Zoroastrian Studies Seminar Series: The Beginning of Evils

In a passage that uses a Homeric formula to invest the events with epic significance, Herodotus identified the moment Athenian ships participated in the sack of Sardis as “the beginning of evils for Greeks and Barbarians.” Behind that reference lies a complex web of past events involving human and metahuman actors, legible in different fashion from Greek and Persian perspectives. Focus on the latter brings to light religious aspects of imperial ideology, including Truth as the basis of cosmic order, the sacred nature of treaty commitments, and the soteriological significance of the gifts of earth and water demanded by and presented to the Achaemenid King.

Bruce Lincoln was born in Philadelphia in 1948, studied at Haverford College and the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Minnesota (1976-1994) and the University of Chicago (1994-2016). He also served as Visiting Professor at Uppsala University, the University of Siena, Novosibirsk State University, Copenhagen University, and the Collège de France, where he was variously billed as a historian, a historian of religions, a cultural anthropologist, and an Iranologist. He has written a number of books, most recently Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégés Unsolved Murder (Oxford University Press, 2023) and On Ritual: A Microhistorical Approach (Brill, forthcoming in 2025).