Persian Fire

1

THE KHORASAN HIGHWAY

Woe to the Bloody City

The gods, having scorned to mold a world that was level, had preferred instead to divide it into two. So it seemed to those who lived in the Zagros, the great chain of peaks which separates the Fertile Crescent from the upland plateau of Iran. Yet these mountains, though savage, were not impassable. One road did snake across them: the most famous in the world, the Khorasan Highway, which led from the limits of the East to the West, and joined the rising to the setting of the sun. In places, as it climbed through the Zagros Mountains, winding along river beds, or threading between jagged pinnacles and ravines, it might be little more than a footpath—but even that, to those who used it, was a miracle enough. Only a beneficent deity, it was assumed, could ever have fashioned such a wonder. Who, and when, no one really knew for sure,*³ but it was certainly very ancient—perhaps, some said, as old as time itself. Over the millennia, the Khorasan Highway had been followed by any number of travelers: nomads, caravans—and the armies of conquering kings.

One empire, in particular, for centuries synonymous with cruel and remorseless invincibility, had sent repeated expeditions into the mountains, dyeing the peaks, in its own ferocious vaunt, “like wool, crimson with blood.”¹ The Assyrians, inhabitants of what is now northern Iraq, were city-dwellers, a people of the flat, alluvial plains; but to their kings, warlords who had spread terror and extermination as far as Egypt, the Zagros was less a barrier than a challenge. Themselves the patrons of a proud and brilliant civilization, sumptuous with palaces, gardens and canals, the kings of Assyria had always seen it as their duty to flatten resistance in the wilds beyond their frontiers. This, the wilds being what they were, had proved a calling without limit. Not even with their incomparable war machine could the Assyrians pacify all the mountain tribes—for there were some living in the Zagros who clung to the peaks like birds, or lurked in the depths of thick forests, so backward that they subsisted entirely on acorns, savages hardly worthy of the royal attention. These too, however, with regular incursions, could be taught to dread the name of Assyria, and provide her with the human plunder on which her greatness had come increasingly to depend. Again and again, punitive expeditions would return from the mountains to their native plains, to the sacred cities of Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh, while in their wake, naked and tethered, followed stumbling lines of captives. Increasingly, the Assyrians had fallen into the habit of moving entire populations, shunting them around their empire, transplanting one defeated enemy into the lands of another, there to live in the houses of the similarly transported, to clear weeds from the rubble, or cultivate the abandoned, smoke-blackened fields.

These tactics had in the end had due effect. By the late eighth century BC, the reaches of the Khorasan Highway had been formally absorbed into the empire and placed under the rule of an Assyrian governor. “Grovelling they came to me, for the protection of their lives,” boasted Assyria’s greatest king, Sargon II. “Knowing that otherwise I would destroy their walls, they fell and kissed my feet.”²

Not that captives were the only source of wealth to be found in the Zagros. Wild and forested though the mountains were, and often bitter the climate, the valleys were famous for their clover-rich pasture. Over the centuries, and in increasing numbers, these had been attracting tribes who called themselves “Arya”—“Aryans”: horse-taming nomads from the plateau to the east.³ Even once settled, these immigrants had preserved many of their ancestors’ instincts, filling the valleys of their new homeland with great herds of long-horned cattle, and preferring, wherever possible, to live in the saddle. The Assyrians, no horse-breeders themselves, would speak in wondering terms of the stud farms of the Zagros, with their “numberless steeds.”⁴ It was relatively easy for the Assyrian army to cherry-pick these as tribute, for the finest horses, by universal consent, were those bred by the Medes, a loose confederation of Aryan tribes settled conveniently along the Khorasan Highway itself. No wonder the Assyrians came to prize the region. Their mastery of Media,⁵ as well as enabling them to control the world’s most important trade route, permitted their armies to develop a new and lethal quality of speed. By the eighth century BC, cavalry had become vital to the ability of Assyria to maintain her military supremacy. The tribute of horses from the mountains had become the lifeblood of her greatness. The richest silver mine could not have been more precious to her than the stud farms of the Zagros.

And yet, in Assyria’s supremacy lay the seeds of its own downfall. The mountains were a mishmash of different peoples, Aryans and aboriginals alike, with even the Medes themselves ruled by a quarrelsome multitude of petty chieftains. Foreign occupation, however, by imposing a unitary authority upon the region, had begun to encourage the fractious tribes to cohere. By the 670s BC, menaced by the shadowy leader of a formal Median union, the Assyrians’ hold on the Zagros started to slip alarmingly. Tribute dried up as its collection became ever more challenging. Open revolts blazed and spread. Over the following decades, the scribes of the Assyrian kings, employed to keep a record of the victories of their masters, ceased to make mention of Media at all.

This silence veiled an ominous development. In 615 BC, a king who claimed sovereignty over all the clan chiefs of the Medes, Cyaxares by name, joined an alliance of the empire’s other rebellious subjects and led his troops from their fastnesses against the Assyrians’ eastern flank. The effect of this sudden eruption of the mountain men was devastating. After only three years of campaigning, the inconceivable occurred: Nineveh, greatest of all the strongholds of Assyrian might, was stormed and razed. To the amazement—and joy—of the empire’s subject peoples, “the bloody city” was pulverized beneath the hooves of the Median cavalry. “Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end—they stumble over the bodies!”⁶

Four years later, and all traces of the Assyrian colossus, which for so long had kept the Near East in its shadow, lay obliterated. To the victors, naturally, had fallen the spoils. Media, precipitately elevated to the rank of great power, seized a huge northern swath of the defeated empire. Her kings, no longer small-time chieftains, could now indulge themselves in the occupations proper to their newly won status—throwing their weight around and scrapping with other great powers. In 610 BC, the Medes swept into northern Syria, burning and looting as they went. In 585, they went to war with the Lydians, a people based in the west of what is now Turkey, and only a solar eclipse, manifesting itself over the battlefield, finally persuaded the two sides to draw back. By the terms of a hurriedly patched-up treaty, the Halys, a river flowing midway between Media and Lydia, was established as the boundary between the rival empires, and for the next thirty years, throughout the Near East, peace, and the balance of power, were maintained.⁷

Not that the new king of Media, Astyages, had any intention of hanging up his saddle. Undistracted now by war with other major empires, he turned his attention instead to the wilds north and east of his kingdom, far distant from the cockpit of the Fertile Crescent. Leading an expedition into the badlands of Armenia and what is now Azerbaijan, he was following in the footsteps of the Assyrian kings, teaching the savages beyond his frontiers to fear his royal name.⁸ In other ways, too, the traditions of the great monarchies of the Near East, so alien to those of his own people, still semi-tribal and nomadic as they were, appear to have whetted the ambitions of the Median king. After all, a ruler of Astyages’ stature, no less powerful than the King of Lydia or the Pharaoh of Egypt, could hardly be expected to rule his empire from a tent. What the monarchs of more ancient lands had always taken for granted—a palace, a treasury, a mighty capital—Astyages, naturally, had to have as well: proofs of his magnificence raised in gold and blocks of stone.

