Κύρια Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
In 480 B.C., Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory—rapid, spectacular victory—had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated in the epochal naval battle at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such an entity as the West at all.Tom Holland's brilliant new book describes the very first "clash of Empires" between East and West. As he did in the critically praised Rubicon, he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no other popular history that takes in the entire sweep of the Persian Wars, and no other classical historian, academic or popular, who combines scholarly rigor with novelistic depth with a worldly irony in quite the fashion that Tom Holland does.
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Garbage! More anti-Iranian propaganda. Avoid if looking for serious scholarship.
13 October 2019 (03:52)
Good argumentation with the doubters of Islam : from the Qur'an, the Torah, the Gospels & science
Abdul-Majid Subh, translated by Wa'il Abdul Mut'aal Shihab
Web Personalization in Intelligent Environments
Giovanna Castellano, Anna Maria Fanelli, Maria Alessandra Torsello, Lakhmi C. Jain (auth.), Giovanna Castellano, Lakhmi C. Jain, Anna Maria Fanelli (eds.)
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Persian Fire
Also by Tom Holland
RU B I C O N
The First World Empire and
the Battle for the West
anchor books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
For Jamie and Caroline
F I R S T AN C H O R BO O K S E D I T I O N , JAN U AR Y 2 0 0 7
Copyright © 2005 by Tom Holland
Persian Fire was originally published in Great Britain in 2005 by Little,
Brown, a division of Time Warner Books UK. The Doubleday edition is
published by arrangement with Little, Brown.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States
by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress
eISBN: 978-0-307-38698-4
www.anchorbooks.com
Note on Proper Names
THE KHORASAN HIGHWAY
PHOTO/ART INSERT
SINGEING THE KING OF PERSIA'S BEARD
AT BAY
I have been wanting to write a book on the Persian Wars since I was
very young, and I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all those
who have given me the opportunity to devote three years of my life
to its study. To Patrick Walsh, best of friends and agents. To my editors, Richard Beswick and Steve Guise. To Gerry Howard, Dan
Israel, Ricardo Artola and Joan Eloi Roca Martinez, for all their
encouragement from abroad. To Louise Allen-Jones and Elizabeth
van Lear, for their support from nearer home. To Amélie Kuhrt
and Paul Cartledge, for sharing their incomparable scholarship so
generously, and saving me from more errors than I care to count.
To the staff of the library of the Society for the Promotion of
Hellenic Studies, for their perfect blend of efficiency and courtesy.
To Maike Bohn, for going out with Michael Cullen, and thereby
introducing me to a travel writer with a limitless knowledge of
Greece. To Philip, Francis and Barbaro Noel-Baker, for happy
months in Euboea. To Jonathan Tite, for arranging a perfect day on
a motorboat around Salamis. To Nick and Sarah Longman, for their
hospitality in Athens. To my father, for his companionship on expeditions over Thermopylae. To Michael Lowry and Deniz Gurtin,
for their hospitality in Bodrum. To Elahe Tabari, for her help at
Persepolis. To Audrey and Becky Gordon, for everything they have
done to keep the enemies of good art from the hall. To Caroline and
Jamie Muir, without whose friendship, support and good humor I
would still be writing this book, and to whom it is dedicated. To my
beloved family, Sadie, Katy and Eliza, for enduring my long
stretches of scholastic seclusion with such forbearance, and for
touring dusty ruins across Greece, Iran and Turkey with such jollity, and giving me some of the happiest times of my life. υ µν
γρ τυ̂ γε κρει̂σσν κα ρειν.
The Persian Empire
Greece and the Aegean
Mesopotamia and Iran
The Peloponnese
Athens in the 6th and 5th centuries BC
Persia's satrapies in the West
At bay: Greece in 480 BC
Thermopylae
Battle of Salamis
Plataea
In the interests of accessibility, it has been my policy throughout this
book to use the familiar Latinate form of a proper name rather than
the Greek or Persian original: Darius, for instance, rather than Dareios
or Daryush.
In the summer of 2001 a friend of mine was appointed the head of a
school history department. Among the many decisions he had to take
before the start of the new term in September, one was particularly
pressing. For as long as anyone could remember, students in their
final year had been obliged to study a special paper devoted to the rise
of Hitler. Now, with my friend's promotion, the winds of change were
set to blow. Hitler, he suggested to his new colleagues, should be toppled and replaced with a very different topic of study: the Crusades.
Howls of anguish greeted this radical proposal. What, my friend's colleagues demanded, was the point of studying a period so alien and
remote from contemporary concerns? When my friend countered by
suggesting that history students might benefit from studying a topic
that did not relate exclusively to twentieth-century dictators, the
indignation only swelled. Totalitarianism, the other teachers argued,
was a living theme, in a way that the Crusades could never be. The
hatreds of Islam and Christendom, of East and West – where was the
possible relevance in these?
The answer, of course, came a few weeks later, on September 11,
when nineteen hijackers incinerated themselves and thousands of
others in the cause of some decidedly medieval grievances. The
Crusades, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden at any rate, had never
ended. "It should not be hidden from you," he had warned the
Muslim world back in 1996, "that the people of Islam have always suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the
Zionist–Crusaders alliance."1 Menacingly proficient at exploiting the
modern world of air flight and mass communications he may be, but
bin Laden has long interpreted the present in the light of the Middle
Ages. In his manifestos, past and present tend to merge as though
one: blood-curdling abuse of the crimes of America or Israel will
mingle with demands for the restoration of Muslim rule to Spain or of
the medieval Caliphate. No wonder that when President Bush chose in
an unguarded moment to describe his administration's war on terrorism as a "crusade" his advisers begged him never to use the fateful
word again.
That an American president might be less au fait with the subtleties
of medieval history than a Saudi fanatic is hardly surprising, of course.
"Why do they hate us?" In the days and weeks that followed
September 11, President Bush was not the only one to wrestle with
that question. Newspapers everywhere were filled with pundits
attempting to explain Muslim resentment of the West, whether by
tracing its origins back to the vagaries of recent American foreign
policy, or further, to the carve-up of the Middle East by the European
colonial powers, or even—following the bin Laden analysis back to its
starting point—to the Crusades themselves. Here, in the notion that
the first great crisis of the twenty-first century could possibly have
emerged from a swirl of confused and ancient hatreds, lay a pointed
irony. Globalization was supposed to have brought about the end of
history, yet it appeared instead to be rousing any number of unwelcome phantoms from their ancestral resting places. For decades, the
East against which the West had defined itself was communist; nowadays, as it always used to be, long before the Russian Revolution, it is
Islamic. The war in Iraq; the rise of anti-immigrant, and specifically
anti-Muslim, feeling across Europe; the question of whether Turkey
should be allowed into the EU; all these have combined with the
attacks of September 11 to foster an agonized consciousness of the
fault-line that divides the Christian West from the Islamic East.
That civilizations are doomed to clash in the new century, as both alQaeda terrorists and Harvard academics have variously argued, remains,
as yet, a controversial thesis. What cannot be disputed, however, is the
degree to which different cultures, in Europe and the Muslim world at
any rate, are currently being obliged to examine the very foundations of
their identities. "The difference of East and West," thought Edward
Gibbon, "is arbitrary and shifts round the globe."2 Yet that it exists—that
East is East, and West is West—is easily history's most abiding assumption. Older by far than the Crusades, older than Islam, older than
Christianity, its pedigree is so venerable that it reaches back almost two
and a half thousand years. "Why do they hate us?" It was with this question that history itself was born—for it was in the conflict between
East and West that the world's first historian, back in the fifth century
BC, discovered his life-work's theme.
His name was Herodotus. As a Greek from what is now the Turkish
resort of Bodrum, but was then known as Halicarnassus, he had
grown up on the very margin of Asia. Why, he wondered, did the peoples of East and West find it so hard to live in peace? The answer
appeared, superficially, a simple one. Asiatics, Herodotus reported,
saw Europe as a place irreconcilably alien. "And so it is they believe that
Greeks will always be their enemies."3 But why this fracture had
opened in the first place was, Herodotus acknowledged, a puzzle.
Perhaps the kidnapping of a princess or two by Greek pirates had been
to blame? Or the burning of Troy? "That, at any rate, is what many
nations of Asia argue—but who can say for sure if they are right?"4 As
Herodotus well knew, the world was an infinite place, and one man's
truth might easily be another's lie. Yet if the origins of the conflict
between East and West appeared lost in myth, then not so its effects.
These had been made all too recently and tragically clear. Difference
had bred suspicion—and suspicion had bred war.
Indeed, a war like no other. In 480 BC, some forty years before
Herodotus began his history, Xerxes, the King of Persia, had led an
invasion of Greece. Military adventures of this kind had long been a
specialization of the Persians. For decades, victory—rapid, spectacular
victory—had appeared to be their birthright. Their aura of invincibility reflected the unprecedented scale and speed of their conquests.
Once, they had been nothing, just an obscure mountain tribe confined
to the plains and mountains of what is now southern Iran. Then, in
the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Middle
East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, amassing
an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As
a result of those conquests, Xerxes had ruled as the most powerful
man on the planet. The resources available to him were so stupefying
as to appear virtually limitless. Europe was not to witness another
invasion force to rival his until 1944, and the summer of D-Day.
Set against this unprecedented juggernaut, the Greeks had
appeared few in numbers and hopelessly divided. Greece itself was
little more than a geographical expression: not a country but a patchwork of quarrelsome and often violently chauvinistic city-states. True,
the Greeks regarded themselves as a single people, united by language,
religion and custom; but what the various cities often seemed to have
most in common was an addiction to fighting one another. The
Persians, during the early years of their rise to power, had found it a
simple matter to subdue the Greeks who lived in what is now western
Turkey—including those of Herodotus' home town—and absorb
them into their empire. Even the two principal powers of mainland
Greece, the nascent democracy of Athens and the sternly militarized
state of Sparta, had seemed ill equipped to put up a more effective
fight. With the Persian king resolved to pacify once and for all the
fractious and peculiar people on the western fringe of his great empire,
the result had looked to be a foregone conclusion.
Yet, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the mainland Greeks had managed to hold out. The invaders had
been turned back. Greece had remained free. The story of how they had
taken on a superpower and defeated it appeared to the Greeks themselves the most extraordinary of all time. How precisely had they done
it? And why? And what had caused the invasion to be launched against
them in the first place? Questions such as these, not lacking in urgency
even four decades later, prompted Herodotus into a wholly novel style
of investigation. For the first time, a chronicler set himself to trace the
origins of a conflict not to a past so remote as to be utterly fabulous, nor
to the whims and wishes of some god, nor to a people's claim to a manifest destiny, but rather to explanations that he could verify personally.
