by Will Durant
At Ecbatana*—i.e., “a meeting-place of many ways”—in a picturesque valley made fertile by the melting snows of the highlands, their first king, Deioces, founded their first capital, adorning and dominating it with a royal palace spread over an area two-thirds of a mile square. According to an uncorroborated passage in Herodotus, Deioces achieved power by acquiring a reputation for justice, and having achieved power, became a despot. He issued regulations “that no man should be admitted to the King’s presence, but every one should consult him by means of messengers; and moreover, that it should be accounted indecency for any one to laugh or spit before him. He established such ceremony about his person for this reason, . . . that he might appear to be of a different nature to them who did not see him.”3 Under his leadership the Medes, strengthened by their natural and frugal life, and hardened by custom and environment to the necessities of war, became a threat to the power of Assyria—which repeatedly invaded Media, thought it most instructively defeated, and found it in fact never tired of fighting for its liberty. The greatest of the Median kings, Cyaxares, settled the matter by destroying Nineveh. Inspired by this victory, his army swept through western Asia to the very gates of Sardis, only to be turned back by an eclipse of the sun. The opposing leaders, frightened by this apparent warning from the skies, signed a treaty of peace, and sealed it by drinking each other’s blood.4 In the next year Cyaxares died, having in the course of one reign expanded his kingdom from a subject province into an empire embracing Assyria, Media and Persia. Within a generation after his death this empire came to an end.
Its tenure was too brief to permit of any substantial contribution to civilization, except in so far as it prepared for the culture of Persia. To Persia the Medes gave their Aryan language, their alphabet of thirty-six characters, their replacement of clay with parchment and pen as writing materials,5 their extensive use of the column in architecture, their moral code of conscientious husbandry in time of peace and limitless bravery in time of war, their Zoroastrian religion of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, their patriarchal family and polygamous marriage, and a body of law sufficiently like that of the later empire to be united with it in the famous phrase of Daniel about “the law of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not.”6 Of their literature and their art not a stone or a letter remains.
Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages, who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied. He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways; wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry, the very horses were often caparisoned in gold.7 These once simple and pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees,8 now rode in expensive chariots from feast to feast. The early kings had prided themselves on justice; but Astyages, being displeased with Harpagus, served up to him the dismembered and headless body of his own son, and forced him to eat of it.9 Harpagus ate, saying that whatever a king did was agreeable to him; but he revenged himself by helping Cyrus to depose Astyages. When Cyrus, the brilliant young ruler of the Median dependency of Anshan, in Persia, rebelled against the effeminate despot of Ecbatana, the Medes themselves welcomed Cyrus’ victory, and accepted him, almost without protest, as their king. By one engagement Media ceased to be the master of Persia, Persia became the master of Media, and prepared to become master of the whole Near Eastern world.
II. THE GREAT KINGS
The romantic Cyrus—His enlightened policies—Cambyses—Darius the Great—The invasion of Greece
Cyrus was one of those natural rulers at whose coronation, as Emerson said, all men rejoice. Royal in spirit and action, capable of wise administration as well as of dramatic conquest, generous to the defeated and loved by those who had been his enemies—no wonder the Greeks made him the subject of innumerable romances, and—to their minds—the greatest hero before Alexander. It is a disappointment to us that we cannot draw a reliable picture of him from either Herodotus or Xenophon. The former has mingled many fables with his history,10 while the other has made the Cyropædia an essay on the military art, with incidental lectures on education and philosophy; at times Xenophon confuses Cyrus and Socrates. These delightful stories being put aside, the figure of Cyrus becomes merely an attractive ghost. We can only say that he was handsome—since the Persians made him their model of physical beauty to the end of their ancient art;11 that he established the Achæmenid Dynasty of “Great Kings,” which ruled Persia through the most famous period of its history; that he organized the soldiery of Media and Persia into an invincible army, captured Sardis and Babylon, ended for a thousand years the rule of the Semites in western Asia, and absorbed the former realms of Assyria, Babylonia, Lydia and Asia Minor into the Persian Empire, the largest political organization of pre-Roman antiquity, and one of the best-governed in history.
So far as we can visualize him through the haze of legend, he was the most amiable of conquerors, and founded his empire upon generosity. His enemies knew that he was lenient, and they did not fight him with that desperate courage which men show when their only choice is to kill or die. We have seen how, according to Herodotus, he rescued Croesus from the funeral pyre at Sardis, and made him one of his most honored counselors; and we have seen how magnanimously he treated the Jews. The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship—that religion is stronger than the state. Instead of sacking cities and wrecking temples he showed a courteous respect for the deities of the conquered, and contributed to maintain their shrines; even the Babylonians, who had resisted him so long, warmed towards him when they found him preserving their sanctuaries and honoring their pantheon. Wherever he went in his unprecedented career he offered pious sacrifice to the local divinities. Like Napoleon he accepted indifferently all religions, and—with much better grace—humored all the gods.
Like Napoleon, too, he died of excessive ambition. Having won all the Near East, he began a series of campaigns aimed to free Media and Persia from the inroads of central Asia’s nomadic barbarians. He seems to have carried these excursions as far as the Jaxartes on the north and India on the east. Suddenly, at the height of his curve, he was slain in battle with the Massagetæ, an obscure tribe that peopled the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Like Alexander he conquered an empire, but did not live to organize it.