Travelers who made the final ascent through the mountains along the Khorasan Highway would see, guarding the approaches to the Iranian plateau ahead of them, a vision which could have been conjured from some fabulous epic: a palace set within seven gleaming walls, each one painted a different color, and on the two innermost circuits, bolted to their battlements, plates of silver and gold. This was Ecbatana, stronghold of the kings of Media, and already, barely a century after its foundation, the crossroads of the world.⁹ Commanding the trade of East and West, it also opened up to its master the whole range of the Zagros, and beyond. Here, for the Median clan chiefs, in particular, was a thoroughly alarming development. The surest guarantee of their freedom from royal meddling, and of the continued factionalism of the kingdom itself, had always been the inaccessibility of their private fiefdoms—but increasingly they found themselves subordinated to the reach of Astyages’ court. At one time, before the building of the polychrome palace walls, Ecbatana had been an open field, a free meeting place for the tribes, a function preserved in the meaning of its name: “assembly point.” But now those days were gone, and the Medes, who had fought so long to liberate themselves from the despots of Nineveh, found themselves the subjects of a despot nearer to home.

No wonder that later generations would preserve a memory of Astyages as an ogre. No wonder, either, that when they sought to explain their loss of freedom, the Medes would identify Ecbatana as both a symbol of their slavery, and a cause.¹⁰

King of the World

Astyages, it was said, even amid all the proofs of his greatness, was haunted by prophecies of doom: strange dreams tormented him, warning him of his downfall and the ruin of his kingdom. Such was the value ascribed by the Medes to visions of this kind that a whole class, the Magi, existed to divine what their meaning might be. Skilled in all the arts of keeping darkness at bay, these ritual experts provided vital reassurance to their countrymen, for it was a principle of the Medes, a devout and ethical people, that there was shadow lurking beyond even the brightest light. All the world, it seemed to the Magi, bore witness to this truth. A fire might be tended so that it burned eternally, but there was nowhere, not beside the coolest spring, nor even on the highest mountain peak, where the purity of its flame might not be menaced by pollution. Creation bred darkness as well as the daylight. Scorpions and spiders, lizards, snakes and ants, all crept and seethed, the visible excrescences of a universal shadow. Just as it was the duty of a Magus to kill such creatures wherever he found them, so shadows had to be guarded against when they darkened people’s dreams—and especially the nightmares of a king. “For they say that the air is full of spectres, which flow by exhalation, and penetrate into the sight of those with piercing vision.”¹¹ Greatness, like fire, had to be tended with care.

That a kingdom as powerful as Media, less than a century after its first rise to independence and greatness, might once again be prostrated and subjected to foreign domination must, to many, have seemed implausible. But this, as the Medes themselves had good cause to know, had always been the baneful rhythm of the region’s power play: great empires rising, great empires falling. No one kingdom, not even Assyria, had ever crushed all who might wish to see it destroyed. In the Near East, predators lurked everywhere, sniffing the air for weakness, awaiting their opportunity to strike. Ancient states would vanish, new ones take their place, and the chroniclers, in recording the ruin of celebrated kingdoms, might find themselves describing strange and previously unknown peoples.

Many of these, just like the Medes themselves, were Aryans—nomads who had left little trace of their migrations upon the records of the time. In 843 BC, for instance, the Assyrians had campaigned in the mountains north of their kingdom against a tribe they called the “Parsua”; two centuries later, a people with a very similar name had established themselves far to the south, on the ruins of the venerable kingdom of Anshan, between the lower reaches of the Zagros and the sweltering coastlands of the Gulf. No chronicler, however, could know for sure if they were one and the same.¹² Only by putting down roots, and by absorbing something of the culture of the people they had displaced, had the newcomers finally been able to intrude upon the consciousness of their more sedentary neighbors. These, reluctant to change the habit of centuries, had continued to refer to the region as they had always done; but the invaders, when they spoke of their new homeland, had naturally preferred to call it after themselves. So it was that what had once been Anshan came gradually to be known by a quite different name: Paarsa, Persia, the land of the Persians.¹³

In 559 BC, while Astyages still ruled in Media, a young man came to the throne of this upstart kingdom. His name was Cyrus, and his attributes included a hook nose, immense ambition and quite limitless ability. From even before his birth, it appeared, he had been marked out for greatness; for it was he—if the stories are to be believed—who had been prophesied as the bane of Median greatness. Astyages was supposed to have seen it all in a dream: a vision of his daughter, Mandane, urinating, the golden stream flowing without cease, until at last the whole of Media had been drowned. When the king had reported this the next morning, his Magian dream-readers had turned pale and warned him that any son of Mandane would be destined to imperil the Median throne. Hurriedly, Astyages had married off his daughter to a vassal, a Persian, the prince of a backward and inconsequential kingdom, hoping in that way to defeat the omen’s malice. But after Mandane had fallen pregnant, Astyages had dreamed a second time: now he saw a vine emerging from between his daughter’s legs, nor did it stop growing until all Asia was in its shade. Panic-stricken, Astyages had waited for his grandson to be born, and then immediately given orders that the boy be put to death. As invariably happens in such stories, the orders had been defied. The baby had been abandoned on a mountainside, to be discovered and brought up by a shepherd; or perhaps, some said, a bandit; or maybe even a bitch, her teats conveniently swollen with milk. Whatever its precise details, the miraculous nature of such an upbringing had clearly betokened a godlike future for the foundling—and so, of course, it had proved. Cyrus had survived and prospered. Once he had grown to a splendid manhood, his natural nobility of character had served to win him the Persian throne. Thus it was that all the wiles of Astyages had been foiled—and the empire of the Medes been doomed.

