Name: Orienting the Self in the Axial Age
Item: Creation
Author: pharmakos

Creation →

by Gore Vidal

Orienting the Self in the Axial Age

pharmakos

Jul 07, 2025

In the 5th century BC Cyrus Spitama, a plenipotentiary of the Persian Empire, travels the world meeting the founders of major philosophical traditions in Greece, Persia, India, and China. Through encountering the beginnings of these ancient traditions, Cyrus puts them in dialogue with one another. He frequently compares one tradition with another and wonders what his past interlocutors would think. The origin of creation, mind-body distinction, and ethics are compared.

Cyrus is the grandson of Zoroaster and while witnesses his death at the hands of a roving Turanian warband. At the moment of his death, Zoroaster had been speaking a prayer that rhetorically questioned how one could know the difference between the righteous and wicked. Afterwards, Cyrus dreams repeatedly of Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord" speaking through the dying Zoroaster, giving him a cryptic edict that all who seek Truth will meet the same fate.

He then goes to the Persian court and is raised there before going abroad. His relationships are a bit of a mess, and he reflects this little. Throughout the text he disparages and resents his mother. He marries an Indian girl, has two children and bounces back to Persia. He marries a sister of Xerxes and then divorces her. Even his loyalty to his emperor and work as plenipotentiary is less from duty, and more of his own egotistical drive to be the one to bring the east into the Persian fold.

Most of the philosophies compared are done so on a metaphysical, abstract level, but it's not really until he reaches China and encounters Confucius that he applies it on a practical, personal level. At this point in time, however, it's too late for filial piety to mend his relationships. His wife in India no longer misses him and intends to remarry. His sons are grown and don't know him. And his childhood friend and King is obsessed with further ornamenting the harem with collected women. He also still is disrespectful to his mother: "that Thracian witch".

By the end of his journeys, Cyrus is unsure whether he fulfilled the edict given him by the Wise Lord, only certain that he knows nothing, but there is a change in attitude that focuses more on the personal. Poignantly, Confucius had said to Cyrus "Now I am in my seventieth year [...] I can follow the dictates of my own heart because what I desire no longer oversteps the boundaries of what is right." At the end of his travels, rather than trying to yoke the east, Cyrus is working as a diplomat in the Greece and fostering his nephew Democritus. It's an abnegation of the ego and his search for capital-T Truth in favor of familial relationships and duty to his lord. He reflects on this little, but it's there in his action.

Narratively, this character development has an accord with the ideologies Cyrus encounters. From his grandfather Zoroaster he is taught that ultimate reality is placed in the afterlife. By the end of the narrative, there is a greater emphasis on the practical, and he is recounting this to his materialist nephew Democritus.

Vidal cleverly reorients the foundations of civilization away from a Eurocentric view and hands it to the east. There are a few funny places where Vidal uses Cyrus' account to turn Herodotus on his head. For instance, Xerxes whipping the Hellespont is completely unmentioned, whereas the mandatory sacral prostituting of every woman in Babylon is not only given credence, but something the narrator indulges himself in. Other impossible famous claims, such as gold digging ants in the far east, are fully believed by Cyrus, despite him being one of the few authorities with actual knowledge to question it. Vidal even wrests Socratic irony away from Socrates. The aging Cyrus, contemporary with a young Socrates, states that he only knows he knows nothing. It's kind of funny in light of Cyrus' frequent assertions that Oracle at Delphi was bribed by the Persian king. (Plato's Apology has the oracle stating that Socrates is the wisest man)