Committed to transcribing only living informants or eyewitness
accounts, Herodotus toured the world—the first anthropologist, the
first investigative reporter, the first foreign correspondent.5 The fruit of
his tireless curiosity was not merely a narrative, but a sweeping analysis
of an entire age: capacious, various, tolerant. Herodotus himself
described what he had engaged in as "inquiries"—"historia." "And I set
them down here," he declared, in the first sentence of the first work of
history ever written, "so that the memory of the past may be preserved
by recording the extraordinary deeds of Greek and foreigner alike—and
above all, to show how it was that they came to go to war."6
Historians always like to argue for the significance of their material, of
course. In Herodotus' case, his claims have had two and a half millennia
to be put to the test. During that time, their founding presumption—
that the great war between Greek and Persian was of an unexampled
momentousness—has been resoundingly affirmed. John Stuart Mill
claimed that "the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings."7 Hegel, in the more
expansive tones that one would expect of a German philosopher,
declared that "the interest of the whole world's history hung trembling
in the balance."8 And so it surely did. Any account of odds heroically
defied is exciting—but how much more tense it becomes when the
odds are incalculably, incomparably high. There was much more at
stake during the course of the Persian attempts to subdue the Greek
mainland than the independence of what Xerxes had regarded as a
ragbag of terrorist states. As subjects of a foreign king, the Athenians
would never have had the opportunity to develop their unique democratic culture. Much that made Greek civilization distinctive would
have been aborted. The legacy inherited by Rome and passed on to
modern Europe would have been immeasurably impoverished. Not
only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely, had the Greeks succumbed to Xerxes' invasion,
that there would ever have been such an entity as "the West" at all.
No wonder, then, that the story of the Persian Wars should serve as
the founding myth of European civilization; as the archetype of the
triumph of freedom over slavery, and of rugged civic virtue over
enervated despotism. Certainly, as the word "Christendom" began to
lose its resonance in the aftermath of the Reformation, so the heroics of Marathon and Salamis began to strike many idealists as an
altogether more edifying exemplification of Western virtues than the
Crusades. More principled, after all, to defend than to invade; better
to fight for liberty than in the cause of fanaticism. One episode above
all, the doomed defense of the pass of Thermopylae by a tiny Greek
holding force—"four thousand against three million,"9 as Herodotus
had it—took on the particular force of myth. Teeming hordes of
Asiatics, driven forward into battle by the whip; a Spartan king,
Leonidas, resolved to do or die; an exemplary death, as he and three
hundred of his countrymen were wiped out making a suicidal last
stand:* the story had it all. As early as the sixteenth century AD, the
great French essayist Michel de Montaigne could argue that although
other battles fought by the Greeks were "the fairest sister-victories
which the Sun has ever seen, yet they would never dare to compare
their combined glory with the glorious defeat of King Leonidas and
his men at the defile of Thermopylae."10 Two and a half centuries
later, Lord Byron, appalled that the Greece of his own day should be
languishing as a province under the rule of the Turkish Sultan, knew
exactly where to look in the history books to find the most heartswelling call to arms.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae!11
*To be strictly accurate, only 298 of the Spartans that Leonidas took with him to
Thermopylae died there in battle. See p. 341.
Putting his money where his mouth was, Byron would subsequently
emulate the example of Leonidas by dying in the glorious cause of
Greek liberty himself. The glamour of his end, the first true celebrity
death of the modern age, only added to the luster of Leonidas, and
helped ensure that Thermopylae, for generations afterward, would
serve as the model of a martyrdom for liberty. Why, the novelist
William Golding asked himself during a visit to the pass in the early
1960s, did he feel so oddly stirred, despite the fact that Sparta herself
had been such a "dull, cruel city"?
It is not just that the human spirit reacts directly and beyond all
arguments to a story of sacrifice and courage, as a wine glass must
vibrate to the sound of the violin. It is also because, way back and at
the hundredth remove, that company stood in the right line of
history. A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like
and write what I like. He contributed to set us free.12
Moving words, and true—and yet it is sobering to reflect that
Golding's encomium might well have served to enthuse Adolf Hitler.
To the Nazis, as it had been to Montaigne, Thermopylae was easily the
most glorious episode in Greek history. The three hundred who
defended the pass were regarded by Hitler as representatives of a true
master race, one bred and raised for war, and so authentically Nordic
that even the Spartans' broth, according to one of the Führer's more
speculative pronouncements, derived from Schleswig-Holstein. In
January 1943, with the Battle of Stalingrad at its height, Hitler explicitly compared the German 6th Army to the Spartan three
hundred—and later, when its general surrendered, raged that the
heroism of his soldiers had been "nullified by one single characterless
weakling."13 Denied a Leonidas, Hitler fumed, the Wehrmacht had
been frustrated of a perfect chance to make its own new Thermopylae.
That the Nazis—as much as Montaigne, Byron or Golding—could
feel such a passionate sense of identification with the example of the
three hundred suggests that any portrayal of the Spartans as defenders of
liberty does not perhaps tell the whole story. As is so often the case, the
truth is both messier and more intriguing than the myth. Had Xerxes
succeeded in conquering Greece, and occupying Sparta, then it would
indeed have spelled the end of that proud city's freedom—for all the
Persian king's subjects were ranked as his slaves. Yet even slavery can be a
matter of degree: what would have been regarded as a fate worse than
death by the Spartans themselves might well have proved a blessed relief
to their neighbors. Sparta's greatness, as Hitler was well aware, rested
upon the merciless exploitation of her neighbors, a demonstration of
how to treat Untermenschen that the Nazis would brutally emulate in
Poland and occupied Russia. The Persian monarchy, brilliantly subtle in
the exploitation of its subjects' rivalries, would certainly have granted,
with an imperious show of graciousness, emancipation and patronage to
Sparta's neighbors. To people who had suffered under Spartan oppression
for generations, Xerxes' rule might almost have felt like liberty.
A momentous, indeed a history-shaping paradox: that annexation
by a foreign power might perhaps, under certain circumstances, be
welcomed. Xerxes was certainly, as the Greeks accused him of being,
a despot, an Iranian who ruled as heir to the millennia-old traditions
of ancient Iraq, of Akkad, Assyria and Babylon, kingdoms that had
always taken it for granted that a monarch should rule and conquer as
a strong man. Mercilessness and repression: these had invariably been
the keynotes of the Iraqi imperial style. The empire of the Persians,
however, although certainly founded amid "the tearing down of walls,
the tumult of cavalry charges, and the overthrow of cities,"14 had also,
as it expanded, developed a subtler response to the challenges of
dominion. By guaranteeing peace and order to the dutifully submissive, and by giving a masterly demonstration of how best to divide
and rule, a succession of Persian kings had won for themselves and
their people the largest empire ever seen. Indeed, it was their epochal
achievement to demonstrate to future ages the very possibility of a
multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, world-spanning state. As such, the influence of their example on the grand sweep of history would be
infinitely more long term than the aberrant and fleeting experiment
that was the democracy of Athens. The political model established by
the Persian kings would inspire empire after empire, even into the
Muslim era: the caliphs, would-be rulers of the world, were precisely
echoing, albeit in piously Islamic idiom, the pretensions of Xerxes.
Indeed, in a sense, the political model established by the ancient
monarchy of Persia was one that would persist in the Middle East until
1922, and the deposition of the last ruling caliph, the Turkish Sultan.*
It is the stated goal of Osama bin Laden, of course, to see the Caliphate
resurrected to its prerogative of global rule.
Granted, the influence of ancient Persia, certainly in comparison
with that of Greece, has always been indirect, occluded, underground.
In 1891, a young British Member of Parliament, George Nathaniel
Curzon, visited the site of Xerxes' palace, which had been left charred
and abandoned since being torched, 150 years after Thermopylae, by a
vengeful Alexander the Great. "To us," Curzon wrote, in soaring
Byronic mode, "it is instinct with the solemn lesson of the ages; it
takes its place in the chapter of things that have ceased to be; and its
mute stones find a voice, and address us with the ineffable pathos of
ruin."15 Seven years later, the by-now Baron Curzon of Kedleston was
appointed Viceroy of India. As such, he ruled as the heir of the
Mughals—who had themselves been proud to wear the title, not of
kings, but of viceroys to the kings of Persia. The British Raj, governed
by the products of self-consciously Spartan boarding schools, was also
thoroughly imbued with "that picturesque wealth of pomp and circumstance which the East alone can give"16—and which ultimately
derived from the vanished flummery of Xerxes' palaces. It might have
flattered the British Empire to imagine itself the heir of Athens; but it
owed a certain debt of obligation to the mortal enemy of Athens, too.
Persia was Persia, in other words, and Greece was Greece—and
sometimes the twain did meet. They might have been combatants in
the primal clash of civilizations, but the ripples of their influence,
*The Caliphate itself was abolished two years later, in 1924.
spilling out across the millennia to the present day, can sometimes
serve to complicate the division between East and West rather than to
clarify it. Had the Athenians lost the Battle of Marathon, and suffered
the obliteration of their city, for instance, then there would have been
no Plato—and without Plato, and the colossal shadow he cast on all
subsequent theologies, it is unlikely that there would have been an
Islam to inspire bin Laden. Conversely, when President Bush speaks of
"an axis of evil," his vision of a world divided between rival forces of
light and darkness is one that derives ultimately from Zoroaster, the
ancient prophet of Iran. Although the defeat of Xerxes was certainly
decisive in giving to the Greeks, and therefore to all Europeans, a sense
of their own distinctiveness, the impact of Persia and Greece upon history cannot entirely be confined within rigid notions of East and West.
Monotheism and the notion of a universal state, democracy and totalitarianism: all can trace their origins back to the period of the Persian
Wars. Justifiably it has been described as the axis of world history.
And yet, by and large, how little it is read about today. Peter Green,
whose wonderful book The Year of Salamis, published over thirty years
ago, was the last full-length account written for a non-academic audience, marveled, in his customarily witty fashion, at the shortage of
overviews of the subject.
Bearing in mind the fact that the Greek victory in the Persian Wars
is routinely described as a fundamental turning point in European
history (advocates of this view don't quite argue that today, had
things gone the other way, mosques and minarets would dominate Europe, but you can sense the unspoken thought in the air),
this omission seems all the more inexplicable.17
Perhaps Green has not been to Rotterdam or Malmö recently; and
yet the fact that nowadays mosques and minarets are to be seen even
in Athens, long the only EU capital without a Muslim place of
worship, hardly detracts from the sense of perplexity he is expressing.
If anything it gives it added force. The Persian Wars may be ancient
history, but they are also, in a way that they never were during the
twentieth century, contemporary history, too.
