Persian Fire (28 page)

Not that the Persians' tolerance of foreigners and their peculiar habits in any way implied respect. Just as Cyrus, conquering Babylon, had felt free to claim the favour of a whole multitude of gods precisely because he believed in none of them, so too did Artaphernes, by appropriating the Lydians' traditions and twisting them to his own ends, display his appreciation of a bleak and baneful truth: the traditions that define a people, that they cling to, that they love, can also, if cunningly exploited by a conqueror, serve to enslave them. This maxim, applied by the Persians across the vast range of all their many satrapies, was one that underpinned their whole philosophy of empire. No elite anywhere, they liked to think, but it might somehow be seduced into submission.

And when no elite existed, one could always be imported from elsewhere. Cyrus, even as he flattered the Babylonians with the attentions he paid to Marduk, had not ignored the yearnings of the city's deportees, exiles such as the Judaeans, brought to Babylon decades previously — for the Persians had recognised in these wretched captives, and in their homesickness, a resource of great potential. Judaea was the pivot between Mesopotamia and Egypt; a land of such strategic significance might certainly be considered worth a small investment. Not only had Cyrus permitted the Judaeans to return to the weed-covered rubble of their homeland, but he had even paid for the rebuilding in Jerusalem of their obliterated Temple. Yahweh, the Judaeans' god, was said to have hailed the Persian king in gratitude as His 'anointed', His 'Christ',
⁴
and asserted that for the messiah of his chosen people the earth itself would prove the limit. 'I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut asunder the bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name.'
⁵

This comical notion, that Cyrus might somehow have owed all his greatness to the Judaeans' boastful god, was one that the Persians were nevertheless perfectly content to indulge; for they well understood the longing of a slave to believe himself his master's favourite. There was no greater source of self-contentment for a subject-nation, after all, and no surer badge of its continued servitude, than to imagine that it might have been graced by a special relationship with the king.
So it had always been: the Persians themselves, back in the days of
their nomadic insignificance, had hardly been oblivious to the magnificence of Mesopotamia. Now the masters of the world, they could still remember what it was like to experience the gravitational pull of wealth and power and glamour.
'The Greek upper classes too, long before the coming of the

Persians, had been intrigued by the golden splendours of the kingdoms of the East. Athletics and dinner-parties were not the only passions of their smart sets; as the decor on the Acropolis bore flamboyant witness, so too was anything that smacked of the Orient. If this was evident even in a backwater such as Athens, then how much more so back across the Aegean, on the shores of Asia itself, where the Ionians had for centuries been cultivating a taste for the exotic. 'In the
agora
you can see them, sporting their purple cloaks, soused in heady perfumes, tossing their exquisite locks.'
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Yet still the Ionians, to their masters, were an enigma — and a challenge. All they ever did, it seemed to the Persians, was quarrel. This interminable feuding, which had helped immensely when it came to conquering them, also made them a uniquely wearisome people to rule. Where the Lydians had their bureaucrats and the Judaeans their priests, the Greeks seemed to have only treacherous and floating factions.

As a result, even with their aptitude for psychological profiling, the Persians struggled to get a handle on their Ionian subjects. True, some advisers in Sardis held out high hopes for the priests of Apollo, identifying them as the nearest thing the Greeks had to an order like the Magi, and recommending lavish patronage of their shrines as a possible means to winning Ionian hearts. Enthusiasm for such a policy went all the way to the top, for even Darius himself might fire off a stinging rebuke if it were reported to him that his officials had been infringing Apollo's prerogatives. Yet the king was to be sorely disappointed if he hoped thereby to recruit the Greeks' god of light to the sacred cause of'Arta'. It was simply not in Apollo's character to offer his worshippers lectures on the truth. As at Delphi, so at his great oracle of Didyma on the south Aegean coast, he much preferred to speak in teasing riddles — which was at least an improvement on the behaviour of his fellow Olympian, Athena, who positively delighted in sponsoring men with a talent for telling lies.

What ever were the Persians to make of such gods? Nothing, really, could have been more shocking to their sensibilities — unless it was the trend, among the more adventurous of the Ionian elite, to deny a divine plan for the universe at all. The first philosophers may have been raised within the Persian Empire, but they could hardly be considered supportive of the Great King's claims or ideals. Where Darius saw in the rise to power of his people certain evidence of the animating favour of Ahura Mazda, a daring Ionian might see only the operation of the principles of nature. As to the character of these principles, that was also the subject of heated debate. One sage might argue that the world was formed entirely out of air, thereby reducing the Persian Empire and all its works merely to the interplay between condensation and rarefaction. Another might press the counter-claim of Zoroaster's sacred element of fire, seeing in it, however, not the immanence of truth, or justice, or righteousness, but only a ceaseless flux. To such a philosopher, the belief that any profounder order might lie behind it was merely the stupidest pretension. 'All things are constituted from fire and all things will melt back into fire.'
⁷
Not much for a propagandist at the satrapal court to work with there.

Yet Artaphernes' dependence on tyrants to administer Ionia, forced on him by the lack of any obvious alternative, hardly served to set Persian power on a rock-solid footing, either. Indeed, it might have been designed to illustrate a theory much favoured by certain philosophers, and one that to them appeared simply an observable fact of life: that everything in the world was conflict and tension. Ionian noblemen, after all, were no more keen on being subjected to a tyranny than were their counterparts across the Aegean. The Persians, by favouring one faction over another, were inevitably sucked into the Ionian aristocracy's endless feuding. Whereas in Sardis they could base their administration upon an efficient and respectful bureaucracy, in Ionia they had to found it upon intrigue, factionalism and espionage. A Persian agent there had to prove himself quite as adept at back-stabbing as any Greek. For Artaphernes himself, the challenge was to pick winners, keep them in power until they had outgrown their usefulness, and then dispose of them with a minimum of fuss.

