Creation
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Historical
ISBN: 0394500156 / Publisher: Random House, February 1981
Cyrus Spitama, aged Persian ambassador to Athens, recounts his official and personal journeys throughout the world of the fifth century B.C. and his encounters with the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and other great men of an extraordinary century
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A sweeping novel of politics, war, philosophy, and adventure–in a restored edition, featuring never-before-published material from Gore Vidal’s original manuscript–Creationoffers a captivating grand tour of the ancient world.Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athens–the Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Socrates–Cyrus recounts his days as he strives to resolve the fundamental questions that have guided his life’s journeys: how the universe was created, and why evil was created with good. In revisiting the fifth century b.c.–one of the most spectacular periods in history–Gore Vidal illuminates the ideas that have shaped civilizations for millennia.
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