War and peace in Achaemenid imperial ideology

Military activity played a determinative role in the history of the Achaemenid empire. This chapter considers some ideological dimensions of this fact. It does so through a separate examination of Persian and Greek representations of the role of war and warriors in the imperial setting. The place of war in the elite Persian psyche does remain rather elusive, but the Persian and Greek data-sets, radically different in content and character, are not far apart in their depiction of an ideological environment in which military values played a larger role than is sometimes acknowledged but were less fundamental than one might have expected. What is sometimes called the pax Achaemenica is certainly an artificial construct, but nothing compels us to replace it with the vision of a truly militarist society

Xenophon, Isocrates and the Achaemenid Empire: history, pedagogy and the Persian solution to Greek problems

Among surviving fourth century Athenian authors Xenophon and Isocrates stand out as the ones interested in Persia.1 Their degree of investment differs, and by one way of reckoning that Isocrates is not actually very large across his whole surviving corpus (nor is Xenophon's uniformly spread over his output), but Persia was part of what defined the environment of late classical Athens (and Greece) and any exercise in comparing and contrasting Isocrates and Xenophon must engage with Persian dimension