Clausewitz's famous remark about the relationship between war and politics goes both ways. More to the point, rather than being polar opposites, the two lie on a spectrum and are often found simultaneously shaping the complex field of human interactions at the local, regional, and, in the case of Empires, even global scale. In the case of Greeks and Persians, studying how and why the entanglement between them played out has been a staple of Classics and Ancient History since their very inception as an academic discipline in the Euro-American (Western, as it is customary to say) world. Despite more than two centuries of scholarly inquiry, going beyond little more than paraphrases of the - primarily hostile - Greek and Latin sources has proven more challenging than one may expect. One not secondary reason thereof can be found in the weight those very sources had on the intellectual construction of the idea of Europe, which in turn, once it took shape, found very comfortable to take the memorialization of the encounter between the Greek world and Persia, at face value and not as one, remarkably biased, viewpoint. [1] Since the Achaemenid History Workshops of the 1980s, valiant efforts by several specialists have come a long way in bringing A Persian Perspective back to the forefront (as one of the series's volumes was tellingly called). [2] Yet, several misconceptions still dominate popular and, to a remarkable extent, academic perceptions of Aegean politics (and warfare and diplomacy) during the 200 years of Achaemenid hegemony, and a thorough, diachronic study of the topic from the standpoint of the Empire as the geopolitical, economic, and cultural pivot of the (Eastern) Mediterranean world has not been forthcoming. [3]

Sebastian Kühne's reworked dissertation takes on the daunting task of filling this notable gap in current scholarship on "Persia and the West" by taking a holistic approach to the concept of political interactions. As the title makes clear, Communication, Consensus (Finding), and Conflict are not - necessarily - separate stages in the Greek experience of Persia, and vice versa. Instead, they have to be considered aspects of one entangled space (the Eastern Mediterranean, from Anatolia to Egypt and the Aegean Island) in which the Achaemenid Empire represented by far the biggest, but by no means the only player. The volume's scope encompasses the entire extent of Achaemenid history, from Cyrus to Alexander. This represents a welcome innovation compared to the previous treatment of Graeco-Persian relations, whose shorter chronological span often precludes a thorough appreciation of structural trends and cultural logics underpinning the events related by the sources. The discussion is prefaced by an introduction, covering somewhat selectively, perhaps inevitably, given the nature of the matter, the history of scholarship, and presenting the sources. It then unfolds in four rather massive chapters, each meticulously divided into sections and sub-(at times sub-sub) sections, usually bookended by intermediary conclusions that conveniently wrap the salient points of the argumentation. Such a structure is a blessing for the reader, especially the non-native German speaker, as it offers precious help in not losing oneself in an elegant, though at times labyrinthic syntax. A final general conclusion (a more detailed summary of the previous chapters) is followed by a thorough bibliography and an index of personal names. An additional index of places and, perhaps more importantly, a sources' index would have been much welcome (the latter particularly so as it would have provided a handy and invaluable resource for other scholars willing to engage with the topic). The book is well crafted and carefully edited, although a few typos can be spotted - particularly wrong page numbers referencing other scholarly works. In light of the massive amount of footnotes (2207), this is perhaps inevitable and does not affect readability or the author's arguments.

The first section, devoted to the question of the communication structures between Greece and Persia, brings to the forefront some critical points. It emerges, for once, that embassies to the King (and the Anatolian satraps) were quite literally an - élite - family business, as the job could be handed down from one generation to the next, with the Persian administration most likely keeping written track of the accredited individuals. Such an arrangement, which answered fundamental issues of trust-building, could have remarkable political repercussions, as it served the Spartan oligarchy (or other similar polities in the mainland) better than the quixotic Athenian democracy. Secondly, Kühne emphasizes the importance of personal relationships and networks as conducive to communication with and movement within the Persian Empire. The satrapal household and the person of the satrap itself played a pivotal role in this context, for it acted as the essential infrastructure through which interactions with the king were possible. This is a point to be kept in mind as the insights provided by the new institutional history fueled by the publication of the Persepolis Archive bring further nuances to current understandings of the Empire's inner workings, as extra-institutional factors (the satraps' own personal or family interests, at time competing with those of their peers or even the king) were inevitably baked into the imperial machinery and, while not visible from the archive's perspective, impacted imperial politics to a considerable degree. [3]

