Persian Fire

2

BABYLON

Stairway to Heaven

Without dirt, there could never have been cities or great kings. So claimed the people of Babylon, who knew full well that their civilization had been fashioned out of mud. Back in the beginning, when all the earth had been ocean, Lord Marduk, king of the gods, had built a raft of reeds, covered it with dust, mingled it with water to form a primordial slime and out of this raised a home for himself, the Esagila, the first building in the world. This could still be seen eons later, standing in the heart of Babylon—but it had needed no temple to make the Babylonians appreciate what could be done with earth and water. They knew it in their bones. “I will take blood,” Marduk had announced, in the earliest days of the world, “and I will sculpt flesh, and I will form the first man.”¹ As good as his word, he had duly mixed dust with the gore of a slaughtered rival, and fashioned humanity out of the sticky compound. Here, in the primal act of man’s creation, had been set a pattern for all time. The crops in a field, the bricks in a city wall: what would these have been without mud? Hemmed in as they were by the bleakness of mountain and desert, the Babylonians could gaze at their land, and know they were the most fortunate of people, blessed not by one but by two mighty rivers, prodigious evidence of the favor of the gods. The fertility of their estates, the towering splendor of their buildings, the easy passage of their merchants to the sea; all were gifts of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Well might Greek travelers have described the mud steppes as “Mesopotamia,” the “Land Between the Rivers”; for without water all the wealth of Babylon would have been as nothing but dry dust.

As it was, the city ranked as the jewel in the King of Persia’s crown. Lose it, and he might lose everything—as the Babylonians themselves were well aware. Never lacking self-regard, they were perfectly accustomed to view their city as the fulcrum of great events. For centuries, their ambitions had shaken the Near East. Of all the many foes of Assyria, Babylon had been the most obdurate, and had led, with the Medes, the revolt that had destroyed the hated empire. Over its wreckage the Babylonians had then raised their own dominion, imposing upon their neighbors, and by the same amiable methods once employed by the Assyrians, “an iron yoke of servitude.”² As Jeremiah, in far-off Judah, had wailed, “Their quiver is like an open tomb, they are all mighty men. They shall eat up your harvest and your food; they shall eat up your sons and your daughters; they shall eat up your flocks and your herds; they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees; your fortified cities in which you trust they shall destroy with the sword.”³ And all had come to pass just as the prophet had foreseen. In 586 BC, Jerusalem had been taken and left a blackened pile of rubble, and the hapless Judaeans hauled off into exile. There, weeping by the rivers of Babylon, they had been kept company by the transplants of other nations from across the Near East—for Mesopotamia, populous and fertile though she was, had long since left behind self-sufficiency. Only by feasting, vampire-like, on far-off lands had she been able to maintain herself, satisfying her monstrous appetites with foreign peoples as well as products. Immigrants, whether slaves and exiles or mercenaries and merchants, thronged the streets of Babylon—history’s first truly multicultural city. Even after the loss of her independence to Cyrus, she had remained the Near East’s supreme melting pot, her streets filled with a thousand different tongues, the roaring of exotic animals and the flashing of strange birds, the golds and scarlets and mother-of-pearl of the ends of the earth. What, in comparison, were the backwoods of Persia? The homeland of an empire, maybe—but hardly the heartbeat of the world.

It was scarcely surprising, then, that the Babylonians should have regarded Persian rule as merely—the gods willing—a temporary aberration. Cyrus, with his customary imperious magnanimity, had disdained to eliminate the defeated royal family; and even though the last king, Nabonidus, had been an old man when his city fell, on his death he had left no lack of thrusting heirs. One of these, taking advantage of the chaos unleashed by Bardiya’s murder, emerged in early October to proclaim himself Nebuchadnezzar III. Here, for all those who had suffered from the Babylonians’ attentions in the past, was a name of ominous portent: for the second Nebuchadnezzar had been Babylon’s greatest ruler, the conqueror of Jerusalem and much more besides, a shatterer of cities and a breaker of proud nations, his memory preserved among those he had defeated as something fabulous, golden and deadly. But if the name of the new king would have sent shivers throughout the Near East, its effect on the Babylonians themselves would surely have been to set them dreaming. Their world must have seemed to be returning to its former balance. Universal dominion, pilfered from Mesopotamia by Persian bandits, could now be restored to where it belonged. As was only right, a Nebuchadnezzar would once again reign supreme.

Darius, ever alert to the possibilities of propaganda, knew better than to take these sentiments lightly. Which was why, even though the rebellion in Elam had cut him off from his heartland, he headed not for Persia but directly for Mesopotamia. Descending at his usual breakneck speed from the mountains, he was following the same road that Cyrus had taken seventeen years previously—and, just as Cyrus had done, he found the way wide open at first. A huge phallus, raised out of stones, stood by the wayside, marking the border of the Land of the Two Rivers; ahead of him, flat and unbroken, stretched a monotony of alluvium. Only the occasional peasant, stooping to plant barley, would have intruded upon the emptiness, and every so often a broken line of palms. These, marking the courses of ditches and canals, would have been far less abundant than they were further south, around the Euphrates; for the Tigris, in contrast to its sister river, had impressively steep banks, and—inconveniently for farmers—flowed so fast that its name in Persian meant “the arrow.”

