Persian Fire (14 page)

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, modelled 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 labourers, 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, andfound 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 sceptre 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 westwards by Cambyses, had been swallowed whole by a desert storm;
[1]
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 eastwards, he dispatched a naval squadron to reconnoitre 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 favour 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 symbolised 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. Westwards as well as eastwards 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; neighbouring 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.

'Who Are the Spartans?'

Back in the early years of the Persian rise to greatness, while Cyrus was still in Lydia, he had found himself unexpectedly visited by a delegation from across the Aegean Sea. The ambassadors were Greek, but quite different from the Greeks of Asia, whose cities, prosperous and tempting, Cyrus was plotting at that very moment to crush and make his own. The strangers wore their hair long; they sported distinctive red cloaks; they spoke not with the subtlety and sense of propriety that conventionally marked an ambassador's language, but brusquely, bluntly, rudely. The message they gave the greatest king on earth was simple: Cyrus should leave the cities of the Ionians well alone; if he did not, then he would have to answer to those who had sent them — the Spartans. Evidently, the strangers felt that the mere mention of this name was sufficient to chill the blood, for they added nothing more. Cyrus, turning from them, was obliged to summon a nearby Ionian attendant. 'Tell me,' he demanded, all bemusement, 'who are the Spartans?'
¹

A startling question for any Greek to have to answer. How could an Asiatic
not
have heard of the Spartans? Nothing could better have illustrated the remote and alien quality of the Persians than the fact that they were ignorant of history's most notorious woman. Helen of Sparta, hundreds of years before, had brought ruin to Asia as well as Greece. Her abduction from the home of her husband, King Menelaus, to the fabled city of Troy had made all the world bleed. For ten long years, the heroes of East and West had butchered each other in the dust of the Trojan plain. Only with the annihilation of what, in the opinion of the Greeks, had been Asia's greatest city, the slaughter of its men and the enslavement of its women, had the terrible war at last been brought to an end. To the descendants of the victors, there had been, in the sheer scale of the destruction, something sobering and fearful: after all, 'an immense expeditionary force had been assembled, Asia invaded and Trojan power wiped out, merely for the sake of a single Spartan woman'. No wonder that many Greeks, and particularly those who actually lived on the margins of Asia, imagined the whole vastness of the East to be sullen still with resentment, brooding on ancient wrongs. Perched precariously as they were on the edge of the great continent, the Ionians had good cause to fear the vengeful shadows of the Trojan dead.

To the Spartans themselves, however, the memory of their city's most famous daughter was precious. Menelaus, it was said, searching for Helen amid the final massacre of the Trojans, had been planning to add her to the piles of corpses, a fitting punishment for all the slaughter she had caused — but when at last he had found his wife, rather than kill her, he had instead dropped his sword, struck dumb by the perfection of her naked breasts, and swept her up into his arms. Both had returned to Sparta, and their tomb could still be seen on a promontory south of the city, its immense stone blocks raised on earth as red as Menelaus' hair. Helen herself, 'that radiance of women','
¹
had been altogether more aureate than her husband: not only had she been a blonde, but even her spindle had been fashioned out of gold. Had Cyrus known that the Spartans worshipped at the shrine of such a woman, sensual and pleasure-loving, he would no doubt have been confirmed in his contempt for their ridiculous pretensions. Certainly, their ambassadors, long-haired and scarlet-cloaked

as they were, would have appeared apt devotees of Helen; for Cyrus would have had sufficient opportunity to learn that the wearing of long hair, among the Greeks, was generally regarded as evidence of effeminacy, and the use of expensive vermilion as a mark of wild extravagance. The Persians, unsurprisingly, chose to scorn the Spartan threats. Surely they could have little to fear from such a luxury-loving race?

Appearances, of course, could be deceptive; but it was true that once, in the earliest years of their history, the Spartans had indeed been notorious for their materialism and greed. 'Acquisitiveness will be their ruin' had been a common prediction.
⁴
Sparta, in the eighth and seventh centuries
bc
, had served as a model of everything that other Greeks hoped to avoid: her elite was brutal and rapacious; its land-hunger was obscene; the impoverishment of the average citizen, leeched of his patrimony and often even of his freedom, was something shocking. Appalled foreign analysts, observing the toxic quality of Sparta's class hatreds, had no hesitation in judging her 'the worst-governed state in Greece'.
⁵
And this at a time when competition was hardly lacking; for everywhere in the Greek world, by the seventh century
bc
, the gap between rich and poor, the few and the many, had begun to widen alarmingly, so that the ideal of good governance,
'eunomid
¹
as it was called, seemed a distant dream, and all was instability.