by Will Durant
Matches were arranged by the parents on the arrival of their children at puberty. The range of choice was wide, for we hear of the marriage of brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son.116 Concubines were for the most part a luxury of the rich; the aristocracy never went to war without them.117 In the later days of the empire the king’s harem contained from 329 to 360 concubines, for it had become a custom that no woman might share the royal couch twice unless she was overwhelmingly beautiful.118
In the time of the Prophet the position of woman in Persia was high, as ancient manners went: she moved in public freely and unveiled; she owned and managed property, and could, like most modern women, direct the affairs of her husband in his name, or through his pen. After Darius her status declined, especially among the rich. The poorer women retained their freedom of movement, because they had to work; but in other cases the seclusion always enforced in the menstrual periods was extended to the whole social life of woman, and laid the foundations of the Moslem institution of purdah. Upper-class women could not venture out except in curtained litters, and were not permitted to mingle publicly with men; married women were forbidden to see even their nearest male relatives, such as their fathers or brothers. Women are never mentioned or represented in the public inscriptions and monuments of ancient Persia. Concubines had greater freedom, since they were employed to entertain their masters’ guests. Even in the later reigns women were powerful at the court, rivaling the eunuchs in the persistence of their plotting and the kings in the refinements of their cruelty.119*
Children as well as marriage were indispensable to respectability. Sons were highly valued as economic assets to their parents and military assets to the king; girls were regretted, for they had to be brought up for some other man’s home and profit. “Men do not pray for daughters,” said the Persians, “and angels do not reckon them among their gifts to mankind.”120 The king annually sent gifts to every father of many sons, as if in advance payment for their blood.121 Fornication, even adultery, might be forgiven if there was no abortion; abortion was a worse crime than the others, and was to be punished with death.122 One of the ancient commentaries, the Bundahish, specifies means for avoiding conception, but warns the people against them. “On the nature of generation it is said in Revelation that a woman when she cometh out from menstruation, during ten days and nights, when they go near unto her, readily becometh pregnant.”123
The child remained under the care of the women till five, and under the care of his father from five to seven; at seven he went to school. Education was mostly confined to the sons of the well-to-do, and was usually administered by priests. Classes met in the temple or the home of the priest; it was a principle never to have a school meet near a market-place, lest the atmosphere of lying, swearing and cheating that prevailed in the bazaars should corrupt the young.124 The texts were the Avesta and its commentaries; the subjects were religion, medicine or law; the method of learning was by commission to memory and by the rote recitation of long passages.125 Boys of the unpretentious classes were not spoiled with letters, but were taught only three things—to ride a horse, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.126 Higher education extended to the age of twenty or twenty-four among the sons of the aristocracy; some were especially prepared for public office or provincial administration; all were trained in the art of war. The life in these higher schools was arduous: the students rose early, ran great distances, rode difficult horses at high speed, swam, hunted, pursued thieves, sowed farms, planted trees, made long marches under a hot sun or in bitter cold, and learned to bear every change and rigor of climate, to subsist on coarse foods, and to cross rivers while keeping their clothes and armor dry.127 It was such a schooling as would have gladdened the heart of Friedrich Nietzsche in those moments when he could forget the bright and varied culture of ancient Greece.
VIII. SCIENCE AND ART
Medicine—Minor arts—The tombs of Cyrus and Darius—The palaces of Persepolis—The Frieze of the Archers—Estimate of Persian art
The Persians seem to have deliberately neglected to train their children in any other art than that of life. Literature was a delicacy for which they had small use; science was a commodity which they could import from Babylon. They had a certain relish for poetry and romantic fiction, but they left these arts to hirelings and inferiors, preferring the exhilaration of keen-witted conversation to the quiet and solitary pleasures of reading and research. Poetry was sung rather than read, and perished with the singers.
