The Persians. Lloyd Lwellyn-Jones.

    

     The title of Lwellyn-Jones' book is a misnomer. A proper name for this eminently readable book would "The palace history of the Achaemenid Empire according (mostly) to Greek anecdotes". The most original (and subjective) is the foreword and conclusion, in which Lwellyn-Jones discusses the cultural foreground and prospects for the "Persianism" in the world culture.

    The book tells very little about the demographics, society, economy, even the military organization of the Persian society. Why the Persian armies were victorious on the battlefield for so long, until their ignominious defeat in the hands of tiny bands of marauding Greeks and Macedonians? The bulk of it deals with sexo-politics of the dysfunctional polygamous family, which were the Achaemenids and reads like a detective story. 

    Remarkably, the reference section contains the sources, from which one could possibly learn about the Persian society and identity in more detail. 

Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind. A Life in History.

    Peter Brown decided to reconcile the history of the Roman Empire with the dogma of the Catholic Church. The result transcended his Catholic Orthodoxy. It was the revision of the history describing the Empire after the Second Century as decaying and the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a watershed. He proved that, intellectually, the Roman Empire evolved quite naturally from a pagan worldview of the mid-Second Century to the conservative Christian society of the Late Empire. Furthermore, culturally, there was no watershed between the Late Roman Empire and the Germanic states, which replaced it thereafter. Currently, these views are accepted as normative in historical science. 

    The memoir is splendidly structured as recollections of his meetings with colleagues in a rough chronological sequence, so that one travels with him to Middle East, Iran and the United States. 

    However, Peter Brown's great revisionist coup obscures the following undeniable facts. Fourth century Roman Empire was less populous and poorer than the Empire at its zenith, the fact noticed by the most prescient of contemporary authors. Civic construction was at a standstill -- after the Baths of Diocletian there were few buildings of comparable size and stature -- and the cities started to be abandoned, first by the upper classes. Secular literature of any quality disappeared. The quality of sculpture and minting declined significantly, which suggests that the urban middle classes devoid of support by the magnates, were fewer and far between. The only mention of economic decay of the Late Empire, which I encountered in his 700 page book is "Trans-Mediterranean trade had already run down considerably before the Muslims reached the sea". 

     This reinforces a currently dominant view -- largely due to Peter Brown himself and others mentioned in the book -- that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was not as much of a watershed as a contiguous process of mutual adaptation between Roman and Germanic societies, but it was a slow decay nevertheless. 

    

Robert Darnton. The Revolutionary Temper. Paris 1748-1789.

      

      Harvard doyen Robert Darnton's book about seething unrest leading to the French Revolution is quite a good reading. Political, economic and administrative realities of the French society serve only as a frame to describe the changes in public opinion, his specialty. 

    The picture of the French society he describes in his book -- without expounding on that -- hints at the causes of the French Revolution as incompatible divergences of the political elites. And these were four: the court, the (upper) clergy, the executive -- the ministers and the Parliaments. Each had its sets of publicists to support their positions. Incongruously, but consistent with American academic tradition, Darnton describes these medieval institutions, the Parliaments, as democracy in action. But he honestly shows that they were largely defenders of entrenched interests of the urban upper classes. Even in one case -- the absolution of the Jansenists -- in which Parliaments were seemingly on the side of the freedom of the press and consciousness, they were defending Jansenism. But it became a superstition long ago, contrasting with a "more enlightened" views of the upper clergy. 

     At the same time, Gallican Church, or at least her upper echelons were more and more entrenched in their Ultramontanism and complete inflexibility, first and foremost, with respect to their own taxation. 

      The most progressive part of the elite were the ministries but they were hamstrung by the court intrigues and the laziness and the indecision of both kings, Louis XV and Louis XVI. Because of the parochial interests of the Parliaments they had to introduce reforms by "tyrannical" (compared with the French Revolution -- ha-ha) methods. 