Yet what rendered it unsuitable for the purposes of irrigation made it ideal as a line of defense: easily the most formidable that Mesopotamia possessed amid the general featurelessness of the landscape. To strengthen it against the menace of invasion from Media, and to plug the open flatlands that lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a great stretch of fortifications had been constructed, eight meters wide and ten meters high, their crenellations proudly visible across the drear of the plains. Even sixty years after its construction, this “Median Wall” still bore witness to the monarch who had raised it, Nebuchadnezzar II, whose greatness had been the dread of the world. Nor, indeed, could a more fitting location for such a display of royal power have been imagined. Akkad, the region through which the Median Wall ran, was numinous with memories of a fateful innovation. Here, millennia before Nebuchadnezzar, an intoxicating dream had come to a man named Sargon, one never since forgotten, so that the kings of Babylon had been honored to name themselves the kings of Akkad. Such a title, in contrast to some other Mesopotamian appellations—“King of the Four Quarters of the Earth,” say, or “King of the Universe”—might have appeared modest; but it had served to link the kings of Babylon to the origins of empire. 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.

Sargon, the obscure adventurer who had emerged as though from nowhere to nurture this proud ambition, to extinguish the independence of neighboring city-states and to rule supreme over the “totality of the lands under heaven,”⁴ had always remained the model of a Mesopotamian strongman. Almost two thousand years after his foundation of Akkad, he remained the cynosure of great kings. Indeed, in the decades before the Persian conquest, the obsession with him had become a veritable craze. At Susa, the capital of Elam, a victory memorial originally inscribed by Sargon’s grandson had been lovingly dusted down and put on prominent display; in Akkad itself, when a statue of the great man was excavated, Nabonidus had come rushing in high excitement to inspect it, and to supervise its restoration. Museums had sprung up everywhere: at Ur, for instance, the antiquities collection maintained by Nabonidus’ daughter, Princess En-nigaldi-Nanna, had been carefully labeled and put on display for the edification of the public. Meanwhile, in Babylon itself, scholars pored over great libraries of archives, tracing ancient documents, recycling archaic phrases, looking to the distant past to legitimize the needs and whims of their masters. The people of Mesopotamia, living as they did amid the lumber of millennia, had always been profoundly respectful of antiquity. Rather than feeling oppressed by it, they recycled it, cannibalized it, and turned it to their advantage.

Confronted by this menacing venerability, the Persians might have been expected to respond to it very differently: with suspicion, and even fear. It was not just that their own history, by comparison, was the merest blink of an eye. The turning of the ages of the world, scrupulously recorded in king lists and star charts, meant knowledge for those who tracked it—and knowledge meant power. Babylon was famed as a metropolis of sorcerers. Throughout Mesopotamia, a great network of observatories had been established, enabling astrologers to trace the warnings of the heavens, and speedily to dispatch news of them back to their intelligence chiefs in Babylon. This ability to read the future and to map the patterns cast on statecraft by the stars had always been a potent weapon of the Babylonian kings. When combined with the elaborate and unfathomable rituals for which their city was also famous, its myriad ziggurats and temples, and the supposedly primordial foundations on which its monuments had been raised, their layout dating back to the beginning of time, their bricks touched with the fingerprints of the gods, Babylon could hardly fail to overwhelm.

And yet Cyrus, back in 539 BC, when he had first arrived in the city as its conqueror, had not been remotely intimidated. Indeed, he had shown himself far more sensitive to the alien and complex traditions of Mesopotamia, and to the potential they might offer his regime, than Nabonidus had ever done. The last king of Babylon, fascinated though he was by antiquity, had eventually pushed his researches too far. 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. Even more offensive to Babylonian sensibilities, however, and ultimately fatal to Nabonidus’ cause, had been his putting Marduk’s nose out of joint.

For a god more prickly with regard to his dignity it would have been hard to imagine. No mortal, not even the greatest monarch, could afford to offend him. This was why, every new year, the king was expected to visit the Esagila, the city’s greatest temple, to have his cheeks slapped and his ears yanked in a grand ritual of humiliation before the admonitory gaze of Marduk’s golden statue. If tears were brought to the king’s eyes, then so much the better, for that would indicate that the god was well pleased; if, however, the king did not turn up at all, then it would presage certain disaster for his realm. Nabonidus’ behavior, to the Babylonians’ way of thinking, had been particularly egregious. Not only had he absented himself from Babylon, and therefore the Esagila, for ten whole years, but he had rubbed salt in the wounds by promoting the cult of a venerable moon god, Sin, in Marduk’s place. Admittedly, he had unearthed good antiquarian reasons for doing so—for just as Babylon, far from being the most ancient city in the world, as her citizens liked to boast, had in fact been a relatively late foundation, so Marduk, its patron, had been an equally late promotion to the throne of the gods. By sponsoring the worship of Sin, Nabonidus had hoped to provide for his far-flung empire a less obviously chauvinistic focus of loyalty than the domineering Marduk. By doing so, however, he had laid himself fatally open to Cyrus’ propaganda. “Marduk,” it was claimed, “scanned all the countries of the world, looking for a righteous ruler,”⁶ and he had found one in the King of Persia. Cyrus, welcomed into Babylon by his new subjects, had duly damned Nabonidus as a heretic, while cheerfully promoting himself as Marduk’s chosen one. The city’s ancient rituals had been permitted to continue undisturbed; cult statues, appropriated by Nabonidus for safe-keeping, had been returned to their proper shrines; in the first months of Persian rule, Cambyses, acting as proxy for his father, had even reported to the Esagila for the ritual New Year slapping.

