Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

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.”

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.

Michel de Montaigne

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.

Peter Green, whose wonderful book The Year of Salamis,

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.”

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.

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 emin...

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.

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.

Egypt submitted. Her people hailed as pharaoh the “Great Chief of the Foreign Lands.”

Cambyses would ever after be remembered in Egypt as a lunatic,

Cambyses would be remembered by the Persians in a very different way, as “cruel and haughty,” and they would label him a “despot.”

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.

Zoroaster, the prophet of the Aryans,

“Unblock your ears, then, to hear the Good News—gaze at the bright flames with clear-seeing thought!” the Prophet had proclaimed, alerting humanity to the great decision that confronted it. “You have the choice as to which faith you will follow, everyone, person by person, with that freedom all are granted in the mighty test of life.”54 Choose wrong, and the path of the Lie, and of chaos, would be opened; choose right, and the path of order, tranquillity and hope.

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. What everyone agreed, h...

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 honor 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 conquered the world, in a state of flux. 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 dogs (a fate otherwise regarded among the Persians as so terrible that it was reserved for regicides). So too with the worship of the Good Lord,

Ahura Mazda himself, influence had long been percolating both ways. 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.

style, Darius was moving with deadly speed to take advantage of this fact. Out of murder and usurpation, he would manufacture a rare legitimacy for himself. Out of weakness, he would forge a strength such as no monarch had ever possessed before.

Dizzying as this startling ambition was, however, so too was the yawning of a waiting abyss. The chosen one of Ahura Mazda could not afford to stumble: just one slip, and Darius would have failed. Already, as he and the other conspirators nursed their strength in Media, disturbing news was coming through to them of the empire’s reaction to their coup. In Elam, an ancient kingdom on the borders of Persia, open revolt had broken out. In Babylon,*5 the great metropolis which was the largest and wealthiest city in the world, a pretender was reported to have emerged to claim its long-vacant throne. Suddenly, it seemed that the empire of the Persians, rather than bringing the universal peace of Arta to mankind, might dissolve, lost to chaos and the reach of a lengthening shadow. For Darius, the self-proclaimed champion of light, the ultimate test was looming. Not only his own future but that of the whole Near East was at stake. Ahead of him waited the road to Babylon.

Without dirt, there could never have been cities or great kings. So claimed the people of Babylon, who knew full well that their civilization had been fashioned out of mud.

Back in the beginning, when all the earth had been ocean, Lord Marduk, king of the gods, had built a raft of reeds, covered it with dust, mingled it with water to form a primordial slime and out of this raised a home for himself, the Esagila, the first building in the world. This could still be seen eons later, standing in the heart of Babylon—but it had needed no temple to make the Babylonians appreciate what could be done with earth and water. They knew it in their bones. “I will take blood,” Marduk had announced, in the earliest days of the world, “and I will sculpt flesh, and I will form the first man.”

Hemmed in as they were by the

bleakness of mountain and desert, the Babylonians could gaze at their land, and know they were the most fortunate of people, blessed not by one but by two mighty rivers, prodigious evidence of the favor of the gods. The fertility of their estates, the towering splendor of their buildings, the easy passage of their merchants to the sea; all were gifts of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Well might Greek travelers have described the mud steppes as “Mesopotamia,” the “Land Between the Rivers”; for without water all the wealth of Babylon would have been as nothing but dry dust.

the Tigris, in contrast to its sister river, had impressively steep banks, and—inconveniently for farmers—flowed so fast that its name in Persian meant “the arrow.”

Yet what rendered it unsuitable for the purposes of irrigation made it ideal as a line of defense: easily the most formidable that Mesopotamia possessed amid the general featurelessness of the landscape.

To strengthen it against the menace of invasion from Media, and to plug the open flatlands that lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a great stretch of fortifications had been constructed, eight meters wide and ten meters high, their crenellations proudly visible across the drear of the plains. Even sixty years after its construction, this “Median Wall” still bore witness to the monarch who had raised it, Nebuchadnezzar II, whose greatness had been t...

Akkad, back in the 2200s BC, that the concept of world conquest had first been conceived.

Sargon, the obscure adventurer who had emerged as though from nowhere to nurture this proud ambition, to extinguish the independence of neighboring city-states and to rule supreme over the “totality of the lands under heaven,”4 had always remained the model of a Mesopotamian strongman.

seventeen million bricks, and looming almost a hundred meters high: the Etemenanki, or “House that is the Frontier between the Heavens and the Earth.”

Processional Way. Beside the city’s main gates, open to the gaze of all who entered Babylon, there stood an immense palace, as visible, in its own way, as the Etemenanki at the opposite end of the boulevard; and yet such was the polychrome gorgeousness of its brickwork, inlaid as it was with gold and silver, and lapis lazuli, and ivory, and cedar, that those who viewed it could hardly help but lower their eyes to the ground. Opulence of such an order was not merely an expression of royal power, but was calculated, very precisely, to reinforce it. All were to feel submission and prostration in their souls.

