Reply #3: Yeah, I'm a history major.

[BreweryYardRat]

That paper's actually late because I'm such a fucking perfectionist (it's run rather substantially over what my professor expected), but eh, I majored in the subject for love of it, and I think my profs for this semester respect that.

I'm actually thinking of writing an article to try and correct the negative portrait of Darius III. (He wasn't anywhere near perfect, as that little anecdote shows, but the poor son of a bitch has been painted as a much worse person than he actually was for the past 2350 years.) All the major sources for that period were Greek or Macedonian writers (who, at best, questioned some of the Persian officers who defected to Alexander), and worse, we're getting their accounts second or third-hand from (comparatively) later authors. (Mostly 50 B.C. -- 50 A.D., and one from the mid-100s.) Some of the Hellenic accounts are blatantly propaganda, and everyone's just kind of accepted them without considering the potential questions that raises in their portrayal of Darius.

There are two, maybe three other papers on all of fucking JSTOR addressing this possibility, and one of them is...eh, let's just say it's not very well done and leave it at that, shall we?