And Marduk had been gratified. Order had been maintained in the Land of the Two Rivers. Yes, the Persians were upstarts, and yes, it was disconcerting for the citizens of the world’s greatest city to be ruled as though they were mere provincials; but Cyrus and Cambyses had given the Babylonians peace. No greater virtue could be ascribed to a king. The priests of Marduk, confirmed in both their primacy and in their extensive property-holdings across Mesopotamia, were not the only natives to have collaborated enthusiastically with foreign rule. Big business had also flourished. Inflation, galloping out of control under Nabonidus, had been stabilized; trade routes, no longer blocked by Persian sanctions, had filled with caravans again. For merchants and financiers, the absorption of Mesopotamia into a world empire had opened up unprecedented opportunities. Sentimental notions of loyalty to the old regime could hardly be expected to stand in the way of profit. The Egibis, for instance, a dynasty of bankers who had been operating as agents to the native kings of Babylon for decades, had no sooner witnessed the downfall of Nabonidus than they were smoothly accommodating themselves to the new order, dating their commercial documents from the accession year of Cyrus, and looking to expand into Iran. Within a couple of years, they had opened offices in Ecbatana and throughout Persia, diversifying enthusiastically into fields as varied as the slave trade and the hawking of marriage contracts. Then, suddenly, caught short by the revolt in Mesopotamia, the Egibis found themselves facing meltdown. By the late autumn of 522 BC, their headquarters in Babylon had lost contact with the regional branches. Two of the family’s brothers were cut off in Persia. The bank’s debts began to mount. As far as the Egibis were concerned, their city’s rebellion promised not liberation but disaster. The sooner it was quelled, and stability restored to the markets, the better.

Of course, the fact that the rule of the Persians had collapsed into murder and factionalism was, for most Babylonians, a justification in itself for their revolt. Just as Marduk had been offended by Nabonidus, so now, self-evidently, he was bending his frown upon the warring house of Cyrus. Yet this assumption, even though it threatened Darius’ claim to the throne, also presented him with a dazzling opportunity. The chosen one of Ahura Mazda, why should he not prove himself the favorite of the supreme god of Babylon, too? Was it likely, after all, that Marduk, having overthrown the heretical Nabonidus, should now bless his son? What better chance for Darius to establish his credentials as monarch of the world than to crush a revolt in Babylon? No wonder that he drove so hard toward the city. Already, by early December, Persian outriders had reached the Median Wall. Next, turning its flank, Darius led his army over the Tigris, his soldiers clinging to horses, camels and inflated animal skins. On December 13, 522 BC he met the army of Nebuchadnezzar III in battle, and routed it. Six days later, with a second victory, Darius completed his annihilation of the Babylonian forces. Nebuchadnezzar, turning tail with what was left of his cavalry, fled back to his capital. Not one of those who stayed behind to surrender was spared. The road to Babylon stood wide open.

Darius, not hesitating, took it. Ahead of him, blotting out the horizon, was a monstrous haze of smoke and dust, the exhalation of a metropolis without rival on the planet. An unprecedented quarter of a million people lived in Babylon, crowded into the narrow, twisting streets; yet, cramped though the city was, a dense agglomeration of brick, bodies and dung, it had still required the longest urban fortifications ever built to enclose just a portion of its sprawl. Stupendous, like everything else in Babylon, the walls enclosed three full square miles, had eight colossal decorated gates, and were protected, where the Euphrates did not provide a natural barrier, by moats, “great floods of destroying waters like the great waves of the sea.” A fittingly grand enceinte for the theater of the world’s fantasies: “Babylon, the city of opulence; Babylon, the city whose people are glutted with wealth; Babylon, the city of celebrations, rejoicing and endless dance.”⁷ Even through the darkest back alleys, it was said, Ishtar, the goddess of love, might be seen gliding, visiting her favorites in taverns and on the open streets, so that all the city, mingling festival with erotic adventure, appeared to glimmer with desire. Well might Babylon, to the Judaean exiles, have appeared a stew of licentiousness, and to those in distant countries, it was a superhuman and magical place. The city walls, it was confidently asserted, stretched for fifty-six miles, and had a hundred gates of bronze. In its streets, so it was whispered, prostitution was regarded as a sacred duty, and daughters would be joyously pimped by their own fathers. Not so much a city, Babylon was rather a veritable world unto itself. Indeed, “such was the immensity of her scale that Cyrus,” it was claimed, “had been able to seize control of the outskirts without anyone in the center even being aware of his arrival, so that the Babylonians, who were celebrating a festival, had continued dancing, and indulging themselves. And so it was that the city had fallen for the first time.”⁸

