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

by Tom Holland

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.

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.

Nevertheless, amid all the clamour and clarions and colour, 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’

Nisaean plain,

Even the conquering Persians acknowledged this. At Pasargadae, a horse from Nisaea would be sacrificed every month before the hallowed tomb of Cyrus himself.

fort named Sikyavautish

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.

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.

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 imposter 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,...

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:

Otanes

Phai...

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.

stentorian:

anathematised

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.

He knew, as more benighted peoples did not, that the universe without truth would be undone and lost to perpetual night.