Mesopotamia, by virtue of its glamor, had always exerted a powerful influence over its neighbors, and the kings of Anshan, among many others, had long looked to Babylon as a model of how best to be royal. Darius, settling himself into the great royal palace on the Processional Way, was laying claim to the same rich inheritance: King of Persia, he would rule as King of Babylon; and, yes, as King of Akkad too. Proud of his background though he was, “an Achaemenid, and a Persian, the son of a Persian,”10 Darius did not scorn to adorn himself in the plundered robes of a Mesopotamian “King of Lands.” Far more than Cyrus or Cambyses, he had good cause to try them on for size. As a usurper, he needed every scrap of legitimacy that he could find.

Having won Babylon, Darius was alert to all the city could teach. For a man of his penetrating intelligence, the city must have appeared as an immense illustration of what kingship might truly be, enshrined within ritual, and luxury, and stone. The lessons that he was absorbing in Babylon promised to be valuable, and they would need to be—for as Darius lingered in the city, grim news began to reach him. His victory in Mesopotamia had failed to deliver a knockout blow to his other enemies....

anathematized

“Those Elamites were faithless,” he thundered. “They failed to worship Ahura Mazda.”18 This, the condemnation of a people for their neglect of a religion not their own, was something wholly remarkable. Until that moment, Darius, following the subtle policy of Cyrus, had always been assiduous in his attention to foreign gods. Now he was delivering to the subject nations of the world a stern and novel warning. Should a people persist in rebellion against the order of Ahura Mazda, they might expect to be regarded not merely as adherents of the Lie but as

the worshippers of “daivas”—false gods and demons. Conversely, those sent to war against them might expect “divine blessings—both in their lives, and after death.”19 Glory on earth and an eternity in heaven: these were the assurances given by Darius to his men. The manifesto proved an inspiring one. When Gobryas, Darius’ father-in-law, led an army into Elam, he was able to crush the revolt there with a peremptory, almost dismissive, speed. Never again would...

Darius, testing the potential of his religion to its limits, had promoted a dramatic innovation.

Contained within it were the seeds of some radical notions: that foreign foes might be crushed as infidels; that warriors might be promised paradise; that conquest in the name of a god might become a moral duty.

Not that Darius, even as he ordered the invasion of Elam, had ever aimed to impose his religion at the point of a sword; such an idea was wholly alien to the spirit of the times. Nevertheless, a new age was dawning—and Darius was its midwife. His vision of empire as a fusion of cosmic, moral and political order was to prove stunningly fruitful: the foundation stone not only of his own rule but of the very concept of a universal order. The dominion raised by Cyrus, having been preserved fro...

The king’s appetite for centralization was insatiable. The city which the Greeks would much later call Persepolis was built as nerve center, powerhouse and showcase. Not only Persia but the realms of the vast dominion beyond it were to be unified into one immense administrative unit, focused, as was only natural, upon the figure of the king himself. Darius had not spent the first years of his reign shoring up the empire for nothing; and he was resolved never again to see it threatened by collapse. With his habitual energy, he threw himself into the most overwhelming task of administration that any monarch had ever faced: nothing less than to set the world upon a sound financial footing. This was the same challenge that had destroyed both Cambyses and Bardiya; but Darius’ talents, once again, were to prove the equal of his ambition. The financial crisis that had racked the empire in the last year of Cambyses’ reign was briskly resolved: the ramshackle system of tribute that had prevailed under Cyrus and his sons was streamlined and reformed; levies in every province, to the far ends of the known world, were carefully fixed. It was an unprecedented achievement, and one destined to endure for almost two centuries as the bedrock of Persian power. Even more than his generalship or his genius for propaganda, it was Darius’ punctilious mastery of fiscal policy that pulled the empire back from the brink. If the rising splendors of Persepolis and Susa spoke loudly of his dominance,...

A truth illustrated by the very fabric of the palaces themselves—for tribute receipts to the Great King were not merely the stuff of dusty archives, but of splendid and sacred drama. During his months in Babylon, Darius

“The gold was brought from Sardis, and from Bactria, and fashioned by craftsmen here, and the precious stones that were used here, lapis lazuli and carnelian, these were brought from Sogdiana.” So visitors to Susa were grandly informed. “The silver and ebony was brought from India, and the friezes on the walls, they were brought from Ionia, and the ivory that was carved here, that came from Ethiopia, and India, and Arachosia.”24 And so on and on, in rolling tones of house-pride, the record of tribute or labor drawn from twenty-three territories of the empire. Never before had the details of tax returns made for quite such a dazzling show.

Susa and Persepolis

banking family, the Egibis,

In 519 BC, one year after the suppression of the Elamites’ revolt, a fresh uprising broke out on the empire’s northern frontier, among those inveterate rebels, the Saka.