Or so the legends had it. It is the nature of great men to attract tall stories, and it may be that the early proofs of Cyrus’ destiny were not quite so manifest as the Persians would later claim.¹⁴ Even so—and irrespective of whether there had truly been prophecies—his potential was evidently sufficient to alarm Astyages: for the Median king, overlord of the Zagros, and wary of high-flying vassals, decided, after six years of watching his grandson on the Persian throne, that Cyrus was altogether too able and dangerous to be left in place for long. Accordingly, in 553 BC, he mustered his fearsome horsemen and struck south. Heavily outnumbered, the Persians resisted ferociously. When it appeared that surrender was imminent, even their women took to the battlefield, to encourage Cyrus and his warriors to fight on. For three years, the conflict convulsed the Zagros—and then, suddenly, in 550 BC, it was over. Even the gods, it appeared, were taken by surprise. They began appearing in the dreams of neighboring kings to broadcast the startling news. “Cyrus scattered the large armies of the Medes with his small army. And he captured Astyages, King of the Medes. And he took him to his country as captive.”¹⁵ Not since the downfall of Assyria had there been an upset on such a scale.

How had it come about? Yes, Cyrus had proved himself a steely and indomitable opponent. As had his Persian subjects, a people so toughened by poverty that they had uncomplainingly endured the sternest hardships—even, notoriously, to the extent of wearing leather trousers. Yet Astyages, with all the resources of a mighty empire behind him, would surely still have triumphed—had he not been grievously stabbed in the back. The story of his betrayal was a strange one—and, as the years passed, the retellings of it grew ever more fantastical and grotesque. The bare essentials were not in doubt. Harpagus, commander of the Median army, and most prominent of the clan chiefs, had deserted to Cyrus, leading a rebellion in mid-battle, and taking Astyages captive. But why such treachery? Because—so the story went—Harpagus, a close kinsman of Astyages, had simultaneously been bound by the most terrible ties of obligation to the King of Persia. It was Harpagus, according to the Medes, who had been charged with the murder of the infant Cyrus, a task which—dissembling—he had claimed to have carried out. Years later, when the truth had at last emerged, Astyages was rumored to have wreaked a bloody revenge, butchering Harpagus’ son, jointing the corpse, and then serving it dressed as mutton to the unsuspecting father. Harpagus himself, having consumed his own child, had swallowed the insult too, and remained a loyal, if chastened, servant of his king. Or so he had pretended. His act had certainly been convincing, for when the war against the Persians broke out, Astyages had appointed Harpagus to the supreme command. Not the cleverest piece of man-management, perhaps—and, in reality, so foolish as to be palpably absurd.

So how had this tall story ever come to be believed? Maybe—somewhere within the shadow play of implausibility and rumor—a faint hint of the truth could still be glimpsed? The family relationship between Astyages and Cyrus had mirrored the close ties, of culture as well as blood, which had always bound the Persians to the Medes. Both peoples, after all, were Aryan; and, to an Aryan, it was only the “anairya”—the non-Aryan—who was foreign. Indeed, any of Astyages’ courtiers who were suffering from nostalgia had only to look south for a glimpse of the good old days. Like their Median cousins, the Persians were at heart a nomadic people, and their country, “rich with good horses, rich with good men,”¹⁶ had remained as much a confederation of different clans as a state. “King of Anshan” though he was, Cyrus had also claimed his throne by virtue of his status as his people’s greatest chieftain—for he was head of the Achaemenids, the leading family of the Pasargadae, the leading Persian tribe. Master both of the stiff rituals of a Near Eastern court and of assemblies of wild horsemen wheeling beneath the open sky, of ancient cities and of the hills and plains, of the Persians’ future and of the memories and customs of their past, Cyrus was adept at playing all these roles, and more. As a result, Persia had largely avoided the tensions that afflicted Media: between a king impatient with the traditional tribal structures of his people and a nobility still defined by them. The Median clan chiefs, suffering from the authoritarian ambitions of Astyages, had taken note. Over time, the contrast between their own king and Cyrus must have struck them as ever more pronounced. It was almost certainly this which had persuaded Harpagus to take his fateful step. “So it was that the Persians, who had once been the slaves of the Medes, became their masters,”¹⁷ and Cyrus, marching into Ecbatana, reaped the due rewards of his forbearance, acuity and charm.

Nor, even after this first great victory, did the subtlety of his balancing act fail. The kings of Assyria, honing the traditional rights of conquest to a peak of savagery, had prescribed unspeakable cruelties for defeated enemies, but Cyrus, prompted by calculation and—no doubt—by temperament as well, preferred the course of mercy. Having lured important swaths of the Median aristocracy into his camp, he resisted the temptation to treat their countrymen as slaves. Even Astyages, rather than being flayed, fed to animals or impaled, was pensioned off into princely retirement. True, the treasury was emptied and its contents carted away to Anshan, but Ecbatana was otherwise spared the fate of Nineveh. Cyrus had no intention of destroying the most strategically sited city in the Zagros. The most pleasant, too—for if, in winter, the cold was savage, with blizzards blocking off the passes, in summer, while the lowlands of Persia burned, Ecbatana was a paradise of greenness, the mountain peaks behind it still capped with cooling snow, the slopes below the walls terraced with orchards and gardens, the air bright and crystal clear. Not only did the city remain the capital of Media, but it became, during the broiling summer months, the effective capital of Cyrus’ whole empire. No wonder that the Medes were able to feel, if not exactly the equals of their conquerors, then at least associates in the great adventure of their new king’s reign.