Medicine was at first a function of the priests, who practised it on the principle that the Devil had created 99,999 diseases, which should be treated by a combination of magic and hygiene. They resorted more frequently to spells than to drugs, on the ground that the spells, though they might not cure the illness, would not kill the patient—which was more than could be said for the drugs.128 Nevertheless lay medicine developed along with the growing wealth of Persia, and in the time of Artaxerxes II there was a well-organized guild of physicians and surgeons, whose fees were fixed by law—as in Hammurabi’s code—according to the social rank of the patient.129 Priests were to be treated free. And just as, among ourselves, the medical novice practises for a year or two, as interne, upon the bodies of the immigrant and the poor, so among the Persians a young physician was expected to begin his career by treating infidels and foreigners. The Lord of Light himself had decreed it:
O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One, if a worshiper of God wish to practice the art of healing, on whom shall he first prove his skill—on the worshipers of Ahura-Mazda, or on the worshipers of the Daevas (the evil spirits)? Ahura-Mazda made answer and said: On worshipers of the Daevas shall he prove himself, rather than on worshipers of God. If he treat with the knife a worshiper of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a second worshiper of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a third worshiper of the Daevas and he die, he is unfit forever and ever; let him never attend any worshiper of God. . . . If he treat with the knife a worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; if he treat with the knife a second worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; if he treat with the knife a third worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; then he is fit forever and ever; he may at his will treat worshipers of God, and heal them with the knife.130
Having dedicated themselves to empire, the Persians found their time and energies taken up with war, and, like the Romans, depended largely upon imports for their art. They had a taste for pretty things, but they relied upon foreign or foreign-born artists to produce them, and upon provincial revenues to pay for them. They had beautiful homes and luxuriant gardens, which sometimes became hunting-parks or zoological collections; they had costly furniture—tables plated or inlaid with silver or gold, couches spread with exotic coverlets, floors carpeted with rugs resilient in texture and rich in all the colors of earth and sky;131 they drank from golden goblets, and adorned their tables or their shelves with vases turned by foreign hands;* they liked song and dance, and the playing of the harp, the flute, the drum and the tambourine. Jewelry abounded, from tiaras and ear-rings to golden anklets and shoes; even the men flaunted jewels on necks and ears and arms. Pearls, rubies, emeralds and lapis lazuli came from abroad, but turquoise came from the Persian mines, and contributed the customary material for the aristocrat’s signet-ring. Gems of monstrous and grotesque form copied the supposed features of favorite devils. The king sat on a golden throne covered with golden canopies upheld with pillars of gold.133
Only in architecture did the Persians achieve a style of their own. Under Cyrus, Darius I and Xerxes I they erected tombs and palaces which archeology has very incompletely exhumed; and it may be that those prying historians, the pick and the shovel, will in the near future raise our estimate of Persian art.† At Pasargadae Alexander spared for us, with characteristic graciousness, the tomb of Cyrus I. The caravan road now crosses the bare platform that once bore the palaces of Cyrus and his mad son; of these nothing survives except a few broken c
olumns here and there, or a door-jamb bearing the features of Cyrus in bas-relief. Nearby, on the plain, is the tomb, showing the wear of twenty-four centuries: a simple stone chapel, quite Greek in restraint and form, rising to some thirty-five feet in height upon a terraced base. Once, surely, it was a loftier monument, with some fitting pedestal; today it seems a little bare and forlorn, having the shape but hardly the substance of beauty; the cracked and ruined stones merely chasten us with the quiet permanence of the inanimate. Far south, at Naksh-i-Rustam, near Persepolis, is the tomb of Darius I, cut like some Hindu chapel into the face of the mountain rock. The entrance is carved to simulate a palace façade, with four slender columns about a modest portal; above it, as if on a roof, figures representing the subject peoples of Persia support a dais on which the King is shown worshiping Ahura-Mazda and the moon. It is conceived and executed with aristocratic refinement and simplicity.
