Through Western eyes

‘Why have we come here? The Directory has deported us,’ grumbled the heat-stricken and exhausted soldiers of Napoleon’s Army of the Orient, having travelled for days across the desert to a spot just west of Cairo. There, at what would later be called the Battle of the Pyramids, they would face the forces of the Ottoman governor Murad Bey. Napoleon lifted his men’s spirits with a vision of history: ‘Go and remember that 40 centuries are looking down upon you,’ he told them. Though opposed by ‘vastly superior Mamluk forces’, the French exploited discipline, firepower and innovative tactics to win the day.

Vividly described, this is just one of the fateful encounters discussed in Anthony Pagden’s book, Worlds at War, which seeks to recount and explain the ‘2,500-year struggle’ between East and West. According to myth, the struggle began with the abduction of Helen by ‘a foppish Trojan playboy’, but for the historical Greeks it began soon after 500 BCE in a series of clashes with the immense and wealthy Persian empire. Much of the identity of ancient Greece, and ultimately of Europe itself — an identity based on the opposition between Western freedom and ‘Oriental despotism’ — was forged on this anvil.

Pagden’s tale continues apace. The classical Greeks are overthrown by the Macedonians, and Alexander the Great then conquers and partially Hellenises the Middle East as far as the Indus River and Afghanistan. In his wake come the Romans with a less vast but more permanent footprint, their empire bounded to the east by the Parthians, with whom they will war for centuries. Contributing to the development of Western civilisation by inventing a universal citizenship based on shared values, the Roman Empire would find itself transformed in turn by the coming of a religion from the East.