Word: persian
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...vehicle for this latest goring is Cyrus Spitama, 75, emissary of the Persian King Artaxerxes, miserably stationed in Athens "amongst a people as cold and windy as the place itself." When he hears Herodotus lecture at the Odeon, Cyrus decides that the Greek historian has concocted a thoroughly slanted account of the so-called Persian Wars and that it is up to him to set the record straight. Because he has gone blind, Cyrus enlists his nephew Democritus as amanuensis. "So make yourself comfortable," he tells the young man. "I have a long memory, and I shall indulge...
...Herodotus and of classical Greece in general. But though he gives the Athenians the back of his hand whenever possible, Cy rus the narrator really has several other missions on his mind. He wants to tell the story of his long life and his decades of service to the Persian Kings Darius the Great and Xerxes. Even more urgently, as a grandson and the last descendant in the male line of the prophet Zoroaster, Cyrus feels obliged to argue theology, to devise an acceptable theory for the creation of the universe and to account for the existence of evil within...
Pursuing these different ends, Cyrus produces a vast narrative, a virtual travelogue of the 5th century B.C. His services to the Persian Empire involve extensive travels throughout the known world. He goes to India to secure new sup plies of iron for Darius and then to far-off Cathay (China), where he is usually treated as a slave instead of an ambassador. His peripatetic existence throws him constantly into the presence of the powerful and influential. He meets, among others, Buddha, Confucius, an ar ray of Indian mystics and holy men, Pericles, Thucydides, Sophocles. He knows people who knew Pythagoras...
...raises terrible issue for its artists. They show the truancy and lack of real content of daydreams. Consequently the pieces reside in no unified time or place: The first takes place in a mythical Alpine village, the last in a farcical New York, while others hover lightly over the Persian Gulf, Long Island, the Charles River, a Vermont farm. Italy and London, in times ranging from the turn of the century to the present. The only continuous impulse unifying the characters is a desire to have a satisfying dream-life. In this book of fiction from...
...Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk in the north and the naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in Viet Nam to the south. That American-built facility has fulfilled the Soviets' long-held, often frustrated desire for a warm-water naval base halfway between Vladivostok and the politically volatile, economically vital Persian Gulf-Indian Ocean region, where the superpowers are now circling each other warily...