But the second? The stories that told of Cyrus’ capture of Babylon, for all their implausibilities, still hinted at a certain strategic truth: any army breaking into the city might indeed find itself swallowed up by the vastness. Darius’ soldiers, as they saw the walls of Babylon looming toward them through the smog, must have felt a quickening of their hearts; for nothing, not even the temples of Egypt, would have prepared them for the gargantuan scale of such a place. But it is doubtful that their general felt any lurch of doubt. Darius knew, for his intelligence agents would have told him as much, that Babylon was ripe for the plucking. The city, impregnable though it might have appeared, was in truth far too riven by division to be defended. If it was, as those who marveled at it claimed, a mirror of the world, then the reflection that it offered was one of social and ethnic hatred. It was not only priests and businessmen who were eager to collaborate with the Persian king. Babylon was also filled with the descendants of deportees, scattered throughout the suburbs. Few of these were willing to die in the cause of a Nebuchadnezzar. The cosmopolitanism of the great city, once the mark and buttress of its imperial might, now threatened it with anarchy. The Babylonians were bound to shrink from such a prospect, even at the cost of surrender to an alien master. Chaos, in Mesopotamia, had always been the ultimate nightmare. Men knew that in the beginning all the world had been under the sway of demons, uncontrollable and savage, until the gods, taking pity on mankind, had established order by giving them a king. Without a monarch, civilization itself would cease to hold; the demons would surely return. “To have authority, and possession, and strength, these are princely divine properties.” So it had been anciently asserted, in a remote age when even Sargon and his empire lay in the future. “You should submit to the strong man; you should humble yourself before the man who wields power.”⁹ Not, perhaps, the most heroic of maxims, but practical, and sanctified by the habits of millennia. The Babylonians, seeing the Persian king ride victorious toward them, duly scrambled to prostrate themselves. Once again, as they had done to Cyrus, they opened up their gates.

Darius, passing through the brilliant glazed blue of the main gateway, took easy possession of the city. No getting sucked into the urban labyrinth for him. Symmetry as well as chaos were to be found in Babylon. Just as the gods had structured the formlessness of human society by gifting it the sacred institution of monarchy, so, across the seething ferment of the world’s largest city, there had been laid an imperious grid of boulevards. Now, down the grandest of these, the Processional Way, Darius made his entry into Babylon.

“May-The-Arrogant-Not-Flourish,” the Babylonians called the street, in memory of past triumphs; and to ride down its length as its master was to lay claim to the city’s very proudest dreams. Display, in Babylon, was the essence of kingship. Far from empty pomp, it was seen as the blazing of a god-given order, one which could be imagined as rippling like a lightning charge throughout the city, suffusing mortal flesh and bone, and dust and limestone and brick. The architecture of the Processional Way gave stirring illustration to this metaphor. At the boulevard’s far end, abutting it, and placing even the Esagila in shadow, was the most staggering of all Babylon’s monuments, an immense stepped tower, formed out of seventeen million bricks, and looming almost a hundred meters high: the Etemenanki, or “House that is the Frontier between the Heavens and the Earth.” Here, as the name of the temple implied, there dwelt a profound mystery, located, with portentous symbolism, in the precise center of the city. But the Etemenanki was not its only incarnation. So too, in the opinion of the Babylonians, was the mortal person of their king; for he, according to the age-old traditions of Mesopotamia, was both the beating heart of society and a man set utterly apart. That this was no paradox could be illustrated by a simple visit to the Processional Way. Beside the city’s main gates, open to the gaze of all who entered Babylon, there stood an immense palace, as visible, in its own way, as the Etemenanki at the opposite end of the boulevard; and yet such was the polychrome gorgeousness of its brickwork, inlaid as it was with gold and silver, and lapis lazuli, and ivory, and cedar, that those who viewed it could hardly help but lower their eyes to the ground. Opulence of such an order was not merely an expression of royal power, but was calculated, very precisely, to reinforce it. All were to feel submission and prostration in their souls.

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

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

For Darius, all the world was still at stake.

The End of History

“Every king on earth,” Cyrus had once boasted, “brought me heavy tribute, and kissed my feet where I sat in Babylon.”¹¹ Darius’ own sojourn in the city, which brought him only tidings of rebellion, was marked by none of the ostentatious gestures of clemency so beloved of his predecessor. Rather, beleaguered as he was, his preference was for carefully targeted acts of savagery and retribution. So it was that the hapless Nebuchadnezzar, captured on the downfall of his capital, was denied even the right to his celebrated name. Darius, pulling a favorite trick, accused him of being an impostor, and had him arraigned as “Nidintu-Bel.” Just as the corpse of “Gaumata” had been disposed of with suspicious haste, now Nidintu-Bel, rather than being paraded down the Processional Way, was hurriedly and discreetly impaled. Forty-nine of the supposed impostor’s lieutenants perished alongside him—his closest intimates, no doubt.*⁶ Dead men, after all, could tell no tales.

Yet the suspicions of those who lurked beyond Darius’ reach, and their continued defiance, were not so easily allayed. That winter, the capture of Babylon notwithstanding, it appeared as though the new king’s scattered and outnumbered forces might be overwhelmed. Even Persia itself had risen in revolt. Fatal though Bardiya’s division of the aristocracy into rival factions had proved to be, it had at least ensured that the cause associated with his name would survive his murder—for those noblemen who had profited from the dead king’s policies could hardly bank on the favor of his assassin. Urgently, they had banded together in opposition to the coup. Promoting one of their own, Vahyazdata, as king, they took a leaf out of Darius’ book and announced that their man was in fact Bardiya himself. To add to the superfluity of pretenders, rebels throughout Asia were similarly emerging from the shadows, laying claim to the bloodlines of long-toppled monarchs, and to the glories of vanished empires. Ancient ambitions, briefly stifled by Persian rule, began to blaze back into life. Most threateningly of all, a nobleman by the name of Phraortes seized control of Ecbatana. Making common cause with rebels in the eastern half of the empire, many of whom hurried to acknowledge him as their overlord, he proclaimed the golden days of Media reborn.