What Green describes as inexplicable, however, is not entirely so.
For all its momentousness, its sweep, and its drama, the story of the
Persian Wars is not an easy one to piece together. The indisputable
truth that they were the first conflict in history that we can reconstruct in detail does not mean that Herodotus tells us everything
about them; far from it, regrettably. Yes, historians can attempt to
cover some of the gaps by stitching together shreds and patches
garnered from other classical authors; but this is a repair job to be
attempted only with the utmost caution. Many sources derive from
centuries—even millennia—after the events that they are purporting
to describe, while many were written not as "inquiries" but as poetry
or drama. Iris Murdoch, in her novel The Nice and the Good, observed of
early Greek history that it "sets a special challenge to the disciplined
mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies
in complicating the rules."18 Historians of archaic Greece, who rarely
feature in novels, love to quote this passage: for the task that they
have set themselves, to reconstruct a vanished world from often
meager scraps of evidence, does indeed resemble, at a certain level, a
game. We can never know for sure what happened at a battle such as
Salamis, when the sources on which any interpretation must depend
manage to be simultaneously contradictory and full of holes: one
might as well look to complete a half-broken Rubik's Cube. No matter
how often the facts are studied, twisted, and rearranged, it is impossible to square them all; a definitive solution can never be found. Yet
even Salamis, notoriously hard to make sense of though it is, can
appear prodigally rich in detail in comparison with, say, the early history of Sparta. That particular topic, one eminent scholar has baldly
confessed, "is a puzzle to challenge the best of thinkers."19 A second
has described it as requiring "intellectual gymnastics."20 A third, even
more up front, simply titled a book The Spartan Mirage.21
But at least the sources for Greek history, no matter how patchy,
derive from the Greeks themselves. The Persians, with one key
exception, did not write anything at all that we can identify as an
account of real events. Tablets inscribed by imperial bureaucrats do survive, together with royal proclamations chiseled on palace walls, and, of
course, the ruins of the astounding palaces themselves. Otherwise, if we
are going to attempt to make any sense of the Persians and their empire,
we must rely, to an alarming degree, upon the writings of others. These,
coming as they do mainly from the Greeks—a people variously invaded,
occupied and pillaged by the imperial armies—tend not to be wildly
keen on giving a balanced portrait of the Persian character and achievement. Herodotus, ever curious, ever open-minded, is the exception that
proves the rule. "Philobarbaros"—"barbarian lover"—one indignant
patriot labeled him:22 the closest to the phrase "bleeding-heart liberal"
that ancient Greek approached. Yet even Herodotus, writing about
remote and peculiar peoples whose languages he did not speak, has to be
excused the occasional inaccuracy, the occasional prejudice, the occasional tendency to treat early Persian history as a fairy tale. None of
which does much to make the modern historian's task any easier.
Three obvious responses to the challenge present themselves. The
first is to accept Greek prejudices at face value, and portray the Persians
as effete cowards who somehow, inexplicably, conquered the world.
The second is to condemn everything that the Greeks wrote about Persia
as an expression of racism, Eurocentrism, and a whole host of other
thought crimes to boot. The third, and most productive, is to explore
the degree to which Greek misinterpretations of their great enemy
reflected the truth, however distorted, of how the Persians lived and saw
their world. It is this approach that has been adopted by a formidable
band of scholars over the past thirty years, and the results have been
spectacular: a whole empire brought back to life, redeemed out of oblivion, rendered so solid that it has become, in the words of one historian,
"something you can stub your toe on."23 As a display of resurrectionism,
it is worthy to stand beside the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb.
And yet the Persians remain shrouded in obscurity. Perhaps this is
hardly surprising. There have been no golden death masks to give a
face to their rediscovery—only scholarly tomes and journals. The
study of Persia, even more than that of Greece, depends on the minutest sifting of the available evidence, the closest analysis of the sources,
the most delicate weighing of inferences and alternatives. This is a
field in which almost every detail can be debated, and certain
themes—the religion of the Persian kings, most notoriously—are
bogs so treacherous that even the most eminent scholars have been
known to blanch at the prospect of venturing into them.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; but I hope, even so, that
my attempt to build a bridge between the worlds of academic and
general readership does not end up appearing as vainglorious as did
the two-mile pontoon which Xerxes built from Asia to Europe, to the
horrified derision of the Greeks. Readers should certainly be warned
that many of the details out of which this book's narrative has been
constructed are ambiguous and ferociously disputed—and that the
sudden appearance of a number in the text, hovering like a fly over a
dunghill, generally indicates that qualification is being offered in an
endnote. Yet while it is true that we can never definitively reconstruct
a period so remote from ourselves, even more striking than our ignorance, perhaps, is the fact that the attempt can be made at all. I have
sought with this book to provide something more than merely a narrative, for it has been my ambition, following in the footsteps of
Herodotus himself, to paint a panorama of the entire world that went
to war—East as well as West. The reader will be taken to Assyria, Persia
and Babylon before Greece; will read of the rise of the first global
monarchy before that of Spartan militarism or the democracy of
Athens; and only halfway through the book will embark on the
account of the Persian Wars themselves. That a story traditionally told
from one side may now be glimpsed, albeit opaquely, from the other
as well, is justification enough, I hope, for attempting to piece
together, out of the many scattered and ambiguous fragments of evidence, a new account of those wars, of why they were fought, and by
whom. It is, after all, an epic as powerful and extraordinary as any to
be found in ancient literature; and one that is, despite all the many
imponderables, not myth but the very stuff of history.
Listen now to a further point: no mortal thing
Has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration;
There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed,
But by mortal men these processes are named "beginnings."
Woe to the Bloody City
The gods, having scorned to mold a world that was level, had preferred
instead to divide it into two. So it seemed to those who lived in the Zagros,
the great chain of peaks which separates the Fertile Crescent from the
upland plateau of Iran. Yet these mountains, though savage, were not
impassable. One road did snake across them: the most famous in the
world, the Khorasan Highway, which led from the limits of the East to the
West, and joined the rising to the setting of the sun. In places, as it climbed
through the Zagros Mountains, winding along river beds, or threading
between jagged pinnacles and ravines, it might be little more than a footpath—but even that, to those who used it, was a miracle enough. Only
a beneficent deity, it was assumed, could ever have fashioned such a
wonder. Who, and when, no one really knew for sure,* but it was certainly very ancient—perhaps, some said, as old as time itself. Over the
millennia, the Khorasan Highway had been followed by any number of
travelers: nomads, caravans—and the armies of conquering kings.
*Although the Greeks plumped for Semiramis, a Syrian warrior-goddess who
was also supposed to have founded Babylon.
One empire, in particular, for centuries synonymous with cruel
and remorseless invincibility, had sent repeated expeditions into the
mountains, dyeing the peaks, in its own ferocious vaunt, "like wool,
crimson with blood."1 The Assyrians, inhabitants of what is now
northern Iraq, were city-dwellers, a people of the flat, alluvial plains;
but to their kings, warlords who had spread terror and extermination
as far as Egypt, the Zagros was less a barrier than a challenge.
Themselves the patrons of a proud and brilliant civilization, sumptuous with palaces, gardens and canals, the kings of Assyria had always
seen it as their duty to flatten resistance in the wilds beyond their
frontiers. This, the wilds being what they were, had proved a calling
without limit. Not even with their incomparable war machine could
the Assyrians pacify all the mountain tribes—for there were some
living in the Zagros who clung to the peaks like birds, or lurked in the
depths of thick forests, so backward that they subsisted entirely on
acorns, savages hardly worthy of the royal attention. These too, however, with regular incursions, could be taught to dread the name of
Assyria, and provide her with the human plunder on which her greatness had come increasingly to depend. Again and again, punitive
expeditions would return from the mountains to their native plains,
to the sacred cities of Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh, while in their
wake, naked and tethered, followed stumbling lines of captives.
Increasingly, the Assyrians had fallen into the habit of moving entire
populations, shunting them around their empire, transplanting one
defeated enemy into the lands of another, there to live in the houses
of the similarly transported, to clear weeds from the rubble, or cultivate the abandoned, smoke-blackened fields.
These tactics had in the end had due effect. By the late eighth
century BC, the reaches of the Khorasan Highway had been formally absorbed into the empire and placed under the rule of an
Assyrian governor. "Grovelling they came to me, for the protection
of their lives," boasted Assyria's greatest king, Sargon II. "Knowing
that otherwise I would destroy their walls, they fell and kissed
my feet."2
Not that captives were the only source of wealth to be found in the
Zagros. Wild and forested though the mountains were, and often
bitter the climate, the valleys were famous for their clover-rich pasture. Over the centuries, and in increasing numbers, these had been
attracting tribes who called themselves "Arya"—"Aryans": horsetaming nomads from the plateau to the east.3 Even once settled, these
immigrants had preserved many of their ancestors' instincts, filling the
valleys of their new homeland with great herds of long-horned cattle,
and preferring, wherever possible, to live in the saddle. The Assyrians,
no horse-breeders themselves, would speak in wondering terms of
the stud farms of the Zagros, with their "numberless steeds."4 It was
relatively easy for the Assyrian army to cherry-pick these as tribute, for
the finest horses, by universal consent, were those bred by the Medes,
a loose confederation of Aryan tribes settled conveniently along the
Khorasan Highway itself. No wonder the Assyrians came to prize the
region. Their mastery of Media,5 as well as enabling them to control
the world's most important trade route, permitted their armies to
develop a new and lethal quality of speed. By the eighth century BC,
cavalry had become vital to the ability of Assyria to maintain her military supremacy. The tribute of horses from the mountains had
become the lifeblood of her greatness. The richest silver mine could
not have been more precious to her than the stud farms of the Zagros.
And yet, in Assyria's supremacy lay the seeds of its own downfall.
The mountains were a mishmash of different peoples, Aryans and
aboriginals alike, with even the Medes themselves ruled by a quarrelsome multitude of petty chieftains. Foreign occupation, however, by
imposing a unitary authority upon the region, had begun to encourage the fractious tribes to cohere. By the 670s BC, menaced by the
shadowy leader of a formal Median union, the Assyrians' hold on the
Zagros started to slip alarmingly. Tribute dried up as its collection
became ever more challenging. Open revolts blazed and spread. Over
the following decades, the scribes of the Assyrian kings, employed to
keep a record of the victories of their masters, ceased to make mention
of Media at all.
This silence veiled an ominous development. In 615 BC, a king who
claimed sovereignty over all the clan chiefs of the Medes, Cyaxares by
name, joined an alliance of the empire's other rebellious subjects and
led his troops from their fastnesses against the Assyrians' eastern flank.
