Herodotus Defines Differences Between Mid-East and West that Linger Today

Of late I’ve been reading The Landmark Herodotus: Histories. Lest you think the differences between the Middle East and the West are a recent phenomenon consider these passages written by Herodotus some 400 years before Christ and nearly a thousand before Mohammed: "[Persians] reserve the highest esteem for those who live closest to them, and secondly, those next to these, and so on; the farther they go from home, the less they esteem the inhabitants proportionally. And they hold in the slightest regard those who live farthest from them, in the belief that they themselves are by far the best of the human race in every way… and so those who live the farthest away from them are felt to be the most inferior."

Isn’t this insular nature reflected in the Middle East today?

And consider this response from the Persian leader Cyrus the Great after learning that the city-state of Sparta, the size of a gnat when compared to the Persian empire, had sent a herald warning Cyrus against molesting Greek cities in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey):

“I have never yet feared any men who have a place in the center for the city set aside for meeting together, swearing false oaths, and cheating one another… Cyrus thus insulted the Hellenes [that is the Greeks] because of their custom of setting up agoras [what we’d called downtowns, where markets and political centers thrive] in their cities for the purpose of bying and selling, which is unknown among the Persians, who do not use markets and… have no place as an agora in any of their cities.”

In modern times those who seek to follow in Cyrus’ (and Darius’) footsteps openly condemn capitalism.