There was more to this defiance of Darius than mere nostalgia for a vanished dynasty. Phraortes was quick to boast of his descent from Astyages, but he was also heir to the same resentments that had helped destroy the Medes’ last king. The Median nobility—and the Persian too, if they wished to preserve any independence—had no choice but to oust the usurper; for Darius, decisive, brutal and charismatic, was patently not a man to indulge the pretensions of anyone save himself. Here, for the clan chiefs, was a truly agonizing choice: either forgo the opportunities of global empire, but enjoy once again the smaller-scale pleasures of factionalism, or remain masters of the world, but as vassals of a universal king. This, even amid what might have seemed its death agony, was the measure of Persian greatness: that all “the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land”¹² could be shaken, and yet the great convulsion, at its heart, be a civil war.

Everywhere the deadliest fighting was between men who only months previously had been comrades in arms. Vahyazdata’s forces, striking eastward from Persia to seize the adjacent province, found themselves blocked by its governor, who had chosen to throw in his lot with Darius; in the north, where rebels had risen in support of Phraortes, Darius’ loyalists were led not by a Persian but by one of Phraortes’ own countrymen, a Mede; meanwhile, in Media itself, amid sub-zero temperatures and snowdrifts, clan chief fought with clan chief for control of the Khorasan Highway. By January, Phraortes’ forces were pushing hard: advancing almost to the Nisaean plain, they threatened to break through into Mesopotamia, just as Darius himself had done barely two months before. Here loomed the great fulcrum of the crisis: Darius, knowing that he could not afford to lose Babylon, yet also frantically orchestrating a war on numerous fronts, dispatched a small army under Hydarnes, one of the seven original conspirators, to hold the highway at all costs. Hydarnes, his future by now irrevocably hitched to Darius’ star, obediently retraced his steps into the frozen Zagros, and there, with grim resolution, positioned his troops to block the descent of the rebellious Medes. Although battle was duly joined, the result was a stand-off: no significant damage was inflicted on Phraortes’ army, but neither was it able to continue its advance. Hydarnes, entrenching himself before the sacred cliff face of Bisitun, stood garrison and waited for his master.

Finally, by April, with a great victory reported against Vahyazdata, and the crushing of the rebellion in the north, Darius was ready to commit himself to the Median campaign. Leading his reserves up from Babylon, he joined with Hydarnes, and then, in a bloody and decisive battle, routed Phraortes, captured him, and loaded him with chains. Darius, having neglected to expose either Gaumata or Nidintu-Bel to public obloquy, now more than made amends. Indeed, the fate of Phraortes could not have been more gruesomely exemplary. His nose, tongue and ears were cut off; then for good measure, he was blinded in one eye. While other prominent rebels were flayed and their skins then stuffed with straw, their master was chained before the gates of the royal palace in Ecbatana, “where everyone could see him.”¹³ Only once his countrymen had been given sufficient opportunity to gawp at his humiliation was Phraortes, the would-be King of Media, impaled.

All done for the particular edification of the clan chiefs, of course. Certainly, the twisted corpse rotting on the spike above Ecbatana would have weighed as heavily on the nobility’s minds as its stench would have hung in the summer air. Two months later, and the Persian aristocracy were graced with the same lesson. Vahyazdata, brought to battle and defeated a second time, was duly impaled; his closest lieutenants, sentenced to the same excruciating fate, writhed upon an immense forest of stakes. Darius, stern-faced and implacable, surveyed the scene. No more pretenders would come forward now claiming to be Bardiya. The murdered king, at last, lay in his grave. Smoothly, Darius moved to annex his dependants to himself. The various female offshoots of the royal family—the sisters, wives and daughters of the man he had displaced—were swept into the marital bed. 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 her emotions must have been as she slept with Bardiya’s murderer one can only imagine. Certainly, she is reported not to have been Darius’ favorite wife. That title went to her younger sister, Artystone—the second of Cyrus’ daughters to have given the new king a marriage link to the past.

Not that Darius, having waded through blood to seize the kidaris, was the man to rely merely on a harem to cement his claim. Even as he staked his exclusive rights to the bloodline of Cyrus, he was loudly broadcasting the primacy of his own: “I am Darius, King of Kings, King of Persia, King of Lands, the son of Hystaspes, grandson of Arsames, an Achaemenid.”¹⁴ So, with a sonorous roll, it was splendidly proclaimed. “There were eight of my family who were kings before me. I am the ninth. Nine times in succession have we been kings.”¹⁵ Which was stretching the truth to breaking point, of course. What of Cambyses, what of Cyrus, what of the legitimate royal line? What, indeed, of Darius’ father, Hystaspes, who was still very much, albeit somewhat embarrassingly, alive? Darius, now that he had the world in his hands, could afford to sweep aside such minor inconveniences. What mattered, after all, was not what an inner circle of courtiers and clan chiefs might know, but what the empire—and posterity—might be made to understand.