One great defect had sullied his character—occasional and incalculable cruelty. It was inherited, unmixed with Cyrus’ generosity, by his half-mad son. Cambyses began by putting to death his brother and rival, Smerdis; then, lured by the accumulated wealth of Egypt, he set forth to extend the Persian Empire to the Nile. He succeeded, but apparently at the cost of his sanity. Memphis was captured easily, but an army of fifty thousand Persians sent to annex the Oasis of Ammon perished in the desert, and an expedition to Carthage failed because the Phoenician crews of the Persian fleet refused to attack a Phoenician colony. Cambyses lost his head, and abandoned the wise clemency and tolerance of his father. He publicly scoffed at the Egyptian religion, and plunged his dagger derisively into the bull revered by the Egyptians as the god Apis; he exhumed mummies and pried into royal tombs regardless of ancient curses; he profaned the temples and ordered their idols to be burned. He thought in this way to cure the Egyptians of superstition; but when he was stricken with illness—apparently epileptic convulsions—the Egyptians were certain that their gods had punished him, and that their theology was now confirmed beyond dispute. As if again to illustrate the inconveniences of monarchy, Cambyses, with a Napoleonic kick in the stomach, killed his sister and wife Roxana, slew his son Prexaspes with an arr
ow, buried twelve noble Persians alive, condemned Croesus to death, repented, rejoiced to learn that the sentence had not been carried out, and punished the officers who had delayed in executing it.12 On his way back to Persia he learned that a usurper had seized the throne and was being supported by widespread revolution. From that moment he disappears from history; tradition has it that he killed himself.13
The usurper had pretended to be Smerdis, miraculously preserved from Cambyses’ fratricidal jealousy; in reality he was a religious fanatic, a devotee of the early Magian faith who was bent upon destroying Zoroastrianism, the official religion of the Persian state. Another revolution soon deposed him, and the seven aristocrats who had organized it raised one of their number, Darius, son of Hystaspes, to the throne. In this bloody way began the reign of Persia’s greatest king.
Succession to the throne, in Oriental monarchies, was marked not only by palace revolutions in strife for the royal power, but by uprisings in subject colonies that grasped the chance of chaos, or an inexperienced ruler, to reclaim their liberty. The usurpation and assassination of “Smerdis” gave to Persia’s vassals an excellent opportunity: the governors of Egypt and Lydia refused submission, and the provinces of Susiana, Babylonia, Media, Assyria, Armenia, Sacia and others rose in simultaneous revolt. Darius subdued them with a ruthless hand. Taking Babylon after a long siege, he crucified three thousand of its leading citizens as an inducement to obedience in the rest; and in a series of swift campaigns he “pacified” one after another of the rebellious states. Then, perceiving how easily the vast empire might in any crisis fall to pieces, he put off the armor of war, became one of the wisest administrators in history, and set himself to reëstablish his realm in a way that became a model of imperial organization till the fall of Rome. His rule gave western Asia a generation of such order and prosperity as that quarrelsome region had never known before.
He had hoped to govern in peace, but it is the fatality of empire to breed repeated war. For the conquered must be periodically reconquered, and the conquerors must keep the arts and habits of camp and battlefield; and at any moment the kaleidoscope of change may throw up a new empire to challenge the old. In such a situation wars must be invented if they do not arise of their own accord; each generation must be inured to the rigors of campaigns, and taught by practice the sweet decorum of dying for one’s country.
Perhaps it was in part for this reason that Darius led his armies into southern Russia, across the Bosphorus and the Danube to the Volga, to chastise the marauding Scythians; and again across Afghanistan and a hundred mountain ranges into the valley of the Indus, adding thereby extensive regions and millions of souls and rupees to his realm. More substantial reasons must be sought for his expedition into Greece. Herodotus would have us believe that Darius entered upon this historic faux pas because one of his wives, Atossa, teased him into it in bed;14 but it is more dignified to believe that the King recognized in the Greek city-states and their colonies a potential empire, or an actual confederacy, dangerous to the Persian mastery of western Asia. When Ionia revolted and received aid from Sparta and Athens, Darius reconciled himself reluctantly to war. All the world knows the story of his passage across the Ægean, the defeat of his army at Marathon, and his gloomy return to Persia. There, amid far-flung preparations for another attempt upon Greece, he suddenly grew weak, and died.
III. PERSIAN LIFE AND INDUSTRY
The empire—The people—The language—The peasants—The imperial highways—Trade and finance
At its greatest extent, under Darius, the Persian Empire included twenty provinces or “satrapies,” embracing Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia, Lydia, Phrygia, Ionia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Armenia, Assyria, the Caucasus, Babylonia, Media, Persia, the modern Afghanistan and Baluchistan, India west of the Indus, Sogdiana, Bactria, and the regions of the Massagetæ and other central Asiatic tribes. Never before had history recorded so extensive an area brought under one government.
