Persian Fire (37 page)

Darius had decided who that should be years previously.
⁶
One son of his in particular shone out from the crowd: Xerxes was not the oldest of the royal princes, but he had long been the Great King's heir apparent. Many circumstances had combined to win him this title. Most crucially of all, perhaps, Xerxes, unlike many of his half-brothers, had the right mix of blood flowing in his veins — for his mother was the imperious Atossa, the best-connected woman in the kingdom, widow of both Cambyses and Bardiya, and daughter of Cyrus the Great. Yet such a pedigree, although certainly an advantage, would hardly have been sufficient to win Xerxes his father's blessing had he not possessed manifold other qualities, too. As a graduate of the most exclusive education in the world, he would have more than demonstrated his proficiency in riding, the handling of weapons, and the wisdom of the Magi — 'for no man could be King of Persia who had failed to be instructed properly in that'.
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Likewise, in the hunt and on campaign, leading from the front, he would have given ample evidence of his personal bravery. Perhaps the clincher, however, was that Xerxes, tall and handsome,
looked
a king. This was a crucial consideration: the Persians were a people so obsessed by physical appearance that every nobleman kept a make-up artist in his train; the must-have fashion item was a pair of platform heels; and false beards and moustaches were so valued, that the exchequer ranked them as taxable items. Not even Xerxes' father could compare with the prince for good looks: for Darius, who was otherwise reckoned a strikingly handsome man, had arms like a gibbon's 'that reached down to his knees'.
⁸
Xerxes suffered from no such physical peculiarities: 'both in his stature, and in the nobility of his bearing, there was no man who appeared more suited to the wielding of great power'.
⁹

So it was that when the ailing King of Kings, in the late autumn of 486
bc,
and before he could set out for Egypt, finally 'went away from the throne',
¹⁰
as the Persians euphemistically put it, Xerxes was able to succeed to the monarchy of the world without opposition. Nothing, perhaps, became Darius’ reign like the leaving it: in the contrast between the violent illegalities of his own accession and the stately
smoothness of his son's lay striking testimony to the order he had brought to his wide dominions. Coated with wax, laid upon a magnificently ornamented chariot, pulled by horses whose manes had all been cropped, the body of the dead king was borne from Persepolis amid scenes of awful mourning. Led by Xerxes himself, the whole population of the city spilled out after the bier, wailing and hacking at their hair, stumbling in the ostentation of their grief towards a distant line of rugged limestone cliffs, out of which, high up on the rock-face, had been carved the royal tomb. There the Great King was laid to rest; and all across Persepolis, and Persia, and every satrapy of the empire, wherever the blessings of Arta had been brought, the sacred fires kept alive for the thirty-six-year span of Darius' reign were solemnly extinguished, and the glowing embers left to fade away into dust.

The altars would not blaze into life again, and the reign of the new king officially begin, until Xerxes, proceeding northwards to Pasargadae, had been inducted into certain secrets which only the wisest of the Magi, and the king himself, were permitted to know. As part of this initiation, Xerxes was obliged first 'to divest himself of his own clothes, and put on a robe which Cyrus had worn before becoming king'," and then to down various foul concoctions prepared for him by the Magi, necromantic brews of curdled milk and sacred herbs. A sceptre was placed in his right hand; the
kidaris,
the fluted tiara of royalty, upon his head. Xerxes was then led into the glaring brightness of the Persian day. The satraps, the high officials, the expectant, swirling crowds, all of whom had assembled at Pasargadae for just this moment, now fell to the ground, prostrating themselves, as it was their duty and their honour to do, whenever graced by the presence of their king. Heir of Cyrus and chosen one of Ahura Mazda, Xerxes stood resplendent before the Persian people as both.

Not that he lingered long to enjoy the acclaim. LIrgent business awaited him. Taking up the reins of Darius' command, Xerxes was soon leaving his still festive capital for Egypt. descending on the rebels, he briskly demonstrated that he was indeed, just as his father had hoped he would prove to be, a chip off the old block: not only was the revolt
summarily crushed, but Xerxes, showing that same eye for constructive nepotism that his father had always practised to such advantage, installed there as satrap one of his numerous brothers. The Great King himself, even more militantly than Darius would have done, regarded this as a triumph not merely over mortal adversaries but over the far more sinister forces of cosmic evil. That countries where
daivas
were worshipped should be attacked and brought low; that their sanctuaries should be obliterated; that territories once given over to the Lie should be reconsecrated to the cause of Truth: this, throughout Xerxes' reign, was to be the guiding manifesto of the Persian people. Just in case there should be any doubt, inscriptions set up at Persepolis proclaimed it sternly to the world, reminding Xerxes' courtiers that there was no path of righteousness save for that set out by their king: 'The man who respects the Law given by Ahura Mazda, who worships Ahura Mazda and Arta with the reverence that they are both due, he will find happiness in life, and become one with the blessed after death.'
¹²
King of Kings though he was, 'King of Persia, King of the Lands', Xerxes never forgot that all his unexampled power had been entrusted to him for a holy and momentous purpose. The obligations laid upon his broad shoulders were hardly of the kind that might be shrugged off casually. Those who had chosen him to bear their heavy weight could not be disappointed. 'Darius had other sons', Xerxes freely confessed, 'but Darius my father made me the greatest one after himself And this, in turn, had been done as the expression of an even higher purpose: 'For all was done in accordance with the wishes of Ahura Mazda.'
¹³

Certainly, once Egypt h id been successfully pacified, there could be no question of neglecting the other great business left unfinished by-Darius' death. No sooner had Xerxes returned to Persia than any number of different interest groups, clamouring for the Great King's attention, began urging him to set in motion a new expedition, to push deeper into Europe,
10
punish Athens, to conquer Greece. Most insistent of all in the royal ear was Xerxes' cousin, Mardonius, long since recovered from the wound he had received in Thrace, and spoiling for a return to the Aegean, which he regarded as very much his personal sphere of expertise. Nor was he the only glory-hunter: one brother might have been installed in the pharaoh's palace, but there were any number of the Great King's other relatives eager to cut a dash, to prove their mettle, to revel in the glamour of high command. After all, conquering far-distant
'anairya'
was what being a Persian was all about.

