ACHAEMENID PERSIA IN THE ROMAN LITERATURE: THE IMAGE OF THE "OTHER" AND SPECIFIC FEATURES OF HISTORICAL MEMORY
The article deals with references to the Persian Achaemenid kingdom in Roman literature. The answer to the question about what the Romans knew about the Achaemenid Persia and how they imagined the Persians from Cyrus to Darius III, in what contexts and for what purposes the corresponding figures and examples from the Persian history were mentioned reveals characteristic stereotypes of perception of one nation by another and helps to discover the specificity of Roman cultural and historical memory, which was largely shaped by the information, <i>topoi</i> and images received from the Greeks. For the most part, these <i>topoi</i> and anecdotes (concerning Persian luxury and wealth, or arrogance of Persian kings, their grandiose constructions, and so on) occurred in moralizing or rhetorical contexts, serving as didactic <i>exempla</i> and often being far from historical reliability. All these topics and stereotypes, via rhetorical teaching and popular moral philosophy, had become shared symbols and heritage of Greek and Roman cultural and historical memory, but in some regards they were perceived in different ways. Images of Achaemenid Persia as images of the «Other» assumed a timeless character in the Roman historical memory, being transferred on contemporary enemies of Rome, Parthia and Sassanid Persia, and were used as a device for constructing Romans' own identity through opposition between West and East, for ideological justification of their confrontation with Iranian powers.