纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 026奥克瑟斯战车模型（7）

"There is a huge and unavoidable pride in the past in Iran ... It's a culture that is at ease with complexity, that has faced the complexity of different races, different religions, different languages, and has found ways to encompass them and to relate them to each other and to organise them. Not in a loose way or in a relativistic way, necessarily, but in a principled way that keeps things together. And Iranians are very keen for people to understand that they have this long, long, long history and this ancient heritage."

Axworthy's phrase 'empires of the mind' sums up pretty well the theme that I'm trying to tackle this week, but perhaps 'states of mind' would be more accurate - because I'm talking about objects that show us how different people imagine and devise an effective state. For Persia I've been looking at a toy chariot; for Athens I'll be looking at a temple. As you'd imagine, because they for so long were at war, Greeks and Persians had very different ideas of what a state should be. But precisely because they were at war, each tended to define the ideal state in opposition to the other. In 480 BC Persian troops destroyed the temple on the Athenian Acropolis. In its place the Athenians built the Parthenon that we know today.

There are few objects that over the last two hundred years have been so widely seen as embodying a set of ideas as the Parthenon. And I'll be looking at one of the sculptures that decorated it in the next programme.