And that adventure, as events were soon exhilaratingly to prove, had only just begun. The downfall of a king as great as Astyages had sent shock waves throughout the whole Near East. Not only the Median Empire but the decades-old international status quo had been left in rubble. Suddenly, it seemed, there was everything to play for, and neighboring great powers, still barely able to take the Persians seriously, began to wonder what pickings might be on offer for themselves. In 547 BC, Croesus, the King of Lydia, led a huge army over the River Halys to find out. Cyrus, having descended from the Zagros, advanced hurriedly to meet him, the ruined cities of Assyria standing sentinel as he passed by, nothing now but dust-blown and jumbled heaps of mud, mute witnesses to the precariousness of power. Yet such a lesson might serve an ambitious man as inspiration as well as warning, and Cyrus, even though it was by now late in the campaigning season, pressed on urgently, eager to engage Croesus. As before, when the Lydians had met with the Medes, an indecisive battle was fought; but this time there was no eclipse, and no end to the war. Instead, with winter drawing on, Croesus withdrew to his capital, Sardis, never imagining that Cyrus would dare to follow him, for the city was so far to the west that the Aegean lay only three days’ journey beyond it—a tremendous distance from the Median frontier. But the Persians did not retreat. Instead, braving the bitter cold, they shadowed Croesus, never alerting him to their presence, allowing him time to dismiss his allies, lurking and waiting for his conscripts to melt away. Then, with Sardis denuded, Cyrus struck. Frantically, Croesus cobbled together what few troops remained. A desperate battle, with the Lydians staking everything on a final cavalry charge—and then the storming of Sardis, and the capture of Croesus himself. Far off in the Fertile Crescent, the details were recorded with a terseness that hardly hinted at their seismic effect: “[Cyrus] defeated the King [of Lydia], seized his possessions, and stationed his own garrison there.”¹⁸ Over the Lydian Empire itself, the news of Croesus’ downfall burst with such a thunderclap that the priestess of one temple was said to have sprouted a beard from the shock. As well she might have done, for in the space of just six years, the Persians, so small in numbers, once so backward and obscure, had made their kingdom the greatest power in the world.

Not that the victory had been theirs alone. The Median cavalry, perfectly equipped for a winter campaign with their sheepskin coats and their tough mountain horses, had more than played their part. Median generals, too. Of all the advice given to Cyrus during the campaign, the best had come from Harpagus, who had suggested, just before the final Lydian cavalry charge, that the baggage camels be placed at the forefront of the Persian battle line. Cyrus had duly given the order, the Lydians’ horses, startled by the unfamiliar stench, had swerved and bolted, and the battle had been won. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that Cyrus, buoyed by this victory, sought to conciliate the Lydians just as he had previously wooed the Medes, anairya though his new subjects were. Croesus, like Astyages, was spared execution, and welcomed into his conqueror’s entourage; his fabulously well-stocked treasury was kept at Sardis; even the gathering of tribute was entrusted to native grandees. The Lydians, however, startled by this magnanimity, interpreted it as weakness; and no sooner had Cyrus left for Ecbatana than the very aristocrats whom he had most trusted, those in charge of the treasury, were rising in revolt. It was a fatal miscalculation. Cyrus, menaced by what he justly regarded as the basest treachery and ingratitude, responded with furious expedition. Fresh troops, with fresh orders, were sent speeding from Ecbatana. There was to be no clemency now. 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.

Yet Cyrus, even as he showed his capacity for repression, had not abandoned the fundamentals of his imperial policy. The Medes, if no longer the Lydians, were still to be offered a form of partnership in his dazzling new order. Accordingly, Harpagus, first and most valued of all Cyrus’ foreign servants, was sent west, to take command of the Persian forces. Reaping opportunities that would never have come his way had he remained loyal to Astyages, the clan chief from the Zagros arrived in Lydia sporting the splendid title of “Generalissimo of the Sea.”¹⁹ Living up to this office with savage efficiency, he had no sooner finished off the Lydians than he was looking to plant his standards along the extremities of Asia, right on the shore of the “bitter sea,”²⁰ the Aegean itself. There, dotted along the coastline, and enticingly prosperous, were the gleaming cities of a people known to the Persians as the “Yauna”—the Ionians.*⁴ Emigrants centuries previously from Greece, the men of Ionia remained as determinedly and defiantly Greek as any of their countrymen back in the motherland across the Aegean. Too quarrelsome to present a united front, they certainly proved easy meat for Harpagus. City by city, he brutally subdued them all. Indeed, so menacing was his reputation that many Ionians, rather than submit to Persian rule, opted for flight across the sea, emigrating to Sicily or the Italian peninsula. One city, Phocaea, evacuated its entire population, “women, children, moveable property, everything, in fact . . . leaving the Persians to take possession of nothing but an empty shell.”²¹ A dark shadow had been cast over the Ionian imagination, and the memory of Harpagus’ coming would long serve to blacken even the most intimate moments of joy:

In winter, as you lie on a soft couch by the fire,

Full of good food, munching on nuts and drinking sweet wine,

Then you must ask questions such as these:

“Where do you come from? Tell me, what is your age?

How old were you when the Mede came?”²²

Not, it might be noted, “How old were you when the Persian came?”—for such was the impact of Harpagus upon the Ionians that it left them perplexed, even as they submitted to their new masters, as to who precisely these were. Ever after, when referring to the Persians, the Greeks would invariably say, “the Medes.” Such confusion was hardly surprising. What were the ethnic complexities of the Zagros to a people so far distant from them? 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. Never before had one man’s reach extended quite so far. Cyrus, however, far from glorying in his achievements, remained restless and anxious for more. For all the scale of his victories in Lydia, he dreaded the danger that he imagined lurking in his rear. Back from Sardis, he turned his gaze toward the eastern horizon. Ignore what lay beyond that and even the most brilliant conqueror might find that his greatness had been raised on shifting sand. No kingdom could reckon itself wholly secure while it still feared the depredations of migrant tribes and the thunder of hoofbeats across the plains of Iran. Who better to appreciate that than a Persian, himself a descendant of nomads?

So it was that Cyrus, disdaining to stamp out the revolt in Lydia in person, had instead taken the opposite route from Ecbatana, following the Khorasan Highway as it wound ever east.²³ This, for Persians and Medes alike, was to journey back into their past, toward the legendary homelands of their ancestors, “rich in pastures and waters . . . the abode of cattle,”²⁴ where everything seemed on a more heroic scale, the plains much vaster, the mountains touching the sky. Fighting his way into the uplands, gazing at last toward the Hindu Kush, Cyrus would have been able to watch the dawning of the sun over the peaks of Central Asia—“the undying, swift-horsed sun; who, foremost in a golden array, takes hold of the beautiful summits, and from them looks over the abode of the Aryans with a beneficent eye.”²⁵ This same “abode of the Aryans,” long after the Persians had emigrated from it, had remained the fiefdom of swaggering noblemen, backward in comparison to their cousins in the Zagros, perhaps, but rich, and hulking, and addicted to war. Once Cyrus had succeeded in forcing their submission, they were to provide him with formidable new resources of manpower and wealth. The badlands would never entirely lose their turbid character, for their new master, chameleon-like as ever, was careful to portray himself as the heir of the region’s traditions, leaving the local noblemen to continue in their rambunctious ways—but in the cause, henceforward, of the Persian king. Loose though it was, the order imposed by Cyrus was subtly calibrated to meet his needs: not only troops and gold, but a buffer zone. The establishment of an immense arc of provinces, stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Aral Sea, served to fence off the approaches to Persia where they had always been most vulnerable, in the northeast, which previously had lain wide open to incursions from the steppes of Central Asia. Gandhara, Bactria and Sogdiana: these lands, once breeding grounds of menace and instability, were now transformed into bulwarks of Persian might.

