Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (5 page)

ing principle of righteousness and justice. Promiscuous in their spon-

sorship of foreign gods they might have been, yet they knew in their

hearts—as lesser peoples did not—that without such a principle, the

universe would be undone and lost to perpetual night. This was why,

so they believed, when Ahura Mazda, the greatest of all the gods, had

summoned creation into being at the beginning of time, he had en-

gendered Arta, who was Truth, to give form and order to the cosmos.

Nevertheless, chaos had never ceased to threaten the world with ruin,

for just as fire cannot burn without the accompaniment of smoke,

so Arta, the Persians knew, was inevitably shadowed by Drauga, the

Lie. These two principles—the one embodying perfection, the other

falsehood —were coiled, so the Persians believed, in a conflict that was

ultimately as ancient as time. What should responsible mortals do,

then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie,

Light against Darkness, lest the universe itself totter and fall?

This was a question that, in 522, would prove to have implications far

beyond the dimensions of priestcraft or theodicy, for it had come to af-

fect the very future of the Persian monarchy itself. First Cambyses, the

eldest son and heir of Cyrus and the king who had finally succeeded in

conquering Egypt, died in mysterious circumstances on the highroad

From Persia with Love 17

back from the Nile. Then, in the early autumn, his brother, the new

king, Bardiya, was ambushed and hacked down amid the mountains of

western Iran. Taking his place on the blood-spattered throne was his

assassin, a man blatantly guilty of usurpation, and yet Darius I, with

a display of nerve so breathtaking that it served to mark him out as a

politician of quite spectacular creativity and ruthlessness, claimed that

it was Bardiya and not himself who had been the fraud, the fake, the

liar.10 Everything he had done, he claimed, everything he had achieved,

was due to the favor 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.”11 Darius was protesting too much, of course,

but that was ultimately because, as a regicide, he had very little choice.

For all that he was quick to claim a close kinship to the house of Cyrus,

and to bundle the sisters of Cambyses and Bardiya into his marriage

bed, his dynastic claim to the throne was in reality so tenuous that he

could hardly rely on it to justify his coup. Other legitimization had to

be concocted, and fast. This was why, far more than Cyrus or his sons

had ever felt the need to do, Darius insisted on his role as the chosen

one of Ahura Mazda: as the standard-bearer of the Truth.

This seamless identification of his own rule with that of a univer-

sal god was to prove a development full of moment for the future.

Usurpers had been claiming divine sanction for their actions since time

immemorial, but never one such as Ahura Mazda could provide. Tram-

pling down his enemies, Darius was not only securing his own rule but

also, and with fateful consequences, setting his empire on a potent new

footing. At Bisitun, a mountain that rose a few miles from the scene of

Bardiya’s assassination, the new king commanded his achievements to

be recorded on the rock face directly above the main road; the result-

ing inscription was to prove a radical and telling departure from the

norms of Near Eastern self-promotion. When the Assyrian kings had

portrayed themselves subduing their foes, they had done so in the most

extravagant and blood-bespattered detail, amid the charging of shock

troops, the advance of siege engines, the trudging into exile of the de-

feated. No such specifics were recorded at Bisitun. What mattered to

Darius was not the battle but that the battle had been won, not the

bloodshed but that the blood had dried, and a new and universal era

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of peace had dawned. History, so Darius was proclaiming, had in effect

been brought to a close. The Persians’ empire was both its end and its

summation, for what else could a dominion be that contained within it

all the limits of the horizon, if not the bulwark of a truly cosmic order?

Such a monarchy, now that the new king had succeeded in redeeming

it from the Lie, might surely be expected to endure for all eternity: infi-

nite, unshakable, the watchtower of the Truth.

Here, in Darius’s vision of empire as a fusion of cosmic, moral, and

political order, was a formulation that was destined to prove stunningly

fruitful. Significant as the bloody practicalities of imperial rule were to

the new king, so also was their shadow, his sacral vision of a universal

state, one in which al his vast dominion had been imposed for the con-

quered’s good. The covenant embodied by Persian rule was henceforth

to be made clear in every manifestation of royal power, whether palaces

or progresses or plans for making war: harmony in exchange for humil-

ity, protection for abasement, the blessings of a new world order for obe-

dience. This was, of course, in comparison to the propaganda of Assyria

a prescription notably lacking in a relish for slaughter, but it did serve

very effectively to justify global conquest without limit. After al , if it was

the destiny of the King of Kings to bring peace to a bleeding world, then

what were those who defied him to be ranked as if not the agents of

anarchy and darkness, of an axis of evil? Tools of Drauga, they menaced

not merely Persian power but also the cosmic order that it mirrored.

No wonder, then, that it had ended up an invincible conviction of im-

perial propagandists that there was no stronghold of Drauga so remote

that it might not ultimately be purged and redeemed. The world needed

to be made safe for the Truth. Such was the Persian mission. In 518, gaz-

ing eastward, Darius duly dispatched a naval squadron to reconnoiter the

mysterious lands along the Indus. Invasion swiftly fol owed; the Punjab

was subdued; a tribute of gold dust, elephants, and similar wonders was

imposed. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the empire, in the distant

west, a Persian battle fleet had begun to cruise the waters of the Aegean.

In 517 Samos was conquered and annexed.12 Neighboring islands, anx-

ious to forestal the Persian fleet, began to contemplate making a formal

submission to the ambassadors of the Great King. Westward as wel as

eastward, it seemed, the course of empire was taking its way.

