When we became enemies The Persians had the misfortune to be the others, the enemies – in short, against whom the first European civilisation defined itself All western political theory is implicitly defined against the ghost of Persia – from condemnations of “tyrants” in the Atlantic republican tradition to Marx’s caricature of “oriental despotism”. In winning their nationhood, the Greeks consigned the Persians to a miserable place in the world’s memory. The most vivid portrait of a Persian ruler isn’t even in this exhibition. It appears in a mosaic found in Pompeii, now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, based on