And bulwarks of much besides. Savages, as all civilized peoples were agreed, belonged exactly where Cyrus was pinning them, in the remote bleakness of the rim of the world. What might happen otherwise was still the stuff of nightmares. 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. There was great alarm, then, when Cyrus, advancing from Sogdiana into what is now Kazakhstan, found himself confronted by these same demons from the Median past, readily distinguishable by their high pointed caps and their alarming facility with axes. A leader of the Saka, captured by Cyrus and treated with notable chivalry, duly submitted to the invaders, and his people, taking service with the Persian king, soon established themselves as the most ferocious of the imperial troops. But this had been only a single tribe. Beyond its homeland lay further plains, bandit-haunted and drear, their immensity mocking all human ambition—even that of the greatest conqueror ever known. How far they stretched no one could say for sure, nor what might be found at their extremities: griffins, some claimed; and tribes of men with goats’ feet; and frozen wastes, where the inhabitants hibernated for six months every year; and beyond them, surrounding the world, the great River Rangha, as wide as the most immense sea.²⁶ Cyrus, crossing the monotony of the steppelands, certainly had no intention of pushing that far; and when at length he found a broad river obstructing his path, he rested on its bank, and there, amid mudflats and the buzzing of mosquitoes, called a halt, at last, to his advance. The river itself, the Jaxartes, was shallow and island-dotted, affording only the barest of natural frontiers; so Cyrus, making good the deficiencies of nature, ordered the construction of seven frontier towns, naming the greatest one after himself—“Cyropolis.”²⁷ Henceforward, like a slave, the featureless savagery of the steppes was to wear the mark of the Persian king.

This branding of his identity upon the land of the Saka proclaimed an imperious dual message. No more would the untamed war-bands beyond the Jaxartes be permitted to raid southward; and no more would those behind it have to fear for their security. Cyrus’ strategy had always been to menace his enemies and to reassure his slaves—and by 540 BC, with the eastern frontier stabilized, he felt ready to put it to its ultimate test. Returning to the Zagros, he fixed his predatory gaze on that supreme goal of every conqueror’s ambition, the wealthy flatlands of what is now southern Iraq, stretching from Assyria to the Persian Gulf, the stage for splendid cities since the very dawn of time. No man could truly be hailed as the master of the world until he had subdued its ancient heartland—as Cyrus, the arriviste, was all too well aware. 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. Cyrus, a man who specialized in overturning hostile preconceptions, chose to meet this new challenge head on. Launching his invasion of enemy territory, he claimed to be defending it; leading an immense army, he affected to be an avatar of peace. And everywhere, strongholds met him with an opening of their gates.

In truth, Persian firepower being what it was, this had been the only sane policy for the defenders to adopt. The one army which sought to defy the invasion had been summarily obliterated; for Cyrus, as he had shown in Lydia, was not averse to the occasional atrocity when he felt that it might serve a salutary purpose. Yet his preference, by and large, was to live up to the high-flying claims of his propaganda. His regime once established, there were no more pogroms. Executions were kept to the barest minimum. His diktats were couched in a moderate and gracious tone. To cities crowded with ancient temples, and scented with incense, Cyrus presented himself as a model of “righteousness and justice,” and his “universal lordship” as a payback from the gods.²⁸ But which gods, precisely? Coolly, Cyrus posed as the favorite of them all. Assorted priesthoods duly scrabbled to hail him as their own, and assorted peoples as the heir to their customs and concerns—the perfect gilding on his mastery of the world. A glorious thing, for the clan chief of the upstart Achaemenids, to be the patron of ancient cities such as Ur and Uruk. Not even in their records, although they reached back to the dawn of time, could be found another man who had risen quite so fast, so far.

To many, inevitably, there appeared something fearsome, even monstrous, about this prodigy. When Cyrus at last fell in battle he was seventy, his appetite for conquest still unassuaged, for his death had come north of the Jaxartes, far beyond the limits he had once set on his own ambitions.²⁹ In her triumph, the queen of the tribe which had killed him was said to have decapitated his corpse, and dropped the head into a blood-filled wineskin, so that the old man’s thirst might glut itself at last. This was to cast Cyrus as a spirit of the kind that haunted the imaginings of the Near East, a demon of the night, eternally hungry for human flesh. Among those who had submitted to him, however, a quite different tradition would be preserved. Cyrus, the man who had convulsed the world, would be remembered with an almost unqualified admiration, for his exceptional nobility of character, and as the architect of a universal peace. For centuries afterward, even among its bitterest enemies, the glow of its founder’s memory would suffuse the empire of the Persians. “He eclipsed all other monarchs, either before him, or since.” Such was the verdict of Xenophon, an Athenian, writing almost two centuries after Cyrus’ death. “No matter whom he conquered, he would inspire in them a deep longing to please him, and to bask in his good opinion. They found themselves longing to be guided by his rulings—his, and no one else’s.”³⁰ An astonishing verdict, it might be thought—and yet Cyrus had indeed seduced as well as forced himself on the world, persuading a host of different peoples that he understood them, respected them and desired their love. No empire had ever before been raised on such foundations. No conqueror had ever before displayed such clemency, such restraint.

