The superior-culture absorption argument fails because the direction of language learning differed from Rome-Greece

Evidence

Some have seen this difference as due to the possession by the Persians of a superior culture. A higher culture absorbs a lower culture. They quote as a parallel the famous Latin dictum: “conquered Greece conquers its fierce conquerors”—in other words the Romans adopt Greek culture. It is a tempting but not convincing parallel. The Romans conquered and ruled Greece, as the Arabs conquered and ruled Iran, but the Romans learned Greek, they admired Greek civilization, they read, translated, imitated Greek books. The Arabs did not learn Persian, the Persians learned Arabic. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 281

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens what ‘conquered Greece conquers its fierce conqueror’ actually claims versus what the Persian case shows.
• XREF: The asymmetry of who learns whose language is a measurable index of cultural prestige — generalizable beyond Persia to contact zones the reader studies (French in Algeria, English globally).