Besides, the fabrications only veiled a deeper truth. By the summer of 521 BC, although there were still smoldering bushfires in Elam and Mesopotamia, Darius’ triumph was not in dispute: he had secured the throne for himself and saved the world for the Persian people. Who but a man strong in the favor of Ahura Mazda, just as Darius had always proclaimed himself to be, could have achieved such startling things? A notable symmetry had framed the arc of his exertions—certain evidence of a guidance more than mortal. It was surely no coincidence, for instance, that Bisitun, holiest of mountains, had witnessed both the execution of Gaumata and the defeat of Phraortes—the two decisive turning points in Darius’ progress to the throne. The new king, looking to immortalize his campaign against the Lie, duly chose to do so at the scene of these stirring events. Already, even before his victory in Persia, masons had been set to work at Bisitun. For the first time ever, “cut like the pages of a book on the blood-colored rock,”¹⁶ the Persian language was to be transcribed into written form. The story of how Darius had rescued the world from evil was far too important to be trusted to the recitations of the Magi alone. Only solid stone could serve such an epic as its shrine. “So it was chiselled, and read out in my presence. And then the inscription was copied and dispatched to every province.”¹⁷ No one in the empire was to be ignorant of Darius’ deeds.

And yet the king, even as he proclaimed his achievements to the far ends of the earth, was already seeking to distance himself from the swirl of revolt and war. His intentions could be seen illustrated on the cliff face of Bisitun itself, carved in immense relief next to the blocks of cuneiform. There loomed a giant Darius, crushing a prostrate Gaumata beneath his foot, while in front of him, dwarfish and tethered, stretched a line of liar-kings. On the face of the conqueror, however, there was no wrinkled lip, no sneer of cold command, only serenity, dignity, majesty and calm; as though the triumphs celebrated in the relief were, to their hero, simply ripples upon an order outside time. Here was a radical departure from the norms of royal self-promotion. When the Assyrian kings had portrayed themselves trampling their foes, they had done so in the most extravagant and blood-spattered detail, amid the advance of siege engines, the flight of the defeated, piles of loot and severed heads. There were no such specifics 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 an age of peace had dawned. Yes, the victory over the liar-kings had been a great and terrible one, and because it had proved the truth of what he had always insisted, that he was indeed the champion of Ahura Mazda, the new king had ordered its details to be recorded and proclaimed. Never again, however, would he permit himself to be shown enclosed within mere events. As universal monarch, he was now above such things. Just as Lord Mazda dwelt beyond the rhythms of the world, so had his proxy, the King of Persia, transcended space and time. History, in effect, had been brought to a glorious close. The Persians’ empire was both its end and its summation—for what 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 Darius had redeemed it from the Lie, might be expected to endure for all eternity: infinite, unshakable, the watchtower of the Truth.

Except, of course, that history still persisted in its flow. In 520 BC, even as Darius’ masons were hard at work at Bisitun, the ever-fractious Elamites rose again in revolt. Darius, infuriated, promptly anathematized them in new and startling terms. “Those Elamites were faithless,” he thundered. “They failed to worship Ahura Mazda.”¹⁸ This, the condemnation of a people for their neglect of a religion not their own, was something wholly remarkable. Until that moment, Darius, following the subtle policy of Cyrus, had always been assiduous in his attention to foreign gods. Now he was delivering to the subject nations of the world a stern and novel warning. Should a people persist in rebellion against the order of Ahura Mazda, they might expect to be regarded not merely as adherents of the Lie but as the worshippers of “daivas”—false gods and demons. Conversely, those sent to war against them might expect “divine blessings—both in their lives, and after death.”¹⁹ Glory on earth and an eternity in heaven: these were the assurances given by Darius to his men. The manifesto proved an inspiring one. When Gobryas, Darius’ father-in-law, led an army into Elam, he was able to crush the revolt there with a peremptory, almost dismissive, speed. Never again would the Elamites dare to challenge the awful might of the Persian king. Such was the effect of the world’s first holy war.

For there had been, in this otherwise obscure and unmemorable campaign, the hint of something fateful. Darius, testing the potential of his religion to its limits, had promoted a dramatic innovation. Contained within it were the seeds of some radical notions: that foreign foes might be crushed as infidels; that warriors might be promised paradise; that conquest in the name of a god might become a moral duty. Not that Darius, even as he ordered the invasion of Elam, had ever aimed to impose his religion at the point of a sword; such an idea was wholly alien to the spirit of the times. Nevertheless, a new age was dawning—and Darius was its midwife. His vision of empire as a fusion of cosmic, moral and political order was to prove stunningly fruitful: the foundation stone not only of his own rule but of the very concept of a universal order. The dominion raised by Cyrus, having been preserved from dissolution, was now, in effect, to be founded a second time—and a global monarchy, secured anew, was to spell a global peace.

For, earth-shaking though Darius’ usurpation had proved to be, it had never been his intention to turn the whole world upside-down. Just the opposite. The ancient kingdoms of the Near East, having had their last hour of rebellion, were now finished as international players; yet Darius, the man responsible for their quietus, still indulged their specters. Brutal though the Persians could be when required, violent revolution was hardly their ideal. The new king, even as he set about constructing his new order, fitted and adorned it with the cladding of the past. A pharaoh still reigned in Egypt; a king of Babylon in Mesopotamia; a self-proclaimed heir of the house of Astyages in Media. Darius was all these things, and more. “King of Kings”:²⁰ such was the title he most gloried in, less because he viewed foreign kingdoms as his fiefdoms—although he did—but rather because it gratified him to pose as the quintessence of royalty. All the monarchies there had ever been were to be regarded as enshrined within his person. He was the Great King.