The book's second section focuses on communications outcomes by investigating the causes behind events such as the so-called King's Peace in 386 BCE. Against the mainstream view of peace as one of compromise or, on the other end, a diktat by the Empire, Kühne makes an astute case for reading the sources against a whitean Middle Ground framework. While acting from a position of (economic, political, and even military, a fact not emphasized enough by scholars) force, the Achaemenids still could - and would - not do away with the interests of Greek communities in Anatolia, the Aegean and the Mainland. Read against this background, narrative sources of Graeco-Persian peace treatise make it possible to retrieve bits and pieces of the Persian official language, which repurposed instances of Greek powers (Sparta above all) in the cultural grammar of Achaemenid imperialism. In turn, the extant accounts appear to re-translate the King's words into the cultural logic of Greek peer politics. One primary outcome of Kühne's approach is that it "provincializes" the Greek politics of Persian rulers, showing through skillful comparison with other parts of the Empire (Egypt above all) that there was much less uniqueness in the way the Persians handled their Western (would-be) subjects than the sources would have one to think.

Finally, the third section of the work turns to Clausewitz's diplomacy by other means, namely warfare. Following in the footsteps of recent revisionist trends of Persia's military history, Kühne aptly illustrates that at no point until Alexander the Great, the King's forces - by land or sea - could seriously be troubled by the Greeks. [5] The idea of "military decadence", which, despite the Workshops members' efforts, is still alive and kicking, is nothing but a trope of the sources, and it may be worth investigating deeper the reasons behind its resilience even among scholars.

Overall, Kühne's book offers a welcome tool (especially for Classicists) for studying the Greek world in the Age of Persia, and it is undoubtedly worthy of careful reading and discussion.

Notes:

[1] Cf. Pierre Briant: Alexandre des Lumières. Fragments d'histoire européenne, Paris 2016 and Giorgia Proietti: Prima di Erodoto. Aspetti della memoria delle Guerre persiane, Stuttgart 2021.

[2] Wouter Henkelman / Amélie Kuhrt (eds.): A Persian Perspective. Essays in Memory of Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, Leiden 2003. See furthermore John Hyland: Persian Interventions. The Achaemenid Empire, Athens, and Sparta, 450-386 BCE, Baltimore 2016 and now the overview by Jennifer Finn: The Grand Strategy of Achaemenid Persia, 539-331 BCE, in: Brill's Companion to Warfare in Ancient Iranian Empires, eds. John Hyland / Khodadad Rezakhani, Leiden 2024, 120-156.

[3] See Emanuele Pulvirenti (ed.): Anatolian Interactions: Criss-Cross Contacts and Cultural Dynamics in the First Millennium BCE, Trento 2024. Both this volume and the author's important, but sadly still unpublished, dissertation on a very similar topic (Aspects of Cultural Interactions between Greeks and Persian. Cultural Entanglement in a Conflictual Context - 546-350 BCE, written in Italian) are unfortunately absent from the Kühne's extensive, primarily German and English, bibliography.

[4] Cf. Rhyne King: The House of the Satrap. The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire, Oakland (CA) 2025. Except for some seminal contributions (most critically Henkelman's article on Imperial Signature and Imperial Paradigm: Achaemenid Administrative Structure and System across and beyond the Iranian Plateau, Wiesbaden 2017, 45-256), the newest insights from Persepolis are relatively underexploited in Kühne's discussion.

[5] Jeffrey Rop: Greek Military Service in the Ancient Near East, 401-330 BCE, Cambridge 2019, Sean Manning: Armed Forces in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire, Stuttgart 2021, and now John Hyland: The Achaemenid Military System and Its Campaign Logistics, in: Brill's Companion to Warfare in Ancient Iranian Empires, eds. John Hyland / Khodadad Rezakhani, Leiden 2024, 157-186.

Marco Ferrario