This had been the genius of Cyrus—and his reward had been dominion on a scale beyond all dreams.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

He died in the summer of 529 BC. His corpse, redeemed from the tribe that had killed him, was brought back to Persia, where an immense stone tomb stood waiting to receive it. This had been raised, according to legend, on the location of the decisive defeat of Astyages, and was just one of a number of structures which Cyrus had sponsored in the area. Less a city than an assemblage of palaces, pavilions and gardens, the site certainly bore ample witness to the scale of the Persians’ greatness—but it also suggested just how disorientating and precipitous their rise had been. Beyond the masonry, herds of livestock still roamed the bleakness of the open hills and plains. Winds gusting across the featureless landscape coated gilded doorways and columns with dust. Even the palace complex itself, despite being built of stone, conveyed in its layout more than a hint of camps and tents. Not for nothing was the site known as Pasargadae: the name of Cyrus’ tribe. It was hardly a paradox, after all, that a nomad too might have his roots.

Now, with Cyrus dead, maneuverings among the clans and tribes of Persia would affect millions. Could a successor hope to take Cyrus’ place, or was the empire of the Persians, suddenly deprived of its founder’s charisma, doomed to vanish as rapidly as it had emerged? As the chronicles of countless vanished empires bore witness, the death of a king was a moment ripe with peril for even the greatest monarchy. Cyrus, with a dynast’s natural enthusiasm for progeniture, had fathered three daughters and—more significantly—two sons; but this guaranteed nothing. To a great empire as to a nomad’s clan, a superfluity of heirs might prove quite as perilous as none.

Farsighted as ever, though, Cyrus had understood the danger and sought to insure against it, carefully providing for the hopes of both his sons. Before his death, he had appointed the elder, Cambyses, crown prince, and the younger, Bardiya, governor of Bactria. This was the largest and most important of the eastern provinces, and even though denied a kidaris, the fluted tiara of royal power, Bardiya had been exempted from paying tribute, a privilege properly befitting a king. Whether his resentment of his brother had been mollified by such an honor, or whether it had only piqued his taste for royal status, time would have to tell. Either way, due notice had been given to the world of Cyrus’ plans for its future: Cambyses was to sit on the throne of the Persians, and Bardiya was to be his lieutenant. No one else was to have a sniff of power. Just to press this point home, a scandalous match was arranged between Cambyses and his two elder sisters, Atossa and Rhoxsane, a spectacle of incest without precedent in the traditions of Persia, but which set a satisfying block on the ambitions of any rival noble house.³¹ After all, who worthier of Cyrus’ daughters than Cyrus’ son? The bloodline of the great conqueror had become—like a spring watched over by the Magi or the flames of a sacred fire—something precious, to be tended and preserved from all pollution.

Even as Cyrus’ corpse was laid to rest in a sarcophagus of gold, inside a tomb carefully oriented toward the rising sun, amid the prayers and lamentations of its Magian attendants, Cambyses moved to claim his birthright. The monarchy of the world was now his. True, as he took his place upon his father’s throne, a few eyes may have turned toward his brother; but Bardiya, confirmed in the governorship of his great fiefdom in the east, gave no sign of any treacherous intent. Cyrus’ last will and testament proved to have been most cunningly constructed. Both brothers had much to gain by interlocking their interests. It might have been thought that Cambyses would have sought, as his priority, to avenge his father’s death—but that would have required him to lead a massive army into the eastern provinces, and provoke his brother’s open resentment. Equally, it might have been thought that Bardiya, possessed of a menacing power base, would have sought to force further privileges from Cambyses—but that would have been to risk the open fury of the new king. Whether tacitly or not, the two brothers formed a compact. Bardiya was to be left undisturbed in his province, but he would guard his brother’s back;³² 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.

Such a campaign, of course, could not be rushed. The might of the pharaohs may have been much diminished from its ancient splendor, having grown dependent upon the support of shiftless mercenaries, and been leeched of income by over-mighty temple priests, but it still posed a formidable challenge. Cambyses spent four years preparing for the invasion. The subject nations of the empire were leaned upon to provide tribute and levies. Ships were built or commandeered, and a Persian king, for the first time in his country’s history, became the master of a 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.³³ Victory was duly won. 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. Nor, of course, was Cambyses’ army the only prong of his assault. All the while, the battle fleet was gliding along the coast. With navy and army shadowing each other in a perfectly coordinated amphibious operation, the Persians advanced to seize their golden prize. Resistance was brutally crushed. Egypt submitted. Her people hailed as pharaoh the “Great Chief of the Foreign Lands.”

But the speed of Cambyses’ victory had been delusive. A land so ancient and mysterious was not easily absorbed into anyone’s empire. True, some measures were easily taken: the income from one town, for instance, was channeled to keep the Persian sister-queens in shoes.³⁴ Others, however, soon began to suck Cambyses into the sinking sands. Change in Egypt had never been a straightforward matter, and it so happened that the most pressing challenge, to tame and tax the priesthood, was also the most intractable. Cambyses, brutal in a way that native pharaohs had never dared to be, did succeed in forcing requisitions from the bloated estates of the temples, but the effort took him four years and naturally won him the eternal enmity of the priests. 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 and to gibbering mockery of the gods. Sometimes he was even accused of combining both pastimes, as when he was supposed to have spitted a bull worshipped by the Egyptians as divine.

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. Just as Cyrus had done, he sought to show himself scrupulously respectful of foreign gods, no matter how outlandish. After all, as pharaoh, he had become a son of Ra himself. 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 fatefully, did the Persian clan chiefs. 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, as “cruel and haughty,” and they would label him a “despot.”³⁵ As evidence, spectacular stories of his savagery would be adduced: how he had used his cupbearer for target practice, and shot him dead; how he had buried twelve noblemen alive and upside-down. More smears? Perhaps—and yet surely reflecting memories of a genuine crisis, one with which the Medes in Cambyses’ entourage would have been only too familiar, of a king intolerant of any hint of opposition, and resolved to break the will of the chiefs of rival clans. Many of these, having gone on the Egyptian adventure, had been kept securely by Cambyses’ side, where they could serve their king as hostages as well as lieutenants. Not all were in Egypt, however. Despite the absence of the court, Persia remained the surest fount of royal power. Whoever could master the heartland might also master the empire beyond. 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.