No wonder that his proteges, perfectly aware of the role they had been allotted within the satrap's scheme of things, felt themselves under an infinitely greater pressure than that which weighed upon their counterparts in Greece. Although clearly indispensable, Persian backing came at a perilous cost — for an Ionian tyrant had to deflect not only the jealousy of his peers but the suspicions of a turbulent and xenophobic lower class. While the aristocracy, suckers for Oriental chic, had proved themselves natural collaborators with their counterparts from the East, their countrymen retained an invincible contempt for foreigners of any kind. Thales, for instance, a man ranked by the Ionians as the most brilliant of their sages — as the first philosopher, indeed — was reckoned to have given a fine example of his wisdom by observing how grateful to Fate he was for three things: 'first, that I am not a beast but a man; second, not a female but a male; and third, not a foreigner but a Greek'.
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The Ionians liked to call their neighbours 'barbarians': people whose languages were gibberish; who went, 'bah, bah, bah'. This failure to speak Greek, self-evidently contemptible, was also widely believed to veil more sinister failings. Ionian suspicion of foreign habits long pre-dated the humiliation of conquest by the Persian king. The same Lydians so admired by upwardly mobile aristocrats back in the days of Croesus, for instance, had been widely despised by the vast majority of Ionians who were unable to afford purple cloaks, perfumes or golden supperware. Scandalous stories had been enthusiastically told of Croesus' predecessors, in particular. One, it was said, had patented female circumcision in an effort to economise on eunuchs; another had been in the habit of showing off his naked queen to voyeurs; yet another was claimed, revoltingly, to have developed a taste for cannibalism, and to have woken up one morning after a night of heavy drinking to find his wife's hand protruding from his mouth.

What kind of Greeks could choose to ape monsters such as these? Clearly, critics of the nobility liked to imply, only those who were perverts and degenerates themselves. Lydia, like her notoriously expert whores, was both diseased and predatory; those who surrendered to her embraces deserved all the scorn they got. Strip away the veil of barbarian delicacies so prized by the aristocracy — the silken eroticism, the refinements, the displays of wealth — and the reality would be an infinitely sordid one: the court at Sardis could fittingly be portrayed as a prostitute 'speaking Lydian', kneeling in a back alley, thrashing her client's testicles while shafting his dripping arse. 'The passageway reeked. Clouds of dung-beetles came whirring after the stench.'
⁹
A vile and shocking scene: fitting metaphor for a vile and shocking truth. The aristocracy were wallowing in shit — and tyrants, the worst offenders, were in it up to their necks.

Which left the tyrants themselves with an invidious choice: either to rule as quislings or to be lynched by angry mobs. If they were to be given the opportunity to strike a devastating blow against their overlords — even, perhaps, to finish off the King of Kings himself — what then? A fantastical hypothetical — except that, back in 513
bc
, the question had suddenly become pressingly real.
¹⁰
Darius, fresh from his triumphs in India, had rolled into Sardis with a vast army, crossed from Asia into Europe, and then vanished north into what is now the Ukraine on a great raid against the Scythians. The various Greek tyrants, ordered to play their part in the Persian war effort, had been sent with their squadrons into the Black Sea to build a pontoon bridge across the mouth of the Danube and await their royal master's return. Among them, recently brought under the Persian yoke and not very happy about it, had been the Athenian aristocrat, Miltiades the Philaid, tyrant of the Chersonese. Counting the weeks and watching the skies turn steadily more leaden and icy, he had conceived an audacious plan. What if the Greeks, by cutting the bridge, were to strand Darius and his army on the Danube's freezing northern bank? Scythia was certainly no place to pass a winter. The snow storms were appalling, and the natives partial to drinking human blood. Conceivably, just conceivably, it lay within the power of the Ionians to doom the Great King's whole expedition. A dangerous, teasing thought — and by late autumn, with Persian outriders only days away, an increasingly urgent one, too. A conference of the tyrants had duly been convened. Miltiades had pressed his case. For a brief, intoxicating moment, the other Greeks had allowed themselves to be swayed; until reason, inglorious but pragmatic, had prevailed. After all, as every Ionian tyrant was perfectly aware, 'there was not one of them but he owed Darius his position as head of state'.
¹¹
So they had voted to stay loyal and to keep the bridge afloat. Discreetly suppressing any mention of the treachery they had been contemplating, the assembled tyrants — Miltiades included — had duly welcomed back their master. The prospect of liberty might have been sweet, but not so sweet, it appeared, when weighed in the balance, as the reality of power.

And for one Greek in particular, a man as sensitive to the opportunities opened up to him by Persian rule as any Lydian or Mede, that power was especially precious. Histiaeus, the chief opponent of Miltiades' braggadocio on the Danube, had spoken out as tyrant of the Aegean's sole world city, the acknowledged 'glory of Ionia',
¹²
Miletus. The birthplace of Thales, and of philosophy itself, the city was an economic as well as a cultural powerhouse. The port's four magnificent harbours, thronged with a great bobbing forest of masts — those of grain-ships from the Crimea, merchant-ships from Syria, from Egypt, from Italy, warships, sleek and menacing, from the Great King's own battle fleet — were unparalleled anywhere else in the Greek world as scenes of opulence and bustle. So prized was Miletus by the Persians, both as trading entrepot and naval base, that she enjoyed, in comparison to the other Ionian cities, a uniquely privileged form of vassalage, one that enabled her to pretend almost to the rank of ally. While being sure never to let this status go to his head, Histiaeus had nevertheless relished the advantages it had given him over his fellow tyrants — and the opportunity, above all else, to establish a personal relationship with the world's most powerful man.