Earlier today, President Trump warned Iran that the “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if it did not agree to a deal to end the war.

What he fails to grasp is that Iran is not a transient state but an ancient civilization. Its first clear manifestation, the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great, is mentioned in the Bible. The three wise men, or Magi, who came to present gifts to the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem would have been from Iran. Though they were still presumably of the Zoroastrian faith, these Iranian wise men knew to honor Christ at a time when King Herod and his Roman overlords could think only to condemn Christ or even murder him.

Trump’s threat is crass in the word’s most literal, original sense. In Latin, “crassus” means thick or gross. That meaning is bound up with the name Crassus — as in Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome. He played a pivotal role in the Republic’s final slide into empire, helping extinguish what little democracy remained among Rome’s landowning patrician elite (the Senate was never for the plebs, let alone for slaves or the conquered peoples who underwrote Roman wealth). Fittingly, Crassus made his fortune in what we would now call real estate, amassing vast slave-worked estates.

Crassus is best remembered today for crushing Spartacus’s great slave revolt. After defeating the rebels, he ordered thousands of captured slaves to be crucified, lining the Appian Way with crosses. He thus embodies a moment when the cross signified the brute force of Roman power, enforcing the rule of the rich and powerful, rather than the later Christian inversion that “the last shall be first and the first shall be last” — a sentiment Spartacus himself might well have shared.

After a long life of wielding power, Crassus was indeed finally humbled. In a shameless bid to equal Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, and thus accumulate wealth and political prestige for himself, Crassus set out to conquer the Parthian Empire, the latest manifestation of Iranian civilization. He failed, with his legions destroyed at the Battle of Carrhae. Crassus himself met a grisly end, with the Parthians allegedly pouring molten gold down his throat to finally quench his thirst for wealth.

As everyone from Crassus to Saddam Hussein found, Iran is a very hard place to conquer. Huge deserts, tall mountains, and the simple vastness of a land that stretches from Mesopotamia to South Asia have proven too difficult to overcome. An American invasion today would face many of the same obstacles, and with the traditional land routes for invading Iran from the west or north cut off, a dangerous amphibious landing on Iran’s mountainous southern coast is the only plausible road for a potential ground invasion. Yet the greatest obstacle would no doubt be the Iranian people themselves, who would likely resist any invader so openly hostile to not just their government but to their very civilization.

Indeed, the successful conquerors of Iran throughout history have all shared one attribute: they worked hard to legitimate their conquests on Iran’s own civilizational terms. Alexander the Great, who conquered Persia from the west, dressed in Persian clothes, took Persian wives, and incorporated Persian soldiers into his ranks — against the wishes of many Macedonian generals. Timur, who conquered Persia from the north, ordered the building of great mosques and universities, sparking the Timurid renaissance in Persian art and culture.

This is not to romanticize them. Alexander burnt Persepolis; Timur built towers of skulls. Yet even the most brutal of history’s conquerors knew that Persian civilization would be a necessary aspect of their rule, not something they could hope to destroy.

But of course, President Trump resembles Crassus more than Alexander or Timur. The civilization now at risk is his. Let us hope he does not march America’s legions toward a Carrhae of our own.

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Antonio De Loera-Brust is the communications director for the United Farm Workers. Previously, he served as a special assistant to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

@AntonioDeLoeraB

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