     The weakness of Darnton's book -- henceforth it cannot replace the classics of De Tocqueville "The Old Regime and the Revolution" and Edgar Faure's "La disgrace de Turgot" -- that all the problems are sorted out from the point of view of Parisian educated middle class. The ones that could afford to pay 9 livres for a literary pamphlet and subscribe to the "Gazette de Leyde" -- his favorite broadsheet source and the barometer of the public opinion.  

Emma Southon. A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire.

   This is an odd work of a Christian Feminism. Modern wokeism tinged it with replacement of slaves by the "enslaved people", though I cannot figure out why the latter is better than the former. Furthermore, "enslaved" does not indicate whether people in question were enslaved during their lifetimes, or were born as slaves. 

    But the book only proves the point that Hellenistic, including Roman, women played no role in state politics. Few exceptions only underline the message. If we exclude semi-legendary women of the Kingly Rome, like Tarpeia and Queen Tanaquil in her book, the only women who actively participated in big political decisions were Severan, i.e. Syrian/Balkan women: Julia Domna, Julia Maesa and Julia Mamaea described by Southon in one of the chapters. A Christian princess Galla Placidia, in another chapter, played a great role in Rome's final demise but this was because of her decision to side with the Goths against her Empire. If one adds to them a treacherous, murderous last wife of Augustus, Empress Livia, or so she is shown in "I, Claudius", the list will be over. 

    So the outrageous remark of one of the 1960s professors that delivering a lecture course on Roman women will be like delivering a course on Roman dogs does not seem so outlandish after all. Women, Roman, or otherwise, Etruscan, British, etc. played a great role in the life of the Roman society, which Dr. Southon shows quite clearly -- with the ample use of obscenities and allusions on the English popular culture, some of which I cannot understand -- but their political influence was negligible. 

William Burns for "Foreign Policy"

 The magazine "Communist" in the Soviet times, despite a visible thickness and demagoguery of its articles, performed a very important function. Through it, the Party and Government leadership as well as a few highly-placed propagandists explained and inculcated current policies of the Party and Government to the masses of its functionaries. Without teeth-crunching studies of the "Communist" articles during special workshops and Party meetings, the functionaries would be left without a guiding light on a frequently changing and, sometimes, contradictory Party policies. 

    Currently, the Washington blob, uses "Foreign Policy" for essentially the same purposes. But the pronouncements, which can easily emerge from large and empty heads of Blinken and Nuland, look really odd when coming from William J. Burns, the only remaining foreign policy whiz in the Biden administration. Basically, it affirms the triumph of Bushism-Bidenism: a complete merger of the foreign and military-intelligence policies with no place for diplomatic conflict resolution and/or mutually beneficial economic cooperation. 

    In his article, Burns advocates a complete destruction of Russian Federation and the reduction of China to semi-colonial status, as the implicit goals of American foreign policy. It is hard to imagine many Russians or Chinese agree with that agenda or not employing every resource to forestall this conclusion. In fact, since the first enlargement of NATO into Eastern Europe in 1998, the American polity was steadily degrading into something very much resembling a traditional Eastern European or Latin American society. We now have domination of the moneyed elite, political parties, which do not recognize the legitimacy of each other and freely appropriate any instrument of control. That includes secret police methods to displace the opponent, kangaroo courts, judging entirely on their political persuasion and ignoring the law, universal surveillance by the police, secret blacklisting, etc. etc. So the unrestrained imperialism of the neocons was hurtful to the majority of the US population. 

   But the most risible is the suggestion that CIA is "totally unpolitical". English language has a distinction between "politics" and "policy", which is not translated to adverbial usage. If the "policy" meaning is in question, than everything what CIA does is "political". If the meaning of (un)political is derived from "politics" then what can he say about the infamous, Blinken-inspired letter of a hundred or so intelligence operatives claiming that information from Hunter Biden's notebook bears "classic features of Russian disinformation". As if Russian intelligence could monitor repair and recycling of laptops in all of the United States. 

  Again, I do not think for a second that Mr. Burns believes in such stupidities. But the fact that he must repeat them to occupy positions of power in today's Washington sheds a dark light on the current state of the US politics. In whichever meaning you take it.