There is much to admire about Pagden’s book. His breadth of knowledge across two and a half millennia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive, and he introduces the reader to a series of fascinating thinkers and travellers: Herodotus, Aelius Aristides, St Augustine, Constantin-François Volney, John Stuart Mill. He also displays a clear-eyed awareness of how myths are created and sustained. The battle of Lepanto, in which the Venetians and Spanish defeated the Ottoman navy, ‘was hailed far and wide across Europe as a new Actium, a new Salamis,’ he writes. But ‘the analogies were, of course, entirely empty . . . The Spain of Philip II was hardly less despotic than the Ottoman Empire and in many respects was a good deal more so.’ As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary.
Which is why it is so surprising to find Pagden’s frequently long stretches of good sense undermined by sweeping simplifications. Again and again, he marks turning points and concludes chapters in a tone appropriate for the grandest of 19th- century grand narrative histories, referring to ‘the ancient struggle’, and describing the relationship between East and West as one of ‘perpetual enmity’ (a phrase he borrows from Herodotus). Similarly, though the book is presented as the history of a conflict between two parties, for much of the period covered it shows only one side’s perspective. The Persian Wars are discussed almost exclusively from the viewpoint of Greece, the Parthians are given neither voice nor authorial attention, and though not ignored, India and China are vastly underweighted against Europe and the Middle East. With the coming of Islam, Pagden finally begins to describe the East in some detail, but for the first 1,000 years of this conflict, the East is visible only dimly, and only through Western eyes.
At root may be the fact that Pagden is both a secular progressive — ‘the myths perpetrated by all monotheistic religions,’ he declares in the preface, ‘have caused more lasting harm to the human race than any other single set of beliefs’ — and an intellectual historian, and that therefore it is the teleological and ideological aspects of history which seem to hold most appeal for him. For example, despite the significant overlaps between ancient Greece and ancient Persia — the extremely close identification of religion and society, the practice of slavery — Pagden focuses only on those few things that made Greece politically distinct and that pointed the way to our own liberal democratic age, in particular the short-lived efflorescence of male-citizen democracy in the fifth century BCE. Understanding a civilisation in the round has been replaced with a motion-centred view: that which does not progress, does not count. ‘To weep over the disappearance of tribe and community, is mere sentimentality’, he writes in his conclusion.
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