East against West: The First Encounter. The Life of Themistocles

East Against West: The First Encounter. The Life of Themistocles. Dmitry Shlapentokh. Ludmila Prednewa, translator. Publish America. US$19.95. 189 pages. ISBN 1-4137-5691-3. In this challenging study, Prof. Shlapentokh, who teaches in the University of Indiana at South Bend, offers an example of revisionist history.

He looks again at the role of the Athenian leader, Themistocles, in the Greek wars against the Persian Empire some 2500 years ago. Generally speaking, historians have seen this as the inevitable triumph of 'democratic' and therefore morally superior Greek states against a 'despotic' Persian Empire. Prof. Shlapentokh examines both Greek and Persian societies: government, social structure, the military, the rule of law and national leaders, Cyrus and Xerxes in particular. The important Greek victory at Salamis really lay in the 'psychological impact' on the Persian king, not in an inevitable Greek triumph based on Athenian-Spartan cooperation (at best a temporary phenomenon, as Themistocles saw). The moral of this short book is that many of the assumptions shared by people today are groundless: the triumph of the 'democratic West' over the 'despotic East' is no more inevitable today than it was 2,500 years ago; 'totalitarian' regimes are often stronger than democracies; and finally it is the Persians, not the Greeks, who have had the greater influence on subsequent history. (T.B.)

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