The rest of such Persian architecture as has survived the wars, raids, thefts and weather of two millenniums is composed of palace ruins. At Ecbatana the early kings built a royal residence of cedar and cypress, plated with metal, which still stood in the days of Polybius (ca. 150 B.C.), but of which no sign remains. The most imposing relics of ancient Persia, now rising day by day out of the grasping and secretive earth, are the stone steps, platform and columns at Persepolis; for there each monarch from Darius onward built a palace to defer the oblivion of his name. The great external stairs that mounted from the plain to the elevation on which the buildings rested were unlike anything else in architectural records; derived, presumably, from the flights of steps that approached and encircled the Mesopotamian ziggurats, they had nevertheless a character specifically their own—so gradual in ascent and so spacious that ten horsemen could mount them abreast*135 They must have formed a brilliant approach to the vast platform, twenty to fifty feet high, fifteen hundred feet long and one thousand feet wide, that bore the royal palaces.† Where the two flights of steps, coming from either side, met at their summit, stood a gateway, or propyleum, flanked by winged and human-headed bulls in the worst Assyrian style. At the right stood the masterpiece of Persian architecture—the Chehil Minar or Great Hall of Xerxes I, covering, with its roomy antechambers, an area of more than a hundred thousand square feet—vaster, if size mattered, than vast Karnak, or any European cathedral except Milan’s.138 Another flight of steps led to this Great Hall; these stairs were flanked with ornamental parapets, and their supporting sides were carved with the finest bas-reliefs yet discovered in Persia.139 Thirteen of the once seventy-two columns of Xerxes’ palace stand among the ruins, like palm-trees in some desolate oasis; and these marble columns, though mutilated, are among the nearly perfect works of man. They are slenderer than any columns of Egypt or Greece, and rise to the unusual height of sixty-four feet. Their shafts are fluted with forty-eight small grooves; their bases resemble bells overlaid with inverted leaves; their capitals for the most part take the form of floral—almost “Ionic” volutes, surmounted by the forequarters of two bulls or unicorns upon whose necks, joined back to back, rested the crossbeam or architrave. This was surely of wood, for such fragile columns, so wide apart, could hardly have supported a stone entablature. The door-jambs and window-frames were of ornamented black stone that shone like ebony; the walls were of brick, but they were covered with enameled tiles painted in brilliant panels of animals and flowers; the columns, pilasters and steps were of fine white limestone or hard blue marble. Behind, or east of, this Chehil Minar rose the “Hall of a Hundred Columns”; nothing remains of it but one pillar and the outlines of the general plan. Possibly these palaces were the most beautiful ever erected in the ancient or modern world.
At Susa the Artaxerxes I and II built palaces of which only the foundations survive. They were constructed of brick, redeemed by the finest glazed tiles known; from Susa comes the famous “Frieze of the Archers”—probably the faithful “Immortals” who guarded the king. The stately bowmen seem dressed rather for court ceremony than for war; their tunics resound with bright colors, their hair and beards are wondrously curled, their hands bear proudly and stiffly their official staffs. In Susa, as in the other capitals, painting and sculpture were dependent arts serving architecture, and the statuary was mostly the work of artists imported from Assyria, Babylonia and Greece.140
One might say of Persian art, as perhaps of nearly every art, that all the elements of it were borrowed. The tomb of Cyrus took its form from Lydia, the slender stone columns improved upon the like pillars of Assyria, the colonnades and bas-reliefs acknowledged their inspiration from Egypt, the animal capitals were an infection from Nineveh and Babylon. It was the ensemble that made Persian architecture individual and different—an aristocratic taste that refined the overwhelming columns of Egypt and the heavy masses of Mesopotamia into the brilliance and elegance, the proportion and harmony of Persepolis. The Greeks would hear with wonder and admiration of these halls and palaces; their busy travelers and observant diplomats would bring them stimulating word of the art and luxury of Persia. Soon they would transform the double volutes and stiff-necked animals of these graceful pillars into the smooth lobes of the Ionic capital; and they would shorten and strengthen the shafts to make them bear any entablature, whether of wood or of stone. Architecturally there was but a step from Persepolis to Athens. All the Near Eastern world, about to die for a thousand years, prepared to lay its heritage at the feet of Greece.