And there was no one left undiminished. Even his former peers, even those possessed of the most famous and honored names in Persia, even the six other conspirators, all were ranked merely as “bandaka”—as servitors of the king. The nobility, decimated by civil war, and intimidated by Darius’ battle-hardened armies, no longer dared dispute the pretensions of royal power. Darius himself, who had not passed the first months of his reign in Babylon for nothing, moved swiftly to drive this home. At Susa, capital of the defeated Elamites, orders were given to flatten much of the old town and construct an immense new royal city, one raised in contempt of the site itself; for it was built not upon natural contours but on an artificially leveled surface, an immense foundation block of gravel and baked brick. Darius, not content with building one new capital from scratch, then began scouting round virgin sites in Persia itself, looking to found a second and even greater one. He settled upon a location some twenty miles south of Pasargadae, a city which, although Darius continued to honor it, was too associated with Cyrus ever to serve him as his own. Darius wanted a stage that was his and his alone; and he had fixed upon a site already lit up by his glory. This was the Mount of Mercy, a name not without irony, for it was at its foot that Vahyazdata and the rebel nobles had been impaled. Now, abutting the slope of the mountain, Darius ordered the construction of a gigantic terrace, a platform with perfect views on to the killing field below, “beautiful and impervious”²¹—a fitting base for the capital of the world.

Darius named it “Paarsa,” as though all the expanse of Persia were to be shrunk and maintained within its walls. And so, in a sense, it was. The king’s appetite for centralization was insatiable. The city which the Greeks would much later call Persepolis was built as nerve center, powerhouse and showcase. Not only Persia but the realms of the vast dominion beyond it were to be unified into one immense administrative unit, focused, as was only natural, upon the figure of the king himself. Darius had not spent the first years of his reign shoring up the empire for nothing; and he was resolved never again to see it threatened by collapse. With his habitual energy, he threw himself into the most overwhelming task of administration that any monarch had ever faced: nothing less than to set the world upon a sound financial footing. This was the same challenge that had destroyed both Cambyses and Bardiya; but Darius’ talents, once again, were to prove the equal of his ambition. The financial crisis that had racked the empire in the last year of Cambyses’ reign was briskly resolved: the ramshackle system of tribute that had prevailed under Cyrus and his sons was streamlined and reformed; levies in every province, to the far ends of the known world, were carefully fixed. It was an unprecedented achievement, and one destined to endure for almost two centuries as the bedrock of Persian power. Even more than his generalship or his genius for propaganda, it was Darius’ punctilious mastery of fiscal policy that pulled the empire back from the brink. If the rising splendors of Persepolis and Susa spoke loudly of his dominance, then so too, as they glided among the building works, loaded down with parchments, tablets and tables of figures, did the bureaucrats who staffed the royal palaces. The Persian nobles, sneering behind Darius’ back, may have mocked their king as a “shopkeeper,”²²—but the empire, and Persia’s greatness, would have been nothing without accounts.

A truth illustrated by the very fabric of the palaces themselves—for tribute receipts to the Great King were not merely the stuff of dusty archives, but of splendid and sacred drama. During his months in Babylon, Darius would have seen how much of that city’s greatness, from the fittings of its palaces to the many languages on its streets, bore witness to the scale of its vanished empire. It was only proper, then, that Susa and Persepolis, as the capitals of a dominion incalculably more extensive than that of Babylon, should have lavished on them “materials brought from afar.”²³ Here, as it was designed to be, glimmered a comprehensive trumping of the magnificence of every king who had gone before. If furnishings could be reckoned the measure of greatness, then Darius, with his grands projets, had hit unprecedented heights. “The gold was brought from Sardis, and from Bactria, and fashioned by craftsmen here, and the precious stones that were used here, lapis lazuli and carnelian, these were brought from Sogdiana.” So visitors to Susa were grandly informed. “The silver and ebony was brought from India, and the friezes on the walls, they were brought from Ionia, and the ivory that was carved here, that came from Ethiopia, and India, and Arachosia.”²⁴ And so on and on, in rolling tones of house-pride, the record of tribute or labor drawn from twenty-three territories of the empire. Never before had the details of tax returns made for quite such a dazzling show.

And what of the Babylonians, whose city had previously been the capital of the world? Their allotted task was to dig foundations and bake mud bricks. Not the most glamorous responsibilities, it might be thought; but Darius, when he came to enumerate the various subject peoples who had contributed to Susa, put the men of Babylon at the head of the list. “That the earth was dug out, and the rubble packed down, and the sun-dried bricks were moulded, this was due to the Babylonians—they performed these tasks.”²⁵ The symbolism was profound, and—Darius being Darius—no doubt deliberate. As he would well have known, it was the practice in Mesopotamia never to clear away the rubble of toppled monuments, but always to seal it before raising new structures on top of the ruins. A temple, for instance, even though it might tower into the heavens, would be founded on the detritus of the past. And so it was with the palaces of the Great King.