The effect of this sudden eruption of the mountain men was devastating. After only three years of campaigning, the inconceivable
occurred: Nineveh, greatest of all the strongholds of Assyrian might,
was stormed and razed. To the amazement—and joy—of the empire's
subject peoples, "the bloody city" was pulverized beneath the hooves
of the Median cavalry. "Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without
end—they stumble over the bodies!"6
Four years later, and all traces of the Assyrian colossus, which for
so long had kept the Near East in its shadow, lay obliterated. To the
victors, naturally, had fallen the spoils. Media, precipitately elevated
to the rank of great power, seized a huge northern swath of the
defeated empire. Her kings, no longer small-time chieftains, could
now indulge themselves in the occupations proper to their newly
won status—throwing their weight around and scrapping with
other great powers. In 610 BC, the Medes swept into northern Syria,
burning and looting as they went. In 585, they went to war with the
Lydians, a people based in the west of what is now Turkey, and only
a solar eclipse, manifesting itself over the battlefield, finally persuaded the two sides to draw back. By the terms of a hurriedly
patched-up treaty, the Halys, a river flowing midway between Media
and Lydia, was established as the boundary between the rival
empires, and for the next thirty years, throughout the Near East,
peace, and the balance of power, were maintained.7
Not that the new king of Media, Astyages, had any intention of
hanging up his saddle. Undistracted now by war with other major
empires, he turned his attention instead to the wilds north and east of
his kingdom, far distant from the cockpit of the Fertile Crescent.
Leading an expedition into the badlands of Armenia and what is now
Azerbaijan, he was following in the footsteps of the Assyrian kings,
teaching the savages beyond his frontiers to fear his royal name.8 In
other ways, too, the traditions of the great monarchies of the Near East,
so alien to those of his own people, still semi-tribal and nomadic as
they were, appear to have whetted the ambitions of the Median king.
After all, a ruler of Astyages' stature, no less powerful than the King of
Lydia or the Pharaoh of Egypt, could hardly be expected to rule his
empire from a tent. What the monarchs of more ancient lands had
always taken for granted—a palace, a treasury, a mighty capital—
Astyages, naturally, had to have as well: proofs of his magnificence
raised in gold and blocks of stone.
Travelers who made the final ascent through the mountains along
the Khorasan Highway would see, guarding the approaches to the
Iranian plateau ahead of them, a vision which could have been conjured from some fabulous epic: a palace set within seven gleaming walls,
each one painted a different color, and on the two innermost circuits,
bolted to their battlements, plates of silver and gold. This was Ecbatana,
stronghold of the kings of Media, and already, barely a century after its
foundation, the crossroads of the world.9 Commanding the trade of
East and West, it also opened up to its master the whole range of the
Zagros, and beyond. Here, for the Median clan chiefs, in particular, was
a thoroughly alarming development. The surest guarantee of their freedom from royal meddling, and of the continued factionalism of the
kingdom itself, had always been the inaccessibility of their private fiefdoms—but increasingly they found themselves subordinated to the
reach of Astyages' court. At one time, before the building of the polychrome palace walls, Ecbatana had been an open field, a free meeting
place for the tribes, a function preserved in the meaning of its name:
"assembly point." But now those days were gone, and the Medes, who
had fought so long to liberate themselves from the despots of Nineveh,
found themselves the subjects of a despot nearer to home.
No wonder that later generations would preserve a memory of
Astyages as an ogre. No wonder, either, that when they sought to
explain their loss of freedom, the Medes would identify Ecbatana as
both a symbol of their slavery, and a cause.10
King of the World
Astyages, it was said, even amid all the proofs of his greatness, was
haunted by prophecies of doom: strange dreams tormented him, warning him of his downfall and the ruin of his kingdom. Such was the
value ascribed by the Medes to visions of this kind that a whole class,
the Magi, existed to divine what their meaning might be. Skilled in all
the arts of keeping darkness at bay, these ritual experts provided vital
reassurance to their countrymen, for it was a principle of the Medes, a
devout and ethical people, that there was shadow lurking beyond even
the brightest light. All the world, it seemed to the Magi, bore witness to
this truth. A fire might be tended so that it burned eternally, but there
was nowhere, not beside the coolest spring, nor even on the highest
mountain peak, where the purity of its flame might not be menaced by
pollution. Creation bred darkness as well as the daylight. Scorpions and
spiders, lizards, snakes and ants, all crept and seethed, the visible excrescences of a universal shadow. Just as it was the duty of a Magus to kill
such creatures wherever he found them, so shadows had to be guarded
against when they darkened people's dreams—and especially the nightmares of a king. "For they say that the air is full of spectres, which flow
by exhalation, and penetrate into the sight of those with piercing
vision."11 Greatness, like fire, had to be tended with care.
That a kingdom as powerful as Media, less than a century after its
first rise to independence and greatness, might once again be prostrated and subjected to foreign domination must, to many, have
seemed implausible. But this, as the Medes themselves had good cause
to know, had always been the baneful rhythm of the region's power
play: great empires rising, great empires falling. No one kingdom, not
even Assyria, had ever crushed all who might wish to see it destroyed.
In the Near East, predators lurked everywhere, sniffing the air for
weakness, awaiting their opportunity to strike. Ancient states would
vanish, new ones take their place, and the chroniclers, in recording the
ruin of celebrated kingdoms, might find themselves describing strange
and previously unknown peoples.
Many of these, just like the Medes themselves, were Aryans—
nomads who had left little trace of their migrations upon the records
of the time. In 843 BC, for instance, the Assyrians had campaigned in
the mountains north of their kingdom against a tribe they called the
"Parsua"; two centuries later, a people with a very similar name had
established themselves far to the south, on the ruins of the venerable
kingdom of Anshan, between the lower reaches of the Zagros and
the sweltering coastlands of the Gulf. No chronicler, however, could
know for sure if they were one and the same.12 Only by putting down
roots, and by absorbing something of the culture of the people they
had displaced, had the newcomers finally been able to intrude upon
the consciousness of their more sedentary neighbors. These, reluctant to change the habit of centuries, had continued to refer to the
region as they had always done; but the invaders, when they spoke of
their new homeland, had naturally preferred to call it after themselves. So it was that what had once been Anshan came gradually to be
known by a quite different name: Paarsa, Persia, the land of the
Persians.13
In 559 BC, while Astyages still ruled in Media, a young man came to
the throne of this upstart kingdom. His name was Cyrus, and his
attributes included a hook nose, immense ambition and quite limitless
ability. From even before his birth, it appeared, he had been marked
out for greatness; for it was he—if the stories are to be believed—
who had been prophesied as the bane of Median greatness. Astyages
was supposed to have seen it all in a dream: a vision of his daughter,
Mandane, urinating, the golden stream flowing without cease, until at
last the whole of Media had been drowned. When the king had
reported this the next morning, his Magian dream-readers had turned
pale and warned him that any son of Mandane would be destined to
imperil the Median throne. Hurriedly, Astyages had married off his
daughter to a vassal, a Persian, the prince of a backward and inconsequential kingdom, hoping in that way to defeat the omen's malice.
But after Mandane had fallen pregnant, Astyages had dreamed a
second time: now he saw a vine emerging from between his daughter's
legs, nor did it stop growing until all Asia was in its shade. Panicstricken, Astyages had waited for his grandson to be born, and then
immediately given orders that the boy be put to death. As invariably
happens in such stories, the orders had been defied. The baby had
been abandoned on a mountainside, to be discovered and brought up
by a shepherd; or perhaps, some said, a bandit; or maybe even a bitch,
her teats conveniently swollen with milk. Whatever its precise details,
the miraculous nature of such an upbringing had clearly betokened a
godlike future for the foundling—and so, of course, it had proved.
Cyrus had survived and prospered. Once he had grown to a splendid
manhood, his natural nobility of character had served to win him the
Persian throne. Thus it was that all the wiles of Astyages had been
foiled—and the empire of the Medes been doomed.
Or so the legends had it. It is the nature of great men to attract tall
stories, and it may be that the early proofs of Cyrus' destiny were not
quite so manifest as the Persians would later claim.14 Even so—and
irrespective of whether there had truly been prophecies—his potential was evidently sufficient to alarm Astyages: for the Median king,
overlord of the Zagros, and wary of high-flying vassals, decided, after
six years of watching his grandson on the Persian throne, that Cyrus
was altogether too able and dangerous to be left in place for long.
Accordingly, in 553 BC, he mustered his fearsome horsemen and struck
south. Heavily outnumbered, the Persians resisted ferociously. When
it appeared that surrender was imminent, even their women took to
the battlefield, to encourage Cyrus and his warriors to fight on. For
three years, the conflict convulsed the Zagros—and then, suddenly, in
550 BC, it was over. Even the gods, it appeared, were taken by surprise.
They began appearing in the dreams of neighboring kings to broadcast
the startling news. "Cyrus scattered the large armies of the Medes
with his small army. And he captured Astyages, King of the Medes.
And he took him to his country as captive."15 Not since the downfall
of Assyria had there been an upset on such a scale.
How had it come about? Yes, Cyrus had proved himself a steely and
indomitable opponent. As had his Persian subjects, a people so tough10
ened by poverty that they had uncomplainingly endured the sternest
hardships—even, notoriously, to the extent of wearing leather
trousers. Yet Astyages, with all the resources of a mighty empire
behind him, would surely still have triumphed—had he not been
grievously stabbed in the back. The story of his betrayal was a strange
one—and, as the years passed, the retellings of it grew ever more fantastical and grotesque. The bare essentials were not in doubt. Harpagus,
commander of the Median army, and most prominent of the clan
chiefs, had deserted to Cyrus, leading a rebellion in mid-battle, and
taking Astyages captive. But why such treachery? Because—so the
story went—Harpagus, a close kinsman of Astyages, had simultaneously been bound by the most terrible ties of obligation to the King of
Persia. It was Harpagus, according to the Medes, who had been charged
with the murder of the infant Cyrus, a task which—dissembling—he
had claimed to have carried out. Years later, when the truth had at last
emerged, Astyages was rumored to have wreaked a bloody revenge,
butchering Harpagus' son, jointing the corpse, and then serving it
dressed as mutton to the unsuspecting father. Harpagus himself,
having consumed his own child, had swallowed the insult too, and
remained a loyal, if chastened, servant of his king. Or so he had pretended. His act had certainly been convincing, for when the war
against the Persians broke out, Astyages had appointed Harpagus to the
supreme command. Not the cleverest piece of man-management,
perhaps—and, in reality, so foolish as to be palpably absurd.
