Persians: a Question of Perspective?

I thought the point Ethan made today in class about the Persians, and whether or not they were actually cruel to the Egyptians or if it was just propaganda by the Greeks who already had a deep seated hatred for them, was extremely interesting and thought-provoking.  We take it as a gift and a blessing that we have some records of what went on in periods so far temporally removed from ourselves, but in doing so sometimes we forget that in history and conflict perspective is ALWAYS a factor.  In this case, the histories and texts that we have are that of writers like Herodotus, a Greek, whom as we know detested everything the Persians were based on their previous wars.  What we don’t get from Herodotus is an objective, or even reasonably objective view of the Persians.  It may just be a hunch, but in the time of Herodotus I feel that the xenophobia of various city-states, amplified by the lust for conquest by empire, created many myths and and legends about the “other” that were not in actuality true.  Because the Greeks fought wars with the Persians, massively bloody wars to put it nicely, they saw the Persians as bringers of death and mortal enemies.  People who were conquered during the reign of Alexander the Great could say the same thing about Alexander and his men, and likewise can be said of any invading imperial force ever.  When someone seeks to take land by force, most of the time people die, and die brutally.  It is not illogical for the Greeks to have thought of the Persians as the worst of the worst, but were there peoples who thought of the Greeks in the same way?  It comes down to being a matter of perspective, and because each side based on nationality and allegiances has a different perspective, any type of conflict is going to make one side feel hostility during and after the fact.  I find it funny that the Greeks thought of the Persians as the most brutal and terrible force, when in the case of Egypt, there really is not any evidence to support that.  What I see is political rhetoric echoed through a historian like Herodotus.  I’m quite certain that the politicians of the day within Greece and the colonial areas of Greece’s empire played off of the fact that the Greeks had been to war with the Persians, and therefore the Persians, who though indeed were not saints, were made into the terrible “other.”  By being able to use a power like the Persians it is likely, as having occurred everywhere else in the world throughout all of history, that Greek rhetoric was aimed to construe Persians as that one outside force that struck fear into the people and that the Greek government would protect from.  In this way, though indeed the Persians were out to take land and increase the size of their empire, that Persians could have been painted in such a way as recklessly brutal when in reality there is little evidence to say that they came in and smashed the hell of out Egypt when they took it over.  Once again, any time people, conflict, and land come together the perspective of which the events are represented is crucial, and also inherently, and humanly, biased.