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

by Tom Holland

Pasargadae:

Now, with Cyrus dead, manoeuvrings 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?

progeniture,

Far-sighted as ever, though, Cyrus had understood the danger and sought to insure against it, carefully providing for the hopes of both his sons.

Cambyses, crown prince,

Bardiya, governor of...

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.

Atossa

Rhoxsane,

Even as Cyrus’ corpse was laid to rest in a sarcophagus of gold, inside a tomb carefully oriented towards 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 towards 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 mass...

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;

Such a campaign, of course, could not be rushed. The might of the pharaohs may have been much diminished from its ancient splendour, 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 analysed. 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 t...

Pelu...

All the while, the battle fleet was gliding along the coast. With navy and army shadowing each other in a perfectly co-ordinated 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.

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...

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.

son of Ra

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 fa...

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, a...

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.

Bardiya

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 nobil...

And then accident – or something very like an accident – intervened.39 Cambyses, as he leapt 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

Rhox...

kidaris.

Atossa,

But while the new king, confident of his supremacy, withdrew for the summer to the cool of Ecbatana, conspiracy and rumour still swirled across the baking lowland plains.

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.

a distant cousin of the king by the name of Darius,

To sift – and to analyse. 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.

Darius,

Otanes,

Furthermore, according to a later tradition, it was Otanes who had first organised 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.

Gobryas,

Artaphernes,

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.

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.