So how had this tall story ever come to be believed? Maybe—
somewhere within the shadow play of implausibility and rumor—a
faint hint of the truth could still be glimpsed? The family relationship
between Astyages and Cyrus had mirrored the close ties, of culture as
well as blood, which had always bound the Persians to the Medes.
Both peoples, after all, were Aryan; and, to an Aryan, it was only the
"anairya"—the non-Aryan—who was foreign. Indeed, any of Astyages'
courtiers who were suffering from nostalgia had only to look south for
a glimpse of the good old days. Like their Median cousins, the Persians
were at heart a nomadic people, and their country, "rich with good
horses, rich with good men,"16 had remained as much a confederation of different clans as a state. "King of Anshan" though he was,
Cyrus had also claimed his throne by virtue of his status as his
people's greatest chieftain—for he was head of the Achaemenids,
the leading family of the Pasargadae, the leading Persian tribe. Master
both of the stiff rituals of a Near Eastern court and of assemblies of
wild horsemen wheeling beneath the open sky, of ancient cities and
of the hills and plains, of the Persians' future and of the memories
and customs of their past, Cyrus was adept at playing all these roles,
and more. As a result, Persia had largely avoided the tensions that
afflicted Media: between a king impatient with the traditional tribal
structures of his people and a nobility still defined by them. The
Median clan chiefs, suffering from the authoritarian ambitions of
Astyages, had taken note. Over time, the contrast between their
own king and Cyrus must have struck them as ever more pronounced. It was almost certainly this which had persuaded Harpagus
to take his fateful step. "So it was that the Persians, who had once
been the slaves of the Medes, became their masters,"17 and Cyrus,
marching into Ecbatana, reaped the due rewards of his forbearance,
acuity and charm.
Nor, even after this first great victory, did the subtlety of his balancing act fail. The kings of Assyria, honing the traditional rights of
conquest to a peak of savagery, had prescribed unspeakable cruelties for
defeated enemies, but Cyrus, prompted by calculation and—no
doubt—by temperament as well, preferred the course of mercy. Having
lured important swaths of the Median aristocracy into his camp, he
resisted the temptation to treat their countrymen as slaves. Even
Astyages, rather than being flayed, fed to animals or impaled, was pensioned off into princely retirement. True, the treasury was emptied and
its contents carted away to Anshan, but Ecbatana was otherwise spared
the fate of Nineveh. Cyrus had no intention of destroying the most
strategically sited city in the Zagros. The most pleasant, too—for if, in
winter, the cold was savage, with blizzards blocking off the passes, in
summer, while the lowlands of Persia burned, Ecbatana was a paradise
of greenness, the mountain peaks behind it still capped with cooling
snow, the slopes below the walls terraced with orchards and gardens,
the air bright and crystal clear. Not only did the city remain the capital
of Media, but it became, during the broiling summer months, the effective capital of Cyrus' whole empire. No wonder that the Medes were
able to feel, if not exactly the equals of their conquerors, then at least
associates in the great adventure of their new king's reign.
And that adventure, as events were soon exhilaratingly to prove,
had only just begun. The downfall of a king as great as Astyages had
sent shock waves throughout the whole Near East. Not only the
Median Empire but the decades-old international status quo had been
left in rubble. Suddenly, it seemed, there was everything to play for,
and neighboring great powers, still barely able to take the Persians
seriously, began to wonder what pickings might be on offer for themselves. In 547 BC, Croesus, the King of Lydia, led a huge army over the
River Halys to find out. Cyrus, having descended from the Zagros,
advanced hurriedly to meet him, the ruined cities of Assyria standing
sentinel as he passed by, nothing now but dust-blown and jumbled
heaps of mud, mute witnesses to the precariousness of power. Yet such
a lesson might serve an ambitious man as inspiration as well as warning, and Cyrus, even though it was by now late in the campaigning
season, pressed on urgently, eager to engage Croesus. As before, when
the Lydians had met with the Medes, an indecisive battle was fought;
but this time there was no eclipse, and no end to the war. Instead,
with winter drawing on, Croesus withdrew to his capital, Sardis, never
imagining that Cyrus would dare to follow him, for the city was so far
to the west that the Aegean lay only three days' journey beyond it—
a tremendous distance from the Median frontier. But the Persians did
not retreat. Instead, braving the bitter cold, they shadowed Croesus,
never alerting him to their presence, allowing him time to dismiss his
allies, lurking and waiting for his conscripts to melt away. Then, with
Sardis denuded, Cyrus struck. Frantically, Croesus cobbled together
what few troops remained. A desperate battle, with the Lydians staking everything on a final cavalry charge—and then the storming of
Sardis, and the capture of Croesus himself. Far off in the Fertile
Crescent, the details were recorded with a terseness that hardly hinted
at their seismic effect: "[Cyrus] defeated the King [of Lydia], seized his
possessions, and stationed his own garrison there."18 Over the Lydian
Empire itself, the news of Croesus' downfall burst with such a thunderclap that the priestess of one temple was said to have sprouted a
beard from the shock. As well she might have done, for in the space of
just six years, the Persians, so small in numbers, once so backward and
obscure, had made their kingdom the greatest power in the world.
Not that the victory had been theirs alone. The Median cavalry, perfectly equipped for a winter campaign with their sheepskin coats and
their tough mountain horses, had more than played their part. Median
generals, too. Of all the advice given to Cyrus during the campaign, the
best had come from Harpagus, who had suggested, just before the final
Lydian cavalry charge, that the baggage camels be placed at the forefront of the Persian battle line. Cyrus had duly given the order, the
Lydians' horses, startled by the unfamiliar stench, had swerved and
bolted, and the battle had been won. Perhaps it was not surprising,
then, that Cyrus, buoyed by this victory, sought to conciliate the
Lydians just as he had previously wooed the Medes, anairya though his
new subjects were. Croesus, like Astyages, was spared execution, and
welcomed into his conqueror's entourage; his fabulously well-stocked
treasury was kept at Sardis; even the gathering of tribute was entrusted
to native grandees. The Lydians, however, startled by this magnanimity, interpreted it as weakness; and no sooner had Cyrus left for
Ecbatana than the very aristocrats whom he had most trusted, those in
charge of the treasury, were rising in revolt. It was a fatal miscalculation. Cyrus, menaced by what he justly regarded as the basest treachery
and ingratitude, responded with furious expedition. Fresh troops, with
fresh orders, were sent speeding from Ecbatana. There was to be no
clemency now. Instead, the Persians were commanded to demonstrate
their mastery of more traditional methods of pacification: cities were to
be ravaged, rebel leaders executed, their followers enslaved. And all
was done as the King of Persia had instructed.
Yet Cyrus, even as he showed his capacity for repression, had not
abandoned the fundamentals of his imperial policy. The Medes, if no
longer the Lydians, were still to be offered a form of partnership in
his dazzling new order. Accordingly, Harpagus, first and most valued
of all Cyrus' foreign servants, was sent west, to take command of the
Persian forces. Reaping opportunities that would never have come
his way had he remained loyal to Astyages, the clan chief from the
Zagros arrived in Lydia sporting the splendid title of "Generalissimo
of the Sea."19 Living up to this office with savage efficiency, he had no
sooner finished off the Lydians than he was looking to plant his
standards along the extremities of Asia, right on the shore of the
"bitter sea,"20 the Aegean itself. There, dotted along the coastline,
and enticingly prosperous, were the gleaming cities of a people
known to the Persians as the "Yauna"—the Ionians.* Emigrants centuries previously from Greece, the men of Ionia remained as
determinedly and defiantly Greek as any of their countrymen back
in the motherland across the Aegean. Too quarrelsome to present a
united front, they certainly proved easy meat for Harpagus. City by
city, he brutally subdued them all. Indeed, so menacing was his reputation that many Ionians, rather than submit to Persian rule, opted
for flight across the sea, emigrating to Sicily or the Italian peninsula.
One city, Phocaea, evacuated its entire population, "women, children, moveable property, everything, in fact . . . leaving the Persians
to take possession of nothing but an empty shell."21 A dark shadow
had been cast over the Ionian imagination, and the memory of
Harpagus' coming would long serve to blacken even the most intimate moments of joy:
*Variations of the word "Ionian" were used as a generic term for "Greek"
throughout the Near East. See, for instance, Genesis 10.2, where one of the sons
of Japheth is called "Javan." The Greeks themselves counted the island cities of
Chios and Samos as Ionian, so, in total, there were reckoned to be twelve cities
of Ionia.
In winter, as you lie on a soft couch by the fire,
Full of good food, munching on nuts and drinking sweet wine,
Then you must ask questions such as these:
"Where do you come from? Tell me, what is your age?
How old were you when the Mede came?"22
Not, it might be noted, "How old were you when the Persian came?"—
for such was the impact of Harpagus upon the Ionians that it left them
perplexed, even as they submitted to their new masters, as to who
precisely these were. Ever after, when referring to the Persians, the
Greeks would invariably say, "the Medes." Such confusion was hardly
surprising. What were the ethnic complexities of the Zagros to a
people so far distant from them? That cities on the western sea should
find themselves subject to a people they had barely heard of suggested
the dawn of a new and unsettling age. The world seemed suddenly
shrunken. Never before had one man's reach extended quite so far.
Cyrus, however, far from glorying in his achievements, remained restless and anxious for more. For all the scale of his victories in Lydia, he
dreaded the danger that he imagined lurking in his rear. Back from
Sardis, he turned his gaze toward the eastern horizon. Ignore what lay
beyond that and even the most brilliant conqueror might find that his
greatness had been raised on shifting sand. No kingdom could reckon
itself wholly secure while it still feared the depredations of migrant
tribes and the thunder of hoofbeats across the plains of Iran. Who
better to appreciate that than a Persian, himself a descendant of
nomads?
So it was that Cyrus, disdaining to stamp out the revolt in Lydia in
person, had instead taken the opposite route from Ecbatana, following
the Khorasan Highway as it wound ever east.23 This, for Persians and
Medes alike, was to journey back into their past, toward the legendary
homelands of their ancestors, "rich in pastures and waters . . . the
abode of cattle,"24 where everything seemed on a more heroic scale,
the plains much vaster, the mountains touching the sky. Fighting his
way into the uplands, gazing at last toward the Hindu Kush, Cyrus
would have been able to watch the dawning of the sun over the peaks
of Central Asia—"the undying, swift-horsed sun; who, foremost in a
golden array, takes hold of the beautiful summits, and from them
looks over the abode of the Aryans with a beneficent eye."25 This same
"abode of the Aryans," long after the Persians had emigrated from it,
had remained the fiefdom of swaggering noblemen, backward in comparison to their cousins in the Zagros, perhaps, but rich, and hulking,
and addicted to war. Once Cyrus had succeeded in forcing their submission, they were to provide him with formidable new resources of
manpower and wealth. The badlands would never entirely lose their
turbid character, for their new master, chameleon-like as ever, was
careful to portray himself as the heir of the region's traditions, leaving
the local noblemen to continue in their rambunctious ways—but in
the cause, henceforward, of the Persian king. Loose though it was, the
order imposed by Cyrus was subtly calibrated to meet his needs: not
only troops and gold, but a buffer zone. The establishment of an
immense arc of provinces, stretching from the Hindu Kush to the
Aral Sea, served to fence off the approaches to Persia where they had
always been most vulnerable, in the northeast, which previously had
lain wide open to incursions from the steppes of Central Asia.