From Persia with Love 19

And yet, unsuspected though it might be back in the cockpit of Per-

sian power, there was trouble brewing in the region—and not merely

in Ionia but beyond the Aegean as well, in Greece. Here, in a land that

to the sophisticated agents of a global monarchy could hardly help but

appear an impoverished backwater, the quarrelsome and chauvinist

character of Ionian public life found itself reflected in a whole mul-

titude of fractious polities. Greece itself was little more than a geo-

graphic expression: not a country at all but a patchwork of city-states.

True, the Greeks regarded themselves as a single people, united by

language, religion, and custom; but as in Ionia, so in the motherland:

what the various cities often seemed to have most in common was

an addiction to fighting one another. Nevertheless, the same restless

propensity for pushing at boundaries that in Ionia was feeding into a

momentous intellectual revolution had not been without effect on the

states of the mainland as well. Unlike the peoples of the Near East,

the Greeks lacked viable models of bureaucracy or centralization to

draw on. In their search for
eunomia
—“good governance”—they were,

in a sense, on their own. Racked by chronic social tensions, they were

nevertheless not entirely oblivious to the freedom that this gave them:

to experiment, to innovate, to forge their own distinctive paths. “Better

a tiny city perched on a rock,” it might even be argued, “so long as it

is well governed, than all the splendours of foolish Nineveh.”13 Ludi-

crous though such a claim would undoubtedly have appeared to the

Persians, those masters of a global empire, there were many Greeks

who were fiercely proud of their small-town eccentricities. Over the

years, repeated political and social upheaval had served to set many

cities on paths that were distinctively their own. To a degree unappreci-

ated by the Persians, who were naturally dismissive of lesser breeds in

a way that only the representatives of a superpower can be, the Greeks

represented a potentially ominous roadblock on the path to continued

expansion, for they were not a people to be broken easily to the Great

King’s formula for conquest. They were, rather, a people who, by the

standards of the Near Eastern norm, were unsettlingly different.

And some were more different than others. In Sparta, for instance,

the dominant city of the Peloponnese, a people who had once been no-

torious for the toxic quality of their class hatreds had metamorphosed

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into
homoioi
: those who were the same. Merciless and universal disci-

pline had served to teach every Spartan, from the moment of his birth,

that conformity was all. The citizen would grow up to assume his place

in society, the warrior would assume his place in a line of battle. There

he would be obliged to remain for the length of his life, “his feet set

firmly apart, biting on his lip, taking a stand against his foe,”14 with only

death to redeem him from his duty. No longer, as they had originally

done, did the Spartans rank as predators on their own kind, rich upon

poor; rather, they had become hunters in a single deadly pack. For their

near neighbors in particular, the consequences of this transformation

had been devastating. The citizens of one state, Messenia, had been

reduced to a condition of brutalized serfdom, those of others in the

Peloponnese to one of political subordination. Across the entire Greek

world the Spartans had won for themselves a reputation as the fore-

most warriors in the world. Some Greeks, rather than face the wolf-

lords of the Peloponnese on the field of battle, had been known to run

away in sheer terror.

And now, in a city that had once been a byword for parochialism

and backwardness, an even more far-reaching revolution was stirring.

Athens was potentially Sparta’s only rival as the dominant power in

Greece, for the city was the mistress of a hinterland, Attica, that was by

Greek standards immense and that, unlike Sparta, had not been seized

from other Greeks. Nevertheless, throughout Athens’s history, the city

had consistently punched below its weight, and by the mid-sixth cen-

tury the Athenian people had grown ever more resentful of their own

impotence. Crisis had bred reform, reform had bred crisis. Here were

the birth pangs, so it was to prove, of a radical and startling new or-

der. For the aristocracy, even as it continued to negotiate the swirl of

its own endless rivalries, had found itself increasingly conscious of a

new and unsettling cross-current, as ambitious power players began to

make play with the support of the
demos
, “the people.” In 546, one of

these, a successful general by the name of Pisistratus, had succeeded

in establishing himself as the city’s undisputed strongman—a “tyrant.”

The word, to the Greeks, did not remotely have the bloodstained con-

notations that it has for us, for a
tyrannos
, almost by definition, had

to have the popular touch. Without it, he could hardly hope to cling

From Persia with Love 21

to power for long, and so it was that Pisistratus and his heirs would

consistently aim to dazzle the
demos
with swagger and imposing public

works. Yet increasingly, the Athenians wanted more, and there were

certain aristocrats, rivals of the Pisistratids, who found themselves so

resentful of their own exclusion from the rule of their city that they

were prepared to take the ultimate sanction and see power handed over

to the people. In 507 revolution broke out. Hippias, the son of Pisistra-

tus, was sent into exile.
Isonomia
—“equality,” equality before the law,

equality of participation in the running of the state—was installed as

the Athenian ideal. A great and noble experiment was embarked upon:

a state in which, for the first time in Attic history, a citizen could feel

himself both engaged and in control, a state, perhaps, that might in-

deed be worth fighting for.

And that, for the upper-class sponsors of their city’s revolution, was

precisely the point. Such men were no giddy visionaries but rather

hard-nosed pragmatists whose goal, quite simply, was to profit as Athe-

nian aristocrats by making their city strong. They had calculated that

a people no longer divided among themselves might at last be able to