Resting on massive terraces of Babylonian brickwork, and adorned with the luxuries and treasures of the world, Susa and Persepolis might not have been the dwelling homes of gods, but they still enshrined an imperiously spiritual vision. Where Babylon seethed with an energy that derived from its own awesome size, the capitals of the Persian monarch, modeled according to their founder’s every whim, held up splendid mirrors to the harmonies of order. This is not to say that they were wholly lacking in metropolitan character: already, even before the foundation of Persepolis, that ubiquitous banking family, the Egibis, had opened an office in the area, soon to be followed by other merchants and financiers; bureaucrats swarmed everywhere; craftsmen and laborers, transported from all corners of the world, brought their own hint of babel to the streets. But Persepolis and Susa were not, in the febrile sense that Babylon was, cosmopolitan; nor had it ever been part of Darius’ ambitions that they should be so. It did not require the Great King to emerge from his palace into a stinking mass of humanity for him to flaunt and represent his sway. The detail of a tax payment, safely logged inside an archive; the glinting on a palace door of rare and precious metals, quarried from an incalculably distant mountain range; the portrayal on a frieze of some humble tributary—an Arab, or an Ethiopian, or a Gandharan—his submission forever frozen by the pattern of the design; all these spoke with perfect clarity of the timeless nature of Persian power. Significant as the bloody practicalities of imperial rule were to Darius, so also was their shadow, his sacral vision of a universal state, one in which all his vast dominion had been imposed for the conquered’s good. The covenant embodied by Persian rule could not have been made any clearer: harmony in exchange for humility; protection for abasement; the blessings of a world order for obedience and submission. This was, of course, in comparison to the propaganda of the great empires of Mesopotamia, notably lacking in a relish for slaughter—but it did serve very effectively to justify global conquest without limit.

For the logic was glaring. If it was the destiny of the Persian people to bring peace to a bleeding world, then those who defied them were clearly the agents of anarchy and darkness. Tools of the Lie as they were, they menaced not merely Darius’ empire but the cosmos that it mirrored. Even the earth and sky, on occasions, might manifest their revulsion for the foes of the Great King. In 519 BC, one year after the suppression of the Elamites’ revolt, a fresh uprising broke out on the empire’s northern frontier, among those inveterate rebels, the Saka. Darius, leading an army against them, was betrayed by his guide, and found himself lost and parched amid the bleak steppes. With no water for miles, nor any hint of rain, the king had little choice but to take desperate measures: climbing to the summit of a hill, he duly divested himself of his robes and kidaris, and thrust his scepter in the ground. As dawn broke, purging the shadows of darkness from the earth, the King of Kings raised his voice in his prayer. His appeals were answered: rain began to fall from the sky; the earth was refreshed by water. Darius, gathering the accoutrements of royalty, then led his army to victory over the rebels. For the Persians, the adventure could hardly have had a more inspiring theme: it taught that there was nowhere so remote that it could not be ordered and tamed. “From this side of the ocean to the far side of the ocean, and from this side of the parched land to the far side of the parched land,”²⁶ Darius ruled it all.

Admittedly, unprecedented though the Great King’s reach was, it did not yet quite embrace every limit of the world. Beyond the Jaxartes, the steppelands of Asia still stretched unconquered to the remote, encircling River Rangha; in Africa, a Persian army, dispatched westward by Cambyses, had been swallowed whole by a desert storm;*⁷ in Europe, across the sea from the cities of Ionia, an entire strange continent, as yet barely even explored, was waiting to be penetrated and subdued. But the time of these remote and savage lands would surely come. There could be no holding back the armies of the Great King. Order would be brought to the final strongholds of the Lie. No sooner had Darius returned from defeating the Saka than he was looking to make fresh conquests. In 518 BC, gazing eastward, he dispatched a naval squadron to reconnoiter the mysterious lands along the Indus. Invasion swiftly followed; the Punjab was subdued; a tribute of gold dust, elephants and similar wonders was imposed. Even the great river itself was placed symbolically under the yoke: its waters were brought to Darius in an immense jar, and placed in his treasury, there to join the waters of other rivers, likewise held captive to the greater glory of the King.²⁷

It was true that there lay still further lands beyond the Indus, as yet independent of Persian rule; but even these, though not formally constituted into a province, might still be blessed by the favor of the king. All that petitioners had to do was to deliver to him a tribute of earth and water, and then, in return, they might be warmed by the light of his attention. Solemn and awe-inspiring ritual accompanied the presentation of these gifts. Supplicants, swearing their oath of loyalty to Persia, would have to do so prostrate on the scattered soil of their own land. In this way the Great King symbolized that the works of nature, as well as man, had been absorbed into his order—the better for everyone. The supplicants themselves, withdrawing from the dreadful presence of the king, could have no possible doubts as to the significance of the gesture they had performed. They had taken a step from which there could be no retreat. They had become a part, however humble, of the empire of the world.

It did not take the armies of the Great King, then, to expand the limits of Persian power. Westward as well as eastward they continued their advance; over sea as well as land. Around the time of the conquest of the Punjab, Otanes, Darius’ one-time rival for the throne, had been cruising the eastern waters of the Aegean. The island of Samos had been formally absorbed into the empire; neighboring islands, as they looked to forestall the Persian fleet, began to contemplate making gifts of earth and water to the ambassadors of the King. Here, for Darius, was a development of much promise. With the rich plains of the Indus pacified, his attentions could now be turned to the opposite end of his dominion. Two continents had already submitted to his supremacy—why should not a third?

The gaze of the Great King, inexorably, began to fix itself on the West.