Gandhara, Bactria and Sogdiana: these lands, once breeding grounds
of menace and instability, were now transformed into bulwarks of
Persian might.
And bulwarks of much besides. Savages, as all civilized peoples were
agreed, belonged exactly where Cyrus was pinning them, in the remote
bleakness of the rim of the world. What might happen otherwise was
still the stuff of nightmares. The Medes, for instance, preserved lurid
folktales of how their empire, at the very peak of its might, had been
subjected to the slant-eyed Saka, a notoriously brutal people, cruel
and untamed like the steppes from which they came, who had held on
to Media for twenty-eight years. There was great alarm, then, when
Cyrus, advancing from Sogdiana into what is now Kazakhstan, found
himself confronted by these same demons from the Median past, readily distinguishable by their high pointed caps and their alarming facility
with axes. A leader of the Saka, captured by Cyrus and treated with
notable chivalry, duly submitted to the invaders, and his people, taking
service with the Persian king, soon established themselves as the most
ferocious of the imperial troops. But this had been only a single tribe.
Beyond its homeland lay further plains, bandit-haunted and drear,
their immensity mocking all human ambition—even that of the greatest conqueror ever known. How far they stretched no one could say for
sure, nor what might be found at their extremities: griffins, some
claimed; and tribes of men with goats' feet; and frozen wastes, where
the inhabitants hibernated for six months every year; and beyond
them, surrounding the world, the great River Rangha, as wide as the
most immense sea.26 Cyrus, crossing the monotony of the steppelands,
certainly had no intention of pushing that far; and when at length he
found a broad river obstructing his path, he rested on its bank, and
there, amid mudflats and the buzzing of mosquitoes, called a halt, at
last, to his advance. The river itself, the Jaxartes, was shallow and islanddotted, affording only the barest of natural frontiers; so Cyrus, making
good the deficiencies of nature, ordered the construction of seven frontier towns, naming the greatest one after himself—"Cyropolis."27
Henceforward, like a slave, the featureless savagery of the steppes was
to wear the mark of the Persian king.
This branding of his identity upon the land of the Saka proclaimed
an imperious dual message. No more would the untamed war-bands
beyond the Jaxartes be permitted to raid southward; and no more
would those behind it have to fear for their security. Cyrus' strategy
had always been to menace his enemies and to reassure his slaves—
and by 540 BC, with the eastern frontier stabilized, he felt ready to put
it to its ultimate test. Returning to the Zagros, he fixed his predatory
gaze on that supreme goal of every conqueror's ambition, the wealthy
flatlands of what is now southern Iraq, stretching from Assyria to the
Persian Gulf, the stage for splendid cities since the very dawn of time.
No man could truly be hailed as the master of the world until he had
subdued its ancient heartland—as Cyrus, the arriviste, was all too
well aware. Yet he would also have known that its inhabitants were no
backward frontiersmen, untutored in the propaganda of despots.
Indeed, it was they who regarded the Persians as savages. Cyrus, a man
who specialized in overturning hostile preconceptions, chose to meet
this new challenge head on. Launching his invasion of enemy territory, he claimed to be defending it; leading an immense army, he
affected to be an avatar of peace. And everywhere, strongholds met
him with an opening of their gates.
In truth, Persian firepower being what it was, this had been the
only sane policy for the defenders to adopt. The one army which
sought to defy the invasion had been summarily obliterated; for
Cyrus, as he had shown in Lydia, was not averse to the occasional
atrocity when he felt that it might serve a salutary purpose. Yet his
preference, by and large, was to live up to the high-flying claims of
his propaganda. His regime once established, there were no more
pogroms. Executions were kept to the barest minimum. His diktats
were couched in a moderate and gracious tone. To cities crowded
with ancient temples, and scented with incense, Cyrus presented
himself as a model of "righteousness and justice," and his "universal
lordship" as a payback from the gods.28 But which gods, precisely?
Coolly, Cyrus posed as the favorite of them all. Assorted priesthoods
duly scrabbled to hail him as their own, and assorted peoples as the
heir to their customs and concerns—the perfect gilding on his mastery of the world. A glorious thing, for the clan chief of the upstart
Achaemenids, to be the patron of ancient cities such as Ur and Uruk.
Not even in their records, although they reached back to the dawn
of time, could be found another man who had risen quite so fast,
To many, inevitably, there appeared something fearsome, even
monstrous, about this prodigy. When Cyrus at last fell in battle he was
seventy, his appetite for conquest still unassuaged, for his death had
come north of the Jaxartes, far beyond the limits he had once set on his
own ambitions.29 In her triumph, the queen of the tribe which had
killed him was said to have decapitated his corpse, and dropped the
head into a blood-filled wineskin, so that the old man's thirst might
glut itself at last. This was to cast Cyrus as a spirit of the kind that
haunted the imaginings of the Near East, a demon of the night, eternally hungry for human flesh. Among those who had submitted to
him, however, a quite different tradition would be preserved. Cyrus,
the man who had convulsed the world, would be remembered with
an almost unqualified admiration, for his exceptional nobility of
character, and as the architect of a universal peace. For centuries afterward, even among its bitterest enemies, the glow of its founder's
memory would suffuse the empire of the Persians. "He eclipsed all
other monarchs, either before him, or since." Such was the verdict of
Xenophon, an Athenian, writing almost two centuries after Cyrus'
death. "No matter whom he conquered, he would inspire in them a
deep longing to please him, and to bask in his good opinion. They
found themselves longing to be guided by his rulings—his, and no one
else's."30 An astonishing verdict, it might be thought—and yet Cyrus
had indeed seduced as well as forced himself on the world, persuading
a host of different peoples that he understood them, respected them
and desired their love. No empire had ever before been raised on such
foundations. No conqueror had ever before displayed such clemency,
such restraint.
This had been the genius of Cyrus—and his reward had been
dominion on a scale beyond all dreams.
He died in the summer of 529 BC. His corpse, redeemed from the tribe
that had killed him, was brought back to Persia, where an immense
stone tomb stood waiting to receive it. This had been raised, according
to legend, on the location of the decisive defeat of Astyages, and was
just one of a number of structures which Cyrus had sponsored in the
area. Less a city than an assemblage of palaces, pavilions and gardens,
the site certainly bore ample witness to the scale of the Persians' greatness—but it also suggested just how disorientating and precipitous
their rise had been. Beyond the masonry, herds of livestock still
roamed the bleakness of the open hills and plains. Winds gusting
across the featureless landscape coated gilded doorways and columns
with dust. Even the palace complex itself, despite being built of stone,
conveyed in its layout more than a hint of camps and tents. Not for
nothing was the site known as Pasargadae: the name of Cyrus' tribe. It
was hardly a paradox, after all, that a nomad too might have his roots.
Now, with Cyrus dead, maneuverings among the clans and tribes of
Persia would affect millions. Could a successor hope to take Cyrus'
place, or was the empire of the Persians, suddenly deprived of its
founder's charisma, doomed to vanish as rapidly as it had emerged? As
the chronicles of countless vanished empires bore witness, the death of
a king was a moment ripe with peril for even the greatest monarchy.
Cyrus, with a dynast's natural enthusiasm for progeniture, had
fathered three daughters and—more significantly—two sons; but
this guaranteed nothing. To a great empire as to a nomad's clan, a
superfluity of heirs might prove quite as perilous as none.
Farsighted as ever, though, Cyrus had understood the danger and
sought to insure against it, carefully providing for the hopes of both
his sons. Before his death, he had appointed the elder, Cambyses,
crown prince, and the younger, Bardiya, governor of Bactria. This was
the largest and most important of the eastern provinces, and even
though denied a kidaris, the fluted tiara of royal power, Bardiya had
been exempted from paying tribute, a privilege properly befitting a
king. Whether his resentment of his brother had been mollified by
such an honor, or whether it had only piqued his taste for royal status,
time would have to tell. Either way, due notice had been given to the
world of Cyrus' plans for its future: Cambyses was to sit on the throne
of the Persians, and Bardiya was to be his lieutenant. No one else was
to have a sniff of power. Just to press this point home, a scandalous
match was arranged between Cambyses and his two elder sisters,
Atossa and Rhoxsane, a spectacle of incest without precedent in the
traditions of Persia, but which set a satisfying block on the ambitions of
any rival noble house.31 After all, who worthier of Cyrus' daughters
than Cyrus' son? The bloodline of the great conqueror had become—
like a spring watched over by the Magi or the flames of a sacred
fire—something precious, to be tended and preserved from all pollution.
Even as Cyrus' corpse was laid to rest in a sarcophagus of gold,
inside a tomb carefully oriented toward the rising sun, amid the
prayers and lamentations of its Magian attendants, Cambyses moved
to claim his birthright. The monarchy of the world was now his. True,
as he took his place upon his father's throne, a few eyes may have
turned toward his brother; but Bardiya, confirmed in the governorship of his great fiefdom in the east, gave no sign of any treacherous
intent. Cyrus' last will and testament proved to have been most cunningly constructed. Both brothers had much to gain by interlocking
their interests. It might have been thought that Cambyses would have
sought, as his priority, to avenge his father's death—but that would
have required him to lead a massive army into the eastern provinces,
and provoke his brother's open resentment. Equally, it might have
been thought that Bardiya, possessed of a menacing power base, would
have sought to force further privileges from Cambyses—but that
would have been to risk the open fury of the new king. Whether tacitly or not, the two brothers formed a compact. Bardiya was to be left
undisturbed in his province, but he would guard his brother's back;32
Cambyses, every bit as ambitious for conquest as his father, would
turn his armies not against the impoverished tribesmen who had
killed Cyrus but toward a kingdom at the opposite end of his frontiers,
rich in gold and gargantuan temples, the one great power still surviving from the old world order, and that the most timeless and
celebrated of all. He would wage war on Egypt.
