This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
The conceit here is that a Persian who has seen much of the world of his time, met the Buddha and Confucius, been an intimate of the Persian court, and who is now Persian ambassador to Athens, is dictating his life story to a Greek friend Democritus (yes, apparently that Democritus). And his life story is very much the story of the time, both in terms of Greek and Persian and Indian and Chinese politics, and Zoroastrianism and Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism and so on.
There's no strong plot or narrative arrow to the book; it is convincingly the end-of-life ramblings and remembrances of an old, well-travelled, and intelligent man. The philosophy is treated well (i.e. I have a Bachelor's in the subject, and didn't really wince at all). The narrator is a Zoroastrian, but he gives us a relatively tolerant and understanding outsider's view of the other belief systems he rubs up against. The very personal pictures of Buddha and Confucius are well done, memorable, and even funny. The historical background is either deeply and well researched, or very well faked (I don't know enough of the detailed history here to know the difference).
It took me a long time to read the book, and at times it dragged. I didn't always care about the characters or the politics, and not knowing whether I was reading an accurate historical account (which would have made it neater) or just a vividly imagined possible past (which would have been a bit more routine) was sometimes unmotivating. But all in all I enjoyed it, and I hope that the images and word-pictures of that century that it's left me with are at least reasonably accurate.
This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.