Three decades previously, the Median chiefs, in their desperation to topple Astyages, had been reduced to countenancing a foreigner as king; but the Persian nobility, even as they chafed under the imperiousness of Cambyses, had a more acceptable alternative to hand. Bardiya was not only the son of Cyrus the Great, but also—and just as importantly—proficient in all the qualities that the Persians most admired in a king. His physical strength had won him the nickname “Tanyoxarces,” or “Mighty-frame,” and his skill with the bow—the Persians’ weapon of choice—was legendary.³⁶ That he had remained the master of the troublesome eastern marches for almost a decade was ample evidence of his talents as a warlord. In other ways, too, Bardiya had proved himself his father’s son. Like Cyrus, it appears, he could conciliate as well as fight. Sensitive to the resentments of the Persian aristocracy, he was also solicitous of the subject peoples, who were increasingly weighed down by the exactions of Cambyses. Whispering it to those who mattered, Bardiya began to moot a startling measure: perhaps, for three years, the subjects of the Persian people might be exempted from providing tribute and further levies to the king? Not that Cambyses would ever agree to that, of course. But a new king? A new king might agree . . .

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 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. 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 had been foreseen by the Magi, who had glimpsed, in the spectacle of a headless baby born to Rhoxsane, the extinction of Cambyses’ line, although the Egyptian priests, more malicious and inventive, would whisper that Cambyses had brought the horror on himself—for he was said to have kicked his sister-bride in the stomach, killing not only the fetus but the queen. Now, in Cambyses’ childlessness, there seemed a welcome chance of peace—and Bardiya moved quickly to seize it. In July, he was formally invested by the Magi, dressed in the robes of his father and the royal kidaris. At the same time, he married Atossa, Cambyses’ surviving sister-bride. Succession and bloodline: both now seemed secured. Who else was there, after all, to challenge Bardiya for the monarchy of the world?

But while the new king, confident of his supremacy, withdrew for the summer to the cool of Ecbatana, conspiracy and rumor still swirled across the baking lowland plains.⁴⁰ 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. But for how long? The highest-ranking officers, scions of great families, had returned from the African adventure battle-hardened and intimate with the workings of power, often beyond their years. Cambyses’ “lance-bearer,” for instance, a distant cousin of the king by the name of Darius, was a mere twenty-eight. Rank, in the Persian court, was measured by proximity to the royal person, so the young Darius’ title, far from implying menial status, had been a splendid and prestigious honorific. It marked him out publicly as a major player at court, and left him privy to the most sensitive royal secrets. In the weeks leading up to Cambyses’ death, he could not have been better placed to sift intelligence on the coup.

To sift—and to analyze. 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. This windfall, however, urgently needed though it was, came at a fearful cost. The split in the nobility was confirmed. In the eyes of many Persians, Bardiya had branded himself “a disgrace to his country, and to his ancient throne.”⁴² One king that summer had already passed away; now plans were hurriedly made for the disposal of a second.

The conspirators were seven in total. All were of the highest rank. Among them was Darius, the young lance-bearer of Cambyses—and an Achaemenid. Not that membership in Persia’s foremost clan necessarily guaranteed him leadership of the plotters, for it was shared by a second conspirator, a wealthy grandee by the name of Otanes, who also appears to have had an eye on the throne. Furthermore, according to a later tradition, it was Otanes who had first organized 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. His status, right from the beginning, appears to have been preeminent. Linked by blood to Cyrus, he also stood at the heart of the web that bound together the seven conspirators. One of them, Gobryas, was both his father-in-law and the husband of his sister: marriage ties could hardly have bound the two any tighter. Darius’ brother, Artaphernes, a man of rare daring and intelligence, was also, although not one of the seven chief conspirators, ready to move on whatever was decided. More than a hint, then, of a family affair. Wherever one looks, Darius seems to loom as the ringleader of the plot.

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. After all, who better placed than a king’s lance-bearer to plot the murder of a king? Such an act of treachery would have been regarded even by Cambyses’ enemies as beyond the pale. While Darius would soon prove himself as bold as he was ruthless, he was never one to flaunt his crimes. As a result, the truth of his guilt or otherwise is forever lost to us.⁴³ Yet if Darius’ involvement in the death of Cambyses must be reckoned, not proven, his role in spurring forward the plot against Bardiya is far more certain. When Otanes, urging a course of prudence, suggested the recruitment of more conspirators, and playing for time, Darius argued for immediate action. They should rely, he insisted, not on force of numbers, but on speed and surprise. To waver would be to lose their advantage. The greater their daring, the greater their chances of success.

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. Practiced horsemen all—for there had never been a Persian nobleman not raised in the saddle—the seven conspirators and their accomplices rode at a scorching pace, desperate not to lose their chance. By September, they had arrived at the borders of Media. Ahead of them lay the Khorasan Highway, twisting through the mountains up to Ecbatana. And descending it, approaching them, somewhere, was Bardiya.

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.⁴⁴ Those coming from Ecbatana would have been able to assure the conspirators that the king had indeed left his summer capital, that he was on the move, that he was not far ahead of them. Then, with Bardiya drawing ever nearer, the traffic on the road would have grown even more varied, the king’s lackeys and outriders increasingly in evidence, their costumes rich, their beards and hair elaborately curled, their peacock extravagance alerting travelers to the approach of their master, the King of Persia, the King of the World.

Nevertheless, amid all the clamor and clarions and color, 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”⁴⁵ in the world, for not even the fabulous kingdoms of India—where, as was well known, every animal grew to a prodigious size—had anything to compare. Once the Medes had been nomads, and now they were the subjects of a foreign monarchy; but riding across the Nisaean plain, abreast of the shimmering herds, they knew themselves supreme as the tamers of horses still. A splendid consolation to them in their slavery: for the white horses, so strong and swift and beautiful, were regarded by the peoples of the Zagros as creatures sacred, bound by mysterious ties of communion to the divine, and to their king.

Even the conquering Persians acknowledged this. At Pasargadae, a horse from Nisaea would be sacrificed every month before the hallowed tomb of Cyrus himself. Perhaps that was why Bardiya, turning off the Khorasan Highway and pausing in his descent toward the lowlands, lingered in the presence of the herd. Whether he sought legitimization, or a sign from the heavens, or perhaps just the reading of bad dreams, he would have found in Nisaea ready experts on hand. Magi, interpreters of all that was mysterious, were the guardians of the sacred horses too. Did Bardiya summon these masters of ritual to his presence and ask them what his future might hold? Perhaps. 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.

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.⁴⁶

And Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, King of the Persians, slumped dead to the ground.

Double Vision

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. Had it not been for the acumen of Darius and his fellow patriots, who had stumbled upon the secret, and their courage in daring to expose it, the Persian people might never have learned of the monstrous scam.

