Books: Travelogue

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CREATION by Gore Vidal Random House; 510pages; $15.95

Although he has dabbled elegantly in many literary forms, Author Gore Vidal is probably most impressive as a historical novelist. Not only does he do his homework, but he can make old facts look like contemporary gossip. And he takes wicked pleasure in turning accepted notions about the past upside down. Julian (1964) strikes a blow for paganism and the Roman Emperor who tried to halt the spread of Christianity. Both Burr (1973) and 1876 (1976) portray the U.S. founding fathers and their successors in distinctly unheroic postures. Creation opens on a similarly iconoclastic note. Vidal's target this time is the Athens of Pericles, the cradle of Western democracy.

The vehicle for this latest goring is Cyrus Spitama, 75, emissary of the Persian King Artaxerxes, miserably stationed in Athens "amongst a people as cold and windy as the place itself." When he hears Herodotus lecture at the Odeon, Cyrus decides that the Greek historian has concocted a thoroughly slanted account of the so-called Persian Wars and that it is up to him to set the record straight. Because he has gone blind, Cyrus enlists his nephew Democritus as amanuensis. "So make yourself comfortable," he tells the young man. "I have a long memory, and I shall indulge it."

Vidal fans might, at this point, expect a typically witty send-up of Herodotus and of classical Greece in general. But though he gives the Athenians the back of his hand whenever possible, Cy rus the narrator really has several other missions on his mind. He wants to tell the story of his long life and his decades of service to the Persian Kings Darius the Great and Xerxes. Even more urgently, as a grandson and the last descendant in the male line of the prophet Zoroaster, Cyrus feels obliged to argue theology, to devise an acceptable theory for the creation of the universe and to account for the existence of evil within it.

Pursuing these different ends, Cyrus produces a vast narrative, a virtual travelogue of the 5th century B.C. His services to the Persian Empire involve extensive travels throughout the known world. He goes to India to secure new sup plies of iron for Darius and then to far-off Cathay (China), where he is usually treated as a slave instead of an ambassador. His peripatetic existence throws him constantly into the presence of the powerful and influential. He meets, among others, Buddha, Confucius, an ar ray of Indian mystics and holy men, Pericles, Thucydides, Sophocles. He knows people who knew Pythagoras and Aeschylus. During his last years in Athens, Cyrus hires a young mason to repair a wall. His name is Socrates.