte; in each case we know that these same events could be and were described differently, even within the Persian tradition-as instances of divine protection of the king and the triumph of righteousness. Instead the account of Cyrus’ divinely ordained rise to power is transformed by being subordinated to a story of revenge and the faithless vizier; while the accession of Darius by the favor of Ahuramazda is played out in the bedchamber and the harem.
We should not ignore the importance of this interpretation of Persian history; it may derive many of its elements from popular sources; but, if it represents the considered response of the Persian aristocracy to their world, it can hardly fail to have reinforced the style of court life which it purported to describe. What is of course significant about this tradition is that it is identical with that which must lie behind the narratives of those later Greek historians who may be thought to have had direct knowledge of Persia, notably Ctesias and (to a lesser extent) Xenophon. It could well be argued that the history of Ctesias, with all its unsatisfactory elements, its lack of chronological framework and arbitrary reinterpretation of events ‘breathing seraglio and eunuch perfumes, mixed with the foul stench of blood’ (Eduard Meyer), is in fact a truly Persian history-not the invention of a Greek doctor, but an account of Persian court life as the Persian aristocracy saw it. The absence of a Persian history is after all a Persian failure, not a Greek one. But I am not yet proposing the rehabilitation of Ctesias as the leading exponent of a lost Persian historiography;(4) I am, however, happy to welcome studies that take seriously as oral tradition the oriental Novelle in both its Greek and its Jewish dress:  it may not be reducible to our sort of history, but it is a genuine expression of Persian traditions about the past.(5)
It does not worry me, as it did not worry Reinhardt, that one of the most striking examples of the type of patterning that we have been interpreting is provided by the story of Gyges, king of Lydia, in its Herodotean version (1. 7-12). The Greek perception of Persia was derivative on the Greek perception of Lydia. It was Lydian culture and the Mermnad dynasty which gave the Greeks their model of an eastern society and of oriental despotism. Equally we know that there existed in Asia Minor of the fifth century a unified Lydian-Persian aristocratic culture, whose traditions must have fused together, allowing attitudes to Persian monarchy to be transferred to the Lydian monarchy. The Gyges story connected with Croseus are quite different in character and clearly Greek in origin. It was until Xanthus of Lydia that Lydian history became fully assimilated to the Persian model.(6)
More problematic is the difficulty referred to by Momigliano in his ironical remark, ‘even a scholar with as fine an ear as K. Reinhardt was hardly able to distinguish between authentic Persian tales and tales attributed to the Persians by Greeks’.(7) It is of course true that the eastern court novel has sufficient similarities with story types in the Greek tradition for it to be easy for the Greeks to take over and even create court novels in their own style. It has always been hard to refute those who follow the simple way out of refusing to make generic distinctions and claiming that all story types are the same, just as it is hard to refute those who attribute nothing to Herodotus’ power of observation and everything to his imagination. In replying to the skeptics we must proceed on various levels. First’ we must try to delineate carefully the general characteristics which seem to differentiate stories told in an eastern context from those told in a Greek context in the spirit of Reinhardt. Second, we can point to detailed evidence which implies a basic Persian narrative; we are lucky that it is possible to demonstrate this for both our main Persian stories in Herodotus, in respect of general story line and also in many significant details which lie behind attempts at Greek rationalization; to take one example, the story of Darius, mare (3. 84-7) attests a practice of horse divination non-existent in Greece, but still practiced in Persia as late as the Sasanian period.(8)
Finally, we should be willing to admit cross-cultural influences. We have seen the fusion of Lydian and Persian kingship; orientalism(9) is at least as old as the fifth century. By then, as Alfoldi saw, the oriental monarch and the Greek tyrant had also fused in popular imagination,(10) and Reinhardt was happy to show how the Persian wars narrative of Herodotus itself combined elements of the Persian court novel with Greek storytelling to construct a plausible Persian version of events, which must surely rest on Herodotus’ own historical imagination. But no one should be afraid of imagination in history.    

1. See Sancisi-Weerdenburg, ‘The Fifth Oriental Monarchy and Hellenocentrism’ [n. 42] and the references cited there.
2. Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography [n. 42], 28.
3. ‘Herodotus Persergeschichten’, in id., Vermachtnis der Antike (Gottingen, 1960), 133-74 at 138. Compare the remarks of S. Trenckner, The Greek Novella in the Classical Period (Cambridge, 1958), 24-5, on the moral seriousness of Herodotus’ Novellen in contrast to those of other writers.
4. Such a rehabilitation is already under way among Iranists and Assyriologists: see F. W. Konig, Ktesias (Archiv fur Orientforschng, suppl. 18; Graz, 1972); W. Nagel, Ninos und Semiramis (Tubingen, 1982). But see Jacoby, ‘Ktesias’, RE xi/2 (1922), 2032-73; A. Momigliano, ‘Tradizione e invenzione in Ctesia’, in id., Quarto contributo (Rome, 1969), 181-212; R. Drews, The Greek Accounts of Eastern History (Washington, 1973), 103-16.
5. H. W. A. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, Yauna en Persia (diss. Groningen, 1980).
6. This tendency is abundantly clear from the fragments of Xanthus, FGrHist 765; cf. n. 48 above. He also wrote Magika on Persia, F 31-2. For bibliography on the Lydian Logos of Herodotus see C. Talamo, ‘Erodoto e il regno do Lidia’, Storia della storiografia, 7 (1985), 150-61 [and now the forthcoming English edition of D. Asheri’s commentary on Herodotus book 1].
7. Alien Wisdom (Cambridge, 1975), 131.
8. Agathias 4. 25; references to modern discussions in M. A. Dandamayev, Persien unter den ersten Achameniden (Wiesbaden, 1976), 166 n. 714.
9. E. W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth, 1985), 56. This is of course a main theme of Momigliano, Alien Wisdom [n. 60], ch. 6.
10. ‘Gewaltherrscher und Theaterkonig’, in k. Weitzmann (ed.), Late Classical and Mediaeval in Honor of A. M. Friend, Jr. (Princeton, 1955), 15-55.



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