Such a campaign, of course, could not be rushed. The might of the
pharaohs may have been much diminished from its ancient splendor,
having grown dependent upon the support of shiftless mercenaries,
and been leeched of income by over-mighty temple priests, but it still
posed a formidable challenge. Cambyses spent four years preparing for
the invasion. The subject nations of the empire were leaned upon to
provide tribute and levies. Ships were built or commandeered, and a
Persian king, for the first time in his country's history, became the
master of a great and powerful navy. Intelligence was gathered and
carefully analyzed. When the Persians finally met the Egyptians in
battle, it is said that they did so with cats pinned to their shields, reducing their opponents' archers, for whom the animals were sacred, to a
state of outraged paralysis.33 Victory was duly won. Pelusium, the gateway to Egypt, was stormed, and the bodies of the defeated left scattered
across the sands; a century later, their bones could still be seen. Nor, of
course, was Cambyses' army the only prong of his assault. All the while,
the battle fleet was gliding along the coast. With navy and army shadowing each other in a perfectly coordinated amphibious operation,
the Persians advanced to seize their golden prize. Resistance was brutally crushed. Egypt submitted. Her people hailed as pharaoh the
"Great Chief of the Foreign Lands."
But the speed of Cambyses' victory had been delusive. A land so
ancient and mysterious was not easily absorbed into anyone's empire.
True, some measures were easily taken: the income from one town,
for instance, was channeled to keep the Persian sister-queens in
shoes.34 Others, however, soon began to suck Cambyses into the sinking sands. Change in Egypt had never been a straightforward matter,
and it so happened that the most pressing challenge, to tame and tax
the priesthood, was also the most intractable. Cambyses, brutal in a
way that native pharaohs had never dared to be, did succeed in forcing
requisitions from the bloated estates of the temples, but the effort
took him four years and naturally won him the eternal enmity of the
priests. No effort was spared by them to blacken his name, and
Cambyses would ever after be remembered in Egypt as a lunatic, much
given to murder and to gibbering mockery of the gods. Sometimes he
was even accused of combining both pastimes, as when he was supposed to have spitted a bull worshipped by the Egyptians as divine.
Lies, all lies. Far from having jeered at the sacred beast, as the black
propaganda would have it, Cambyses had actually behaved with exemplary propriety, ordering the dead bull embalmed and reverently laid
to rest. Just as Cyrus had done, he sought to show himself scrupulously respectful of foreign gods, no matter how outlandish. After all,
as pharaoh, he had become a son of Ra himself. To a man only one
generation away from wearing leather trousers, the grandiosity of
Egyptian traditions, aureate like no other, must have provided scope
for considerable reflection. Too much scope, perhaps: for while the
Egyptian priesthood came to regard Cambyses as an oppressive
maniac, so too, and far more fatefully, did the Persian clan chiefs.
Cyrus, even as he conquered the world, had never forgotten his roots,
and as a result he had been loved, and called the "father" of his
people—but Cambyses would be remembered by the Persians in a
very different way, as "cruel and haughty," and they would label him
a "despot."35 As evidence, spectacular stories of his savagery would be
adduced: how he had used his cupbearer for target practice, and shot
him dead; how he had buried twelve noblemen alive and upsidedown. More smears? Perhaps—and yet surely reflecting memories of
a genuine crisis, one with which the Medes in Cambyses' entourage
would have been only too familiar, of a king intolerant of any hint of
opposition, and resolved to break the will of the chiefs of rival clans.
Many of these, having gone on the Egyptian adventure, had been kept
securely by Cambyses' side, where they could serve their king as
hostages as well as lieutenants. Not all were in Egypt, however. Despite
the absence of the court, Persia remained the surest fount of royal
power. Whoever could master the heartland might also master the
empire beyond. Cambyses' long absence in Egypt served to make this
an increasingly suggestive calculation. Treason began to be muttered
in the clan lands of the Persians.
Three decades previously, the Median chiefs, in their desperation to
topple Astyages, had been reduced to countenancing a foreigner as
king; but the Persian nobility, even as they chafed under the imperiousness of Cambyses, had a more acceptable alternative to hand.
Bardiya was not only the son of Cyrus the Great, but also—and just as
importantly—proficient in all the qualities that the Persians most
admired in a king. His physical strength had won him the nickname
"Tanyoxarces," or "Mighty-frame," and his skill with the bow—the
Persians' weapon of choice—was legendary.36 That he had remained
the master of the troublesome eastern marches for almost a decade
was ample evidence of his talents as a warlord. In other ways, too,
Bardiya had proved himself his father's son. Like Cyrus, it appears, he
could conciliate as well as fight. Sensitive to the resentments of the
Persian aristocracy, he was also solicitous of the subject peoples, who
were increasingly weighed down by the exactions of Cambyses.
Whispering it to those who mattered, Bardiya began to moot a startling measure: perhaps, for three years, the subjects of the Persian
people might be exempted from providing tribute and further levies to
the king? Not that Cambyses would ever agree to that, of course. But
a new king? A new king might agree . . .
Such sedition could hardly be kept quiet for long. Spies were everywhere. Cambyses, his African conquests by now secured, woke
abruptly to the menace at his rear. Despite all his great achievements,
which had seen him extend the supremacy of the Persian people far
into the Libyan desert and even into the land of the fabled Ethiopians,
"the tallest and best-looking of all men in the world,"37 he had been
too long away from home. By early 522 BC, having set out at last on the
long road back to Persia, Cambyses found himself in a desperate race
against time. Although he still had his crack troops with him—and
much of the nobility as well—events were slipping out of his control.
On March 11, Bardiya openly laid claim to the throne. A month later,
he was being hailed as king throughout the eastern provinces.38 Would
the empire of the Persian people, raised up to such splendor by Cyrus,
now be shattered on the ambitions of his rival sons, break into separate
halves, or maybe crumble away entirely? There seemed no escape from
the looming fratricide.
And then accident—or something very like an accident—intervened.39 Cambyses, as he leaped onto his horse to continue his advance
through Syria, was said to have wounded himself in the thigh with his
sword. Gangrene set in. Within days he was dead. A startling misadventure—and most convenient in its timing, if true. The obvious
beneficiary, of course, was Bardiya, now left as Cyrus' only surviving
male heir, and therefore king by right as well as might. All had been
foreseen by the Magi, who had glimpsed, in the spectacle of a headless
baby born to Rhoxsane, the extinction of Cambyses' line, although the
Egyptian priests, more malicious and inventive, would whisper that
Cambyses had brought the horror on himself—for he was said to
have kicked his sister-bride in the stomach, killing not only the fetus
but the queen. Now, in Cambyses' childlessness, there seemed a welcome chance of peace—and Bardiya moved quickly to seize it. In July,
he was formally invested by the Magi, dressed in the robes of his father
and the royal kidaris. At the same time, he married Atossa, Cambyses'
surviving sister-bride. Succession and bloodline: both now seemed
secured. Who else was there, after all, to challenge Bardiya for the
monarchy of the world?
But while the new king, confident of his supremacy, withdrew for
the summer to the cool of Ecbatana, conspiracy and rumor still
swirled across the baking lowland plains.40 Whether accident or not,
the death of Cambyses presented a fearsome temptation to others
aside from Bardiya. On the trunk road which led from Syria to the
Zagros, the royal army now stood leaderless. But for how long? The
highest-ranking officers, scions of great families, had returned from
the African adventure battle-hardened and intimate with the workings of power, often beyond their years. Cambyses' "lance-bearer," for
instance, a distant cousin of the king by the name of Darius, was a
mere twenty-eight. Rank, in the Persian court, was measured by proximity to the royal person, so the young Darius' title, far from implying
menial status, had been a splendid and prestigious honorific. It marked
him out publicly as a major player at court, and left him privy to the
most sensitive royal secrets. In the weeks leading up to Cambyses'
death, he could not have been better placed to sift intelligence on
the coup.
To sift—and to analyze. For Darius could see, with the pitiless eye
of a born politician, that Bardiya's position might not be as strong
as it had originally appeared. The clan chiefs' loyalty was divided and
unsure. A manifesto of tribute reform, however welcome to the subject nations, was unlikely to prove popular with the Persian ruling
class. Bardiya, if his coffers were not to be emptied, would have to
recoup the loss of revenue somehow. Since he had no wish to commit
political suicide, the new king could hardly put the squeeze on his
own supporters; but with much of the nobility far away in Syria, and
in Cambyses' camp, an alternative source of income appeared ready
to hand. The orders duly went out. The estates of those regarded as
Bardiya's opponents, their "pastures and herds, their slaves and
houses,"41 all were confiscated. This windfall, however, urgently
needed though it was, came at a fearful cost. The split in the nobility
was confirmed. In the eyes of many Persians, Bardiya had branded
himself "a disgrace to his country, and to his ancient throne."42 One
king that summer had already passed away; now plans were hurriedly
made for the disposal of a second.
The conspirators were seven in total. All were of the highest rank.
Among them was Darius, the young lance-bearer of Cambyses—and
an Achaemenid. Not that membership in Persia's foremost clan necessarily guaranteed him leadership of the plotters, for it was shared by
a second conspirator, a wealthy grandee by the name of Otanes, who
also appears to have had an eye on the throne. Furthermore, according to a later tradition, it was Otanes who had first organized the
conspiracy—with Darius invited to join only as an after-thought. But
this version does not quite add up. For a supposed late-comer, Darius
was acknowledged as the conspiracy's linchpin with remarkable speed.
His status, right from the beginning, appears to have been preeminent. Linked by blood to Cyrus, he also stood at the heart of the web
that bound together the seven conspirators. One of them, Gobryas,
was both his father-in-law and the husband of his sister: marriage ties
could hardly have bound the two any tighter. Darius' brother,
Artaphernes, a man of rare daring and intelligence, was also, although
not one of the seven chief conspirators, ready to move on whatever
was decided. More than a hint, then, of a family affair. Wherever one
looks, Darius seems to loom as the ringleader of the plot.
Why, then, the insistence that he had not been in on it from the
start? How might he have benefited from this apparent distortion of the
time frame? What, to put it bluntly, might he have had to cover up?
One obvious and fateful answer suggests itself—regicide. After all, who
better placed than a king's lance-bearer to plot the murder of a king?
Such an act of treachery would have been regarded even by Cambyses'
enemies as beyond the pale. While Darius would soon prove himself as
bold as he was ruthless, he was never one to flaunt his crimes. As a
result, the truth of his guilt or otherwise is forever lost to us.43 Yet if
Darius' involvement in the death of Cambyses must be reckoned, not
proven, his role in spurring forward the plot against Bardiya is far more
certain. When Otanes, urging a course of prudence, suggested the
recruitment of more conspirators, and playing for time, Darius argued
for immediate action. They should rely, he insisted, not on force of
numbers, but on speed and surprise. To waver would be to lose their
advantage. The greater their daring, the greater their chances of success.