Persia itself, which was to rule these forty million souls for two hundred years, was not at that time the country now known to us as Persia, and to its inhabitants as Iran; it was that smaller tract, immediately east of the Persian Gulf, known to the ancient Persians as Pars, and to the modern Persians as Fars or Farsistan.15 Composed almost entirely of mountains and deserts, poor in rivers, subject to severe winters and hot, arid summers,* it could support its two million inhabitants17 only through such external contributions as trade or conquest might bring. Its race of hardy mountaineers came, like the Medes, of Indo-European stock perhaps from South Russia; and its language and early religion reveal its close kinship with those Aryans who crossed Afghanistan to become the ruling caste of northern India. Darius I, in an inscription at Naksh-i-Rustam, described himself as “a Persian, the son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan descent.” The Zoroastrians spoke of their primitive land as Airyana-vaejo—“the Aryan home.”† Strabo applied the name Ariana to what is now called by essentially the same word—Iran.18
The Persians were apparently the handsomest people of the ancient Near East. The monuments picture them as erect and vigorous, made hardy by their mountains and yet refined by their wealth, with a pleasing symmetry of features, an almost Greek straightness of nose, and a certain nobility of countenance and carriage. They adopted for the most part the Median dress, and later the Median ornaments. They considered it indecent to reveal more than the face; clothing covered them from turban, fillet or cap to sandals or leather shoes. Triple drawers, a white under-garment of linen, a double tunic, with sleeves hiding the hands, and a girdle at the waist, kept the population warm in winter and hot in summer. The king distinguished himself with embroidered trousers of a crimson hue, and saffron-buttoned shoes. The dress of the women differed from that of the men only in a slit at the breast. The men wore long beards and hung their hair in curls, or, later, covered it with wigs.19 In the wealthier days of the empire men as well as women made much use of cosmetics; creams were employed to improve the complexion, and coloring matter was applied to the eyelids to increase the apparent size and brilliance of the eyes. A special class of “adorners,” called kosmetai by the Greeks, arose as beauty experts to the aristocracy. The Persians were connoisseurs in scents, and were believed by the ancients to have invented cosmetic creams. The king never went to war without a case of costly unguents to ensure his fragrance in victory or defeat.20
Many languages have been used in the long history of Persia. The speech of the court and the nobility in the days of Darius I was Old Persian—so closely related to Sanskrit that evidently both were once dialects of an older tongue, and were cousins to our own.* Old Persian developed on the one hand into Zend—the language of the Zend-Avesta—and on the other hand into Pahlavi, a Hindu tongue from which has come the Persian language of today.22 When the Persians took to writing they adopted the Babylonian cuneiform for their inscriptions, and the Aramaic alphabetic script for their documents.23 They simplified the unwieldly syllabary of the Babylonians from three hundred characters to thirty-six signs which gradually became letters instead of syllables, and constituted a cuneiform alphabet.24 Writing, however, seemed to the Persians an effeminate amusement, for which they could spare little time from love, war and the chase. They did not condescend to produce literature.
The common man was contentedly illiterate, and gave himself completely to the culture of the soil. The Zend-Avesta exalted agriculture as the basic and noblest occupation of mankind, pleasing above all other labors to Ahura-Mazda, the supreme god. Some of the land was tilled by peasant proprietors, who occasionally joined several families in agricultural cooperatives to work extensive areas together.25 Part of the land was owned by feudal barons, and cultivated by tenants in return for a share of the crop; part of it was tilled by foreign (never Persian) slaves. Oxen pulled a plough of wood armed with a metal point. Artificial irrigation drew water from the mountains to the fields. Barley and wheat were the staple crops and foods, but much meat was eaten and much wine drunk. Cyru
s served wine to his army,26 and Persian councils never undertook serious discussions of policy when sober†—though they took care to revise their decisions the next morning. One intoxicating drink, the haoma, was offered as a pleasant sacrifice to the gods, and was believed to engender in its addicts not excitement and anger, but righteousness and piety.28
Industry was poorly developed in Persia; she was content to let the nations of the Near East practice the handicrafts while she bought their products with their imperial tribute. She showed more originality in the improvement of communications and transport. Engineers under the instructions of Darius I built great roads uniting the various capitals; one of these highways, from Susa to Sardis, was fifteen hundred miles long. The roads were accurately measured by parasangs (3.4 miles); and at every fourth parasang, says Herodotus, “there are royal stations and excellent inns, and the whole road is through an inhabited and safe country.”29 At each station a fresh relay of horses stood ready to carry on the mail, so that, though the ordinary traveler required ninety days to go from Susa to Sardis, the royal mail moved over the distance as quickly as an automobile party does now—that is, in a little less than a week. The larger rivers were crossed by ferries, but the engineers could, when they wished, throw across the Euphrates, even across the Hellespont, substantial bridges over which hundreds of sceptical elephants could pass in safety. Other roads led through the Afghanistan passes to India, and made Susa a half-way house to the already fabulous riches of the East. These roads were built primarily for military and governmental purposes, to facilitate central control and administration; but they served also to stimulate commerce and the exchange of customs, ideas, and the indispensable superstitions of mankind. Along these roads, for example, angels and the Devil passed from Persian into Jewish and Christian mythology.