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

by Tom Holland

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.

Ahura Mazda,

Arta, who was Truth,

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?

Drauga

Sikyavautish,

Gaumata

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 recognised, 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 ...

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.

Or so it pleased Darius to claim. Yet the imagery, although it would suffuse his propaganda, was not his own.

If it bore witness to the reverence for Arta found among all the Aryans,then it drew as well on the teachings of a far more rigorous dualism. ‘The twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man’: not Darius’ words but those of that most fabled of visionaries, Zoroaster, the prophet of the Aryans, the man who had first revealed to a startled world that it was the battleground in a relentless war between good and evil.

Here, in this war, was the great death-struggle of things – for the Prophet, continuing with his novel doctrines, had taught that the cycles of the cosmos would not keep revolving for ever, as had always been assumed, but move instead towards a mighty end, a universal apocalypse in which Truth would a...

Presiding over this final and decisive victory would be the Lord of Life, Wisdom and Light, Ahura Mazda himself – not, as other Iranians had always believed, one among a multitude of divinities, but ...

hedgehog);

dog;

‘Unblock your ears, then, to hear the Good News – gaze at the bright flames with clear-seeing thought!’ the Prophet had proclaimed, alerting humanity...

Was Darius the first usurper to appreciate just how amenable to his purposes this great religion of peace and justice might prove to be? We shall never know for sure. The early history of Zoroaster and his doctrines was a puzzle even to his own followers. That the Prophet had been the only baby to laugh, rather than cry, at his birth; that he had been granted his first vision of Ahura Mazda at the age of thirty, as he emerged from a river; that he had finally succumbed, aged seventy-seven, to an assassin’s knife: these few scraps of his biography had been preserved by the devout. But as to when he had lived, and where, wildly divergent opinions were held: some dated Zoroaster to the dawn of time, others only to the reign of King Astyages;55 some held that he had been raised in Bactria, others on the steppes.

But to what effect? The empire founded by Cyrus was certainly no theocracy; it was never, in any real sense, ‘Zoroastrian’ at all. The Persians continued to worship their ancient gods, to honour mountains and flowing streams, and to sacrifice horses before the tombs of their kings. But if the Achaemenid court remained pagan in much of its practice, it was also, in its dominant sensibility, not entirely removed from Zoroaster’s teachings.

As in the eastern kingdoms of Iran, where the monotheism of the Prophet had taken its strongest hold, so also in the west, Ahura Mazda had long been worshipped as supreme. Between the native paganism of the Persians and the teachings of Zoroaster there appears to have been, not rivalry, but rather synergy, and even fusion.

Both were the expressions of a single religious impulse, one that had been evolving over centuries, and was still, as the Persians co...

In particular, between the Magi, who had long been adepts of the most occult and sacred knowledge, and the priests of Zoroaster, there were numerous correspondences. It was not even clear which order had first proclaimed eternal war against insects and reptiles, had first worn white robes as the mark of their status, or had first exposed the corpses of their fellows to be consumed by birds and...

Far from dividing the Medes and Persians from their cousins in the East, their ‘Mazdaism’ appears to have served them as a source of unity.

A bond certainly appreciated by Cyrus. Looking to dramatise his unprecedented dominion over the various Iranian peoples, he had consciously adopted certain customs from their ancient heartlands.

In the nursery of his own tribe, at Pasargadae, far distant from Bactria or Sogdiana, he had ordered the building of three startling new structures: fire-holders made of stone, their tops hollowed out into deep, wide bow...

There can be no doubt that it was from Zoroaster that the Persians ‘derived the rule against burning dead bodies or defiling fire in any way’, for a Lydian scholar, in the earliest reference to the Prophet recorded by an anairya, commented as much.

Cyrus had hit upon the perfect image of his power. How better to represent royal greatness than to associate it with fire? Even those otherwise ignorant of the customs of the Iranians might readily appreciate such a notion. Soon enough, throughout the empire, similar sanctuaries began to appear, their flames guarded by the Magi, only ever to be extinguished on the death of the reigning monarch, symbols both of Arta and of the rule of Persia’s king.

And now Darius, his hands wet with royal blood, was moving to make this identification of the two orders, celestial and mortal, even more explicit. As he would never cease to acknowledge, everything he was, everything he had achieved, was due to the favour of Ahura Mazda: ‘He bore me aid, the other gods too, because I was not faithless, I was not a follower of the Lie, I was not false in my actions.’