Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

To people who had suffered under Spartan oppression for generations, Xerxes’ rule might almost have felt like liberty.

It might have flattered the British Empire to imagine itself the heir of Athens; but it owed a certain debt of obligation to the mortal enemy of Athens, too.

Medes, a loose confederation of Aryan tribes settled conveniently along the Khorasan Highway itself.

True, the treasury was emptied and its contents carted away to Anshan, but Ecbatana was otherwise spared the fate of Nineveh.

Instead, the Persians were commanded to demonstrate their mastery of more traditional methods of pacification: cities were to be ravaged, rebel leaders executed, their followers enslaved. And all was done as the King of Persia had instructed.

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.

Fighting his way into the uplands, gazing at last toward the Hindu Kush,

fiefdom of swaggering noblemen, backward in comparison to their cousins in the Zagros, perhaps, but rich, and hulking, and addicted to war.

The Medes, for instance, preserved lurid folktales of how their empire, at the very peak of its might, had been subjected to the slant-eyed Saka, a notoriously brutal people, cruel and untamed like the steppes from which they came, who had held on to Media for twenty-eight years.

menace his enemies and to reassure his slaves

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.

Pelusium, the gateway to Egypt, was stormed, and the bodies of the defeated left scattered across the sands; a century later, their bones could still be seen.

while the Egyptian priesthood came to regard Cambyses as an oppressive maniac, so too, and far more fatefully, did the Persian clan chiefs.

What is certain, however, is that on September 29, 522 BC, a man calling himself Bardiya was in Nisaea, in a fort named Sikyavautish—and that it was there that Darius finally tracked him down.

the only uncreated god.

“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.”

Darius was surely protesting too much. But as a regicide and usurper, he had little choice.

the twin peaks of Bisitun, “the place of the gods,” the most sacred mountain in the whole Zagros range.

Provincial though Akkad had long become, its ancient grandeur lost to the wind, it had once been the seat of a global monarchy—for it was in Akkad, back in the 2200s BC, that the concept of world conquest had first been conceived.

menacing venerability,

Not content with hero-worshipping Sargon, he had also extolled the kings of Assyria, naming them his “royal ancestors”5 and adopting their ancient titles. This, in a city which one Assyrian king had sought to obliterate from the face of the earth, had been tactless, to say the least.

The priests of Marduk, confirmed in both their primacy and in their extensive property-holdings across Mesopotamia,

beleaguered as he was, his preference was for carefully targeted acts of savagery and retribution.

Among these was the already twice-widowed Atossa, who now, for the first time, became the queen of a man who was not her brother.

what an inner circle of courtiers and clan chiefs might know, but what the empire—and posterity—might be made to understand.

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.

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.

And there was no one left undiminished.

once, in the earliest years of their history, the Spartans had indeed been notorious for their materialism and greed.

an agglomeration of four villages, founded on what had previously been an almost virgin site.

Revolution, as they were the first people in history to discover, could best be buttressed if it was transfigured into myth.

The Messenians, laboring “like asses suffering under heavy loads,”20 found themselves having to shoulder the full weight of Spartan greatness.

the Argives had not merely countered the first assault upon their territory by the Spartans’ new citizen army, but annihilated it.

For the Spartans, in their concern to mold the perfect citizen, had developed a truly bizarre and radical notion: the world’s first universal, state-run education system.

Egalitarian though the Lycurgan ideal was, it did not foster any notions of equality.

It was evident to Solon that the two great crises facing Athens, agrarian and military, both sprang from the same root: rural impoverishment was enfeebling the reserves of Attic manpower; farmers were sinking ever deeper into serfdom.

Slaves from the steppes of Scythia, a savage wilderness far to the north of Greece, appeared suddenly on patrol in the streets, an alarming sight for any citizen, armed as the police squads were with bows and arrows, and wearing outlandish pointed caps.

Now that the tyranny itself was gone, it was difficult to say where precisely power resided.

what was a gift of earth and water? A gesture—nothing more. Or so, at any rate, it pleased the Athenians to assume.

This interminable feuding, which had helped immensely when it came to conquering them, also made them a uniquely wearisome people to rule.

To such a philosopher, the belief that any profounder order might lie behind it was merely the stupidest pretension. “All things are constituted from fire and all things will melt back into fire.”7 Not much for a propagandist at the satrapal court to work with there.

Having defied the orders of Darius’ appointed satrap, and ousted the regimes he had imposed, they had effectively chosen to declare war on the King of Kings. In the first giddy flush of their liberty, this seemed barely to concern most of them.

War fever, as Aristagoras jovially pointed out, was an intoxication to which democracies appeared peculiarly prone. After all, “where he had failed with Cleomenes, a single individual, he had now succeeded with the Athenians, an assembly of thirty thousand.

Most ominously, as they had found out for themselves, the Ionian hoplites simply had no answer to the range and speed of the Persian cavalry—so much so that by the summer of 497 BC, barely two years into the revolt, the rebels had all but been swept into the sea.

far from welcoming their landlord, they opted instead to make their own bid for freedom, and knifed him dead.

Still the Ionian fleet, moored along the islands off embattled Miletus, held to its position, more than 350 battleships, a fearsome number, save that as they rotted in the storms of winter and steamed in the summer heat they began to reek of dread and desperation, a stench that hung menacingly in the air, and reached as far as a fretful Athens.

Guided in her policy as she was by landowners, instinctive lubbers with their roots in the soil, Athens had never thought to build herself a navy.

when I have not yet made anyone jealous?”

keen to make friends and influence people, he set up as an attorney, the first candidate ever in a democracy to rehearse for public life by practicing the law.

Artaphernes, taking possession of the city, had wreaked upon it a terrible, almost Assyrian, revenge. The jewel of the Aegean, once the favored ally of the Persian king, had been given over completely to fire. Her men had been slaughtered, her women raped, her sons castrated, her daughters enslaved.