Truth and lies are the two faces of freedom.

I just posted something from a book review from many years ago in which there was an allusion by a Persian king to the Greeks lying to one another in their markets.  Intrigued, I went to find the whole piece in Herodotus.  From Herodotus, 1.152-3, translated by Andrea L. Purvis.  

When the messengers of the Ionians and Aeolians arrived in Sparta (and this all actually happened very quickly), they chose a Phocaean named Pythermos to speak for all of them. And he donned a purple cloak in order to arouse the curiosity of the Spartans and attract as many as possible to come and hear him. Then, taking an orator’s stance, he made a long speech asking the Spartans to come to their defense against Cyrus.  The Lacedaemonians, however, refused to heed this plea and decided against helping the Ionians against Cyrus, so the messengers departed. However, in spite of having turned the Ionians away, the Lacedaemonians dispatched some men in a penteconter—I presume in order to spy on the affairs of Cyrus and the Ionians. And when they arrived at Phocaea, they sent the most distinguished man with them, named Lakrines, to Sardis to declare to Cyrus in the name of the Lacedaemonians that he must not inflict reckless damage on any city in Hellenic territory, since the Lacedaemonians would not tolerate it.

They say that when the herald had delivered this message, Cyrus questioned the Hellenes who were with him, asking them who were these Lacedaemonians who would send such a command to him, and how many of them were there? When he heard their response, he said to the Spartan herald, “I have never yet feared any men who have a place in the center of the city set aside for meeting together, swearing false oaths, and cheating one another, and if I live long enough, Lacedaemonians will have troubles of their own about which to converse, rather than those of the Ionians.”  Cyrus thus insulted the Hellenes because of their custom of setting up agoras in their cities for the purpose of buying and selling, which is unknown among the Persians, who do not use markets and, indeed, have no such place as an agora in any of their cities.

So the Spartans won't entangle themselves in the affairs of the Greek city-states in Ionia but they will independently warn off the Persian king from reckless wars in Ionian territories.  Sounds very modern.  In fact, exactly contemporary with G7 Foreign Ministers this week in Vilnius, both warning Russia off of Ukraine and helping Ukraine to a certain extent, but also not wanting to bind themselves to Ukraine's affairs for fear of complex entanglements.

The second echo is that of the fear all autocrats have of the free agora where people are free to assemble and free trade with one another to their mutual benefit and where they talk, share information, lie, and spread misinformation.  Cyrus, and all authoritarians, despite his posturing, do fear the agora where their writ does not run.  Where people trade freely and where information, of any quality, is shared freely.  

Which goes to my criticism of China's half reform from the early 1990s under Deng Xiaoping.  If you have free markets with some modicum of property rights, you eventually have to have its sibling of free speech.  Free markets will lead to free speech and eventual political reform.  If you decide you don't want the free speech and throttle that down, you will lose the prosperity that goes with the free market.

True in the day of Cyrus the Great and true today for Xi Jinping.  

But fascinating to consider the Persian Empire having no markets anywhere.  Seems impossible and Herodotus is not always fully reliable but . . . he is often pretty observant.  Perhaps Persia was indeed that much of a command and control system.