Turning to his intelligence chiefs for information on the western front, Xerxes was gratified to be informed that all stood fair. Yes, Athens and Sparta remained implacably opposed to his ambitions, but the aristocracy in other areas of Greece — including, not least, the vital territory of Thessaly, just to the north of Boeotia and Thebes — would, so the intelligence chiefs reported, welcome any Persian invasion with open arms. Once Thessaly had fallen, Thebes herself and a host of other cities further south were bound to collaborate. Indeed, even Sparta and Athens might not be utterly lost causes — for Demaratus, comfortably ensconced at Susa, and the Pisistratids, now well into their third decade of life on the Persian payroll, could guarantee the support of a few clients still. The admirably proactive sons of Hippias, indeed, ventured to offer the Great King the support of the heavens themselves — 'describing to Xerxes how it was fore-ordained that a native of Persia should bridge the Hellespont, and expounding in detail on the triumphs that were bound to follow'.
¹
'
¹
Source of these confident assertions was none other than Onomacritus, that same charlatan who had once been an intimate of the tyrants back in Athens, until falling out with them over accusations that he had been doctoring prophecies. Perhaps he was not the most reliable source of information — but the Pisistratids had an exile's desperation to see their homeland again and had returned desperately, pathetically, to trusting his every word.

It is doubtful that the Persian high command had quite the same level of confidence in Onomacritus, but that hardly mattered. Already, within months of Xerxes' return from Egypt, the drive to war had become unstoppable. Those few doves opposed to the invasion found themselves powerless to halt it. If they did speak out, they were labelled cowards. Their warnings, however, despite impatient snorts from the war party, could not so easily be swept aside. That the Athenians, as they had proved at Marathon, were no push-over; that the provisioning of any task force was bound to prove onerous even for the Persians' practised bureaucrats; that the mountainous terrain of Greece was notoriously inhospitable: concerns such as these could hardly be dismissed as

defeatist scaremongering. Yet even the perils of the venture, for all that they might inspire the occasional spasm of hesitation in Xerxes, served in the end only to stiffen the royal resolve. To have shrunk from risk, to have confessed that Persian power might be susceptible to overstretch, to have abandoned Athens and the continent beyond her for ever to the Lie, such would have been an abject betrayal of Darius and, even more unforgivably, of the great Lord Mazda

Yes, the invasion was ripe with hazard — but then again, if it had not been, it would hardly have been a challenge worthy of the attentions of the King of Kings.

How best to meet it? Deep within the innermost sanctum of Persepolis — beyond the looming entrance halls carved in the form of colossal bulls with human heads and the wings of eagles, beyond the brightly painted courtyards manned by officious eunuchs, beyond even the thousand bodyguards stationed on perpetual duty outside their royal master's door, their long robes gem-studded, the butts of their spears adorned with delicate apples of gold - Xerxes' most trusted advisers assembled before the royal throne to offer their opinions. Although they were sequestered within the nerve centre of Persian power, what was spoken there would in due course come to be shrewdly guessed at, thanks to rumour and to the progress of events.
¹⁵
At issue, of course, once it had been resolved that the war should go ahead, was a single question: what kind of task force should be marshalled for the invasion and conquest of Greece?

It seems that Mardonius urged that only elite fighters — Persians themselves, Medes, Saka and East Iranians — be conscripted. Such a strike force, he argued, would be able to move like lightning, outpace any foe, descend upon the lumbering infantrymen of the enemy with the same murderous speed that had always proved so lethal to the Greeks of Ionia.
¹⁶
Yet this strategy, although modelled on glorious precedent, did have a major, indeed, an insuperable drawback. Times had changed: how could an army drawn from so few satrapies possibly be considered sufficient for the dignity of the man who was to command it? What might have served Cyrus in the days of his mountain banditry was hardly adequate for his grandson, who ruled the world. Xerxes, when he conquered the West, would do so not merely as the King of Persia, but as king of all the dominions that lay beyond it, too. The people of even the obscurest frontier had a sacred duty to pay him the tribute of their sons. And in their obedience would be reflected the peerless glory of their master, the King of Kings.

So it was settled. And perhaps, very faintly, above the issuing of the royal commands, could be heard from the great courtyard outside Xerxes' audience hall the chiselling of sculptors as they adorned a nearby staircase wall.'
⁷
Just like the steps themselves, which swept gracefully upwards at a height sufficiently shallow to permit a nobleman in his voluminous robes to ascend them without any impairment to his dignity, the work had to be delicate in the extreme — for the workmen had been commanded to portray, in row after finely detailed row, lines of subject peoples presenting treasure to the king. This, so far, was the most that Xerxes knew of many of his subjects, remote from Persia and savage as the majority of them were; yet now, as his messengers prepared to gallop to every corner of the empire, to rouse the satrapies and summon them to battle, he could look forward to seeing all the fabulous diversity of his tributaries gathered before him and armed for war. Indians in their cotton dhotis, with their tall bows made of cane; Ethiopians draped in leopard-skins, armed with arrows tipped with stone; Moschians wearing wooden helmets; Thracians with fox-skins wrapped around their heads; Cissians in turbans; Assyrians in linen corslets, wielding their studded clubs. All, as though they had emerged from the stone of Persepolis into exotic flesh and blood, would assemble before their master, and march with him against the West.