| Summary/Abstract |
Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (AD 361–63), addressing his assembled Roman legions, gestured at captive Iranian soldiers on the eve of an ultimately disastrous campaign against the legions' rival, the Iranian Sasanian Empire, and called them “deformed, dirty and loathsome goats.” Julian's denigration of the Iranians was neither novel nor original. In their long interaction with the peoples of the Near East, the Greeks and Romans ascribed “Oriental peculiarities” in war to race, culture, the despotic nature of governments and sometimes to the physical environment. They often conflated the first two, suggesting that despotism was racial and cultural in origin. As the Western world began to achieve military predominance in the 17th century, its observations became more contemptuous of the way of war in the “Orient”: the Near East, South Asia and the Far East
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