Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent

by Tom Holland

Lydian Empire

Croesus’ downfall

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 ...

Cro...

Asty...

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 sp...

‘Yauna’

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’.

Harpagus’

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. Neve...

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.

This, for Persians and Medes alike, was to journey back into their past, towards 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 towards 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, a...

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 rumbustious ways – but in the cause, henceforward, of the Persian king.

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 north-east, which previously had lain wide open to incursions from the steppes of Central Asia.

Gandhara,

Ba...

Sogd...

And bulwarks of much besides. Savages, as all civilised peoples were agreed, belonged exactly where Cyrus was pinning them, in the remote bleakness of the rim of the world.

slant-eyed Saka,

Sogdiana

Kazakhstan,

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.

River Rangha,

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.

Jaxa...

‘Cyropolis’.

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 southwards; 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 stabilised, he felt ready to put it to its ultimate test.

wealthy flat-lands

arriviste,

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 specialised in overturning hostile preconceptions, chose to meet this new challenge head on.

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.

Achaemenids,

Ur

U...

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.

Xenophon,

‘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.’

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.

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.

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.