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 impostor 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, the conspirators hurriedly announced, had indeed been a Magus, “Gaumata by name.”⁴⁷ An obscure and low-born villain he may have been, and yet so potent had his sorcery proved itself, and so audacious his plot, that he had almost won the empire by his fraud.

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: his ears, for some unspecified crime, had long before been cut off by Cyrus. A daughter of Otanes named Phaidime, a wife of Bardiya who had never suspected that he might have been killed and replaced by a double, had brushed the side of her husband’s head one evening while he slept, and uncovered the appalling truth. Telling her father of her discovery, she had thereby set in train the dramatic sequence of events which had culminated in the murder of the impostor. Such, at any rate, was the story which years later would be told across the empire. And there was nobody, by then, left to dispute it.

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. With blood still being washed from the fittings of Sikyavautish, it was hardly the time for quibbles. The conspirators were in no mood to tolerate dissent. The warning given by Darius could not have been more stentorian: “Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a follower of the Lie, him do thou punish well!”⁴⁸ Here, from a master political strategist, was a dazzling sleight-of-hand. It would serve to place not the assassins but their accusers on the defensive. Skeptics were to be anathematized as the enemies of truth.

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. Only a Persian could have made them—for only a Persian could understand what truth really meant. He knew, as more benighted peoples did not, that the universe without truth would be undone and lost to perpetual night. More than an abstraction, more even than an ideal, it formed instead the very fabric of existence.

This was why, in the beginning, when Ahura Mazda, greatest of the gods, had summoned time and creation into being, he had engendered Arta, who was Truth, to give order to the universe. Without Arta, it would have lacked form or beauty, and the great cycles of existence set in motion by Lord Mazda could not have brought life into the world. 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? “The wretch who weaves deceit will bring death into his country”:⁵⁰ so it had been anciently proclaimed. How much more deadly the peril, then, if a “wretch” had somehow seized his country’s throne. The Magus, by taking on the image of Bardiya, and impersonating the rightful king, had handed to Drauga the scepter of the world. Darius and his fellows, by riding to Sikyavautish, had toppled an evil infinitely more threatening than a mere impostor. Far from staging a squalid putsch, they had been engaged in nothing less than the redemption of the cosmos.

And now, with Gaumata justly toppled and dispatched, the throne which he had tainted stood empty. 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 recognized, 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 been agreed among the conspirators that “the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne”⁵¹—and they added, furthermore, that Darius had cheated. His groom, it was said, had dabbled his fingers inside a mare’s vulva beforehand, and then, just as the sun rose, placed them beside the nose of Darius’ horse. But this was scurrilous nonsense, and typical of the Greeks. How like them to distort the holy rites of Truth!

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. Blessed by the neighing of the sacred white horses, and by the mountain dawn, Darius could know himself doubly the champion of Arta. As the first rays illuminated the plain, so night, the order of Drauga, menacing and indistinct, began to fade before the brilliant light of the sun. “So can I recognize you as strong and holy, O Mazda, when by the hand in which you hold the twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man, and by the glow of your fire whose power is the Truth, the might of Good Thought shall come to me.”⁵² And now, that late September dawn, the might of Good Thought had indeed come to Nisaea, for the Liar was dead, and the Righteous Man was king.

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 forever, as had always been assumed, but move instead toward a mighty end, a universal apocalypse in which Truth would annihilate all falsehoods, and establish on their ruin an eternal reign of peace. 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 the supreme, the all-powerful, the only uncreated god. From him, like fire leaping from beacon to beacon, all goodness proceeded: six great emanations of his own eternal light, the Amesha Spentas, holy and immortal;⁵³ a broader pantheon of beneficent spirits; the world in its many beauties; plants and animals (and, in particular, because it spent its days preying upon insects, those swarming spawn of the dark side, the hedgehog); the faithful and ever-righteous dog; and finally, noblest of all creations, man himself. “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, however, was that he had been neither a Mede nor a Persian—and that the knowledge of his teachings had first come to the Zagros from the East.⁵⁶

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.

A bond certainly appreciated by Cyrus. Looking to dramatize 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 bowls, in which white-hot ashes could be kept forever burning.⁵⁷ Fire had long been sacred to all the Iranians, but to no one more than to Zoroaster himself, who had taught that its flames were the very symbol of righteousness and truth. Daily prayer before fire had been laid upon his followers as a sacred duty, and Cyrus, in the course of his eastern conquests, would surely have witnessed the spectacle of such worship for himself. 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.⁵⁸ The fire-holders built by Cyrus, their flames rising into the azure of the Persian sky, would certainly have blazed out the new doctrine high and clear—but they would also have served to broadcast a very different lesson. 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 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.”⁵⁹ Darius was surely protesting too much. But as a regicide and usurper, he had little choice. With his claim to the throne so tenuous, 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 God.

Who precisely God might be, however, whether the Ahura Mazda of his ancestors’ pantheon, or the one supreme being proclaimed by Zoroaster, the new king was content to leave unclear. Ambiguity had its uses. Above all, it was essential that Darius show his respect for the traditions of his own people—and it so happened that his situation on the Nisaean plain provided the perfect stage. Some fifteen miles north of Sikyavautish, rising high and somber from the midst of a level plain, loomed the twin peaks of Bisitun, “the place of the gods,” the most sacred mountain in the whole Zagros range.⁶⁰ Here, near the scene of his ambushing of Bardiya, Darius could offer sacrifice just as the Persians and the Medes had always done, in the sanctity of the pure and open air. Yet the murder itself, the stern and epic quality of its execution, and the configuration of the assassins, would have conjured up associations for the followers of Zoroaster just as ripe with potential for Darius’ propaganda. Six, according to the teachings of the Prophet, were the Amesha Spentas, the Beneficent Immortals who proceeded from Ahura Mazda—and six were the accomplices of Darius in his war against the Lie. That men might ponder this coincidence—or symmetry—could serve only to buttress the new king’s cause. Darius might not have been the son of Cyrus, but he could pose as something infinitely more impressive: the proxy of the Good Lord, Ahura Mazda himself.

This seamless identification of his own power with that of a universal god was a development full of moment for the future. Usurpers had been claiming divine sanction for their actions since time immemorial, but never such as Ahura Mazda could provide. Already, with the daring and creativity that were the trademarks of his 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.