With his brother, Artaphernes, and a majority of the seven backing
him, Darius had his way. His calculations had been precise. A rare
opportunity was indeed now opening. As the conspirators and their
train, following the Khorasan Highway, closed in on the foothills of
the Zagros, they would have felt the violent heat of summer on the
plains starting to diminish. Autumn was on its way. Soon, the king
would be descending from the mountains. If the assassination squad
could ambush him on open ground, somewhere on the road between
Ecbatana and the heartland of royal power in Persia, then he might be
dispatched with relative ease. Practiced horsemen all—for there had
never been a Persian nobleman not raised in the saddle—the seven
conspirators and their accomplices rode at a scorching pace, desperate
not to lose their chance. By September, they had arrived at the borders
of Media. Ahead of them lay the Khorasan Highway, twisting through
the mountains up to Ecbatana. And descending it, approaching them,
somewhere, was Bardiya.
News of his progress would have been easily come by. The road was
always busy. Merchants, profiting from the consolidation of Persian
authority, had begun to throng the great highway in growing numbers, businessmen from the wealthy trading cities of the lowlands,
their talk an exotic babel, their laden pack animals clopping in tow.44
Those coming from Ecbatana would have been able to assure the conspirators that the king had indeed left his summer capital, that he
was on the move, that he was not far ahead of them. Then, with
Bardiya drawing ever nearer, the traffic on the road would have grown
even more varied, the king's lackeys and outriders increasingly in evidence, their costumes rich, their beards and hair elaborately curled,
their peacock extravagance alerting travelers to the approach of their
master, the King of Persia, the King of the World.
Nevertheless, amid all the clamor and clarions and color, traces of
a far more ancient order still abided. By late September, as the conspirators pressed along the northern edge of Nisaea, the most fertile of
the Zagros valleys, they would have been able to mark the most dramatic of these. Away from the courtiers and caravans on the highway,
covering the clover-rich pastureland, there spread a spectacle familiar
to numberless generations; indeed, a reminder of ways more primordial than Media itself. Horses, white horses, covered the plain—as
many as 160,000 of them, it was said. These were the same breed that
had been paid in tribute to the Assyrians almost two centuries before,
"the best, and the largest"45 in the world, for not even the fabulous
kingdoms of India—where, as was well known, every animal grew to
a prodigious size—had anything to compare. Once the Medes had
been nomads, and now they were the subjects of a foreign monarchy;
but riding across the Nisaean plain, abreast of the shimmering herds,
they knew themselves supreme as the tamers of horses still. A splendid consolation to them in their slavery: for the white horses, so strong
and swift and beautiful, were regarded by the peoples of the Zagros
as creatures sacred, bound by mysterious ties of communion to the
divine, and to their king.
Even the conquering Persians acknowledged this. At Pasargadae, a
horse from Nisaea would be sacrificed every month before the
hallowed tomb of Cyrus himself. Perhaps that was why Bardiya, turn29
ing off the Khorasan Highway and pausing in his descent toward the
lowlands, lingered in the presence of the herd. Whether he sought
legitimization, or a sign from the heavens, or perhaps just the reading
of bad dreams, he would have found in Nisaea ready experts on hand.
Magi, interpreters of all that was mysterious, were the guardians of the
sacred horses too. Did Bardiya summon these masters of ritual to his
presence and ask them what his future might hold? Perhaps. What is
certain, however, is that on September 29, 522 BC, a man calling himself Bardiya was in Nisaea, in a fort named Sikyavautish—and that it
was there that Darius finally tracked him down.
What happened next would be retold by all those who traced their
lineage from the seven leaders of the assassination squad. Many versions must have been elaborated over the years. All agreed, however,
that Bardiya was taken wholly by surprise. It seems that the conspirators and their followers, coolly riding up to the gates of the fortress,
baldly announced that they had come to see the king. The guards,
overawed by the rank of the new arrivals, scurried to let them in.
Only in the courtyard, as they approached the royal quarters, did
anyone think to challenge them—but by then it was too late. The
assassins, overpowering the courtiers in their path, burst into Bardiya's
chamber. The king, it is said, was with a concubine. Desperately,
he sought to stave off his attackers with the leg of a broken stool,
but to no avail. It is also said that it was Darius' brother, "faithful
Artaphernes," who finally plunged the dagger home.46
And Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, King of the Persians, slumped dead
to the ground.
Or did he? No sooner had the assassins completed their bloody work
than they themselves were promoting a quite different tale. The
corpse of the murdered man may not have been exposed to public
view, but a great deal else was now revealed, to universal amazement.
The story told by the conspirators was staggering. The man they had
slain, they claimed, was not Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, at all. That
Bardiya was already long dead. Cambyses, jealous and savage, had
ordered his execution years before. Had it not been for the acumen of
Darius and his fellow patriots, who had stumbled upon the secret,
and their courage in daring to expose it, the Persian people might
never have learned of the monstrous scam.
All of which begged a rather obvious question. If the man assassinated at Sikyavautish had not been the son of Cyrus—and the rightful
king—then who had he been? Here the revelations took an even more
sinister turn. That an impostor had taken on the role of a prince of the
royal blood was alarming enough, but that he had played it for years
unsuspected even by his family and household could only be evidence
of the blackest necromancy. Surely, then, a Magus, one who had been
schooled in the mastery of the supernatural, was the likeliest suspect?
Could it have been merely a coincidence that the impostor had been
surprised in Nisaea, on the plain of the sacred horses, well known as a
haunt of the Magi? It seemed not—for Bardiya's doppelgänger, the
conspirators hurriedly announced, had indeed been a Magus,
"Gaumata by name."47 An obscure and low-born villain he may have
been, and yet so potent had his sorcery proved itself, and so audacious
his plot, that he had almost won the empire by his fraud.
Sensationalist retellings would tease out the full implications of
this scandal and adorn them further. For all his powers, it appeared
that the Magus had forgotten to conceal one crucial detail: his ears,
for some unspecified crime, had long before been cut off by Cyrus. A
daughter of Otanes named Phaidime, a wife of Bardiya who had
never suspected that he might have been killed and replaced by a
double, had brushed the side of her husband's head one evening
while he slept, and uncovered the appalling truth. Telling her father
of her discovery, she had thereby set in train the dramatic sequence
of events which had culminated in the murder of the impostor.
Such, at any rate, was the story which years later would be told
across the empire. And there was nobody, by then, left to dispute it.
Even on the night of the assassination, if there had been anyone in
Nisaea to query the conspirators' self-justification, or to point out
some of its more glaring implausibilities, or to ask why the corpse of
the supposed impostor had been disposed of with such speed, he
would have known better than to speak his mind. With blood still
being washed from the fittings of Sikyavautish, it was hardly the time
for quibbles. The conspirators were in no mood to tolerate dissent. The
warning given by Darius could not have been more stentorian: "Thou
who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie;
the man who shall be a follower of the Lie, him do thou punish well!"48
Here, from a master political strategist, was a dazzling sleight-of-hand.
It would serve to place not the assassins but their accusers on the
defensive. Skeptics were to be anathematized as the enemies of truth.
And this, for any Persian, was a feared and dreadful fate. It was an
article of faith to Darius' countrymen that they were the most honest
people in the world. Three things were taught them, it was said: "to
ride, to fire a bow and to tell the truth."49 Darius, by threatening those
who might doubt his story of the Magus' crimes, was not just shoring
up a rickety case; his claims were altogether more soaring. Only a
Persian could have made them—for only a Persian could understand
what truth really meant. He knew, as more benighted peoples did
not, that the universe without truth would be undone and lost to
perpetual night. More than an abstraction, more even than an ideal,
it formed instead the very fabric of existence.
This was why, in the beginning, when Ahura Mazda, greatest of
the gods, had summoned time and creation into being, he had engendered Arta, who was Truth, to give order to the universe. Without
Arta, it would have lacked form or beauty, and the great cycles of
existence set in motion by Lord Mazda could not have brought life into
the world. Even so, the work of Truth was never done. Just as fire,
when it rises to the heavens, is accompanied by black smoke, so Arta,
the Persians knew, was shadowed by Drauga, the Lie. Two orders—one
of perfection, the other of falsehood, each the image of the other—
were coiled in a conflict as ancient as time. What should mortals do,
then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie,
lest the universe itself should totter and fail? "The wretch who weaves
deceit will bring death into his country":50 so it had been anciently proclaimed. How much more deadly the peril, then, if a "wretch" had
somehow seized his country's throne. The Magus, by taking on the
image of Bardiya, and impersonating the rightful king, had handed to
Drauga the scepter of the world. Darius and his fellows, by riding to
Sikyavautish, had toppled an evil infinitely more threatening than
a mere impostor. Far from staging a squalid putsch, they had been
engaged in nothing less than the redemption of the cosmos.
And now, with Gaumata justly toppled and dispatched, the throne
which he had tainted stood empty. The insignia of royal power—a
robe, a bow and a shield—waited in Sikyavautish for the rightful
claimant. Who that might be, however, and how he was to be recognized, remained, on the evening of the assassination, a mystery. Only
the most garbled account of what followed has survived. The conspirators, it was said, rode out by night into the open plain. At an
agreed point, they reined in their horses and awaited the coming of
dawn. When the sun's first rays appeared above the rugged line of
mountains to the east, it was Darius' horse who neighed to them in
greeting. At once, his companions slipped from their saddles and fell
to their knees in homage. The Greeks, when they repeated this story,
would claim that it had been agreed among the conspirators that "the
one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the
throne"51—and they added, furthermore, that Darius had cheated.
His groom, it was said, had dabbled his fingers inside a mare's vulva
beforehand, and then, just as the sun rose, placed them beside the
nose of Darius' horse. But this was scurrilous nonsense, and typical of
the Greeks. How like them to distort the holy rites of Truth!
For it is evident, even from the unsatisfactory version that we have,
that Darius' accession was marked by potent and awful ritual. The conspirators gathered in the chill of that September night not because
they wished to discover who the next king might be, but because they
already knew. Otanes, Darius' only conceivable rival, had already
bowed to the inevitable and discounted himself as a candidate for the
throne: the noblemen riding across the plain of Nisaea were celebrating
a fait accompli. Blessed by the neighing of the sacred white horses, and
by the mountain dawn, Darius could know himself doubly the champion of Arta. As the first rays illuminated the plain, so night, the order
of Drauga, menacing and indistinct, began to fade before the brilliant
light of the sun. "So can I recognize you as strong and holy, O Mazda,
when by the hand in which you hold the twin destinies of the Liar and
of the Righteous Man, and by the glow of your fire whose power is the