IX. DECADENCE
How a nation may die-Xerxes-A paragraph of murders-Artaxerxes II—Cyrus the Younger—Darius the Little—Causes of decay: political, military, moral—Alexander conquers Persia, and advances upon India
The empire of Darius lasted hardly a century. The moral as well as the physical backbone of Persia was broken by Marathon, Salamis and Plataea; the emperors exchanged Mars for Venus, and the nation descended into corruption and apathy. The decline of Persia anticipated almost in detail the decline of Rome: immorality and degeneration among the people accompanied violence and negligence on the throne. The Persians, like the Medes before them, passed from stoicism to epicureanism in a few generations. Eating became the principal occupation of the aristocracy: these men who had once made it a rule to eat but once a day now interpreted the rule to allow them one meal—prolonged from noon to night; they stocked their larders with a thousand delicacies, and often served entire animals to their guests; they stuffed themselves with rich rare meats, and spent their genius upon new sauces and desserts.140a A corrupt and corrupting multitude of menials filled the houses of the wealthy, while drunkenness became the common vice of every class.140b Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.
Xerxes I was every inch a king—externally; tall and vigorous, he was by royal consent the handsomest man in his empire.141 But there was never yet a handsome man who was not vain, nor any physically vain man whom some woman has not led by the nose. Xerxes was divided by many mistresses, and became for his people an exemplar of sensuality. His defeat at Salamis was in the nature of things; for he was great only in his love of magnitude, not in his capacity to rise to a crisis or to be in fact and need a king. After twenty years of sexual intrigue and administrative indolence he was murdered by a courtier, Artabanus, and was buried with regal pomp and general satisfaction.
Only the records of Rome after Tiberius could rival in bloodiness the royal annals of Persia. The murderer of Xerxes was murdered by Artaxerxes I, who, after a long reign, was succeeded by Xerxes II, who was murdered a few weeks later by his half-brother Sogdianus, who was murdered six months later by Darius II, who suppressed the revolt of Terituchmes by having him slain, his wife cut into pieces, and his mother, brothers and sisters buried alive. Darius II was followed by his son Artaxerxes II, who at the battle of Cunaxa, had to fight to the death his own brother, the younger Cyrus, when the youth tried to seize the royal power. Artaxerxes II enjoyed a long reign, killed his son Darius for conspiracy, and died of a broken heart on finding that ano
ther son, Ochus, was planning to assassinate him. Ochus ruled for twenty years, and was poisoned by his general Bagoas. This iron-livered Warwick placed Arses, son of Ochus, on the throne, assassinated Arses’ brothers to make Arses secure, then assassinated Arses and his infant children, and gave the sceptre to Codomannus, a safely effeminate friend. Codomannus reigned for eight years under the name of Darius III, and died in battle against Alexander at Arbela, in the final ruin of his country. Not even the democracies of our time have known such indiscriminate leadership.
It is in the nature of an empire to disintegrate soon, for the energy that created it disappears from those who inherit it, at the very time that its subject peoples are gathering strength to fight for their lost liberty. Nor is it natural that nations diverse in language, religion, morals and traditions should long remain united; there is nothing organic in such a union, and compulsion must repeatedly be applied to maintain the artificial bond. In its two hundred years of empire Persia did nothing to lessen this heterogeneity, these centrifugal forces; she was content to rule a mob of nations, and never thought of making them into a state. Year by year the union became more difficult to preserve. As the vigor of the emperors relaxed, the boldness and ambition of the satraps grew; they purchased or intimidated the generals and secretaries who were supposed to share and limit their power, they arbitrarily enlarged their armies and revenues, and engaged in recurrent plots against the king. The frequency of revolt and war exhausted the vitality of little Persia; the braver stocks were slaughtered in battle after battle, until none but the cautious survived; and when these were conscripted to face Alexander they proved to be cowards almost to a man. No improvements had been made in the training or equipment of the troops, or in the tactics of the generals; these blundered childishly against Alexander, while their disorderly ranks, armed mostly with darts, proved to be mere targets for the long spears and solid phalanxes of the Macedonians.142 Alexander frolicked, but only after the battle was won; the Persian leaders brought their concubines with them, and had no ambition for war. The only real soldiers in the Persian army were the Greeks.