Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome

by Victor Davis Hanson

  of familiar things that they now discover are in fact quite old. The an-

  cient world is sometimes thought to be irrelevant because it is so dis-

  tant. But in an age of confusing theories, rapidly shifting technologies,

  and a cacophony of instant communications, the Greeks and Romans,

  precisely because of their distance and clarity, loom more relevant

  than ever. These essays are offered in the hope that the next time a

  statesman or general offers an entirely new solution to what he insists

  is an entirely new problem, someone can object that is not necessar-

  ily so. Rather than offering political assessments of modern military

  leaders’ policies, we instead hope that knowledge of the ancient world

  will remind us all of the parameters of available choices—and their

  consequences.

  10 Introduction

  1. From Persia with Love

  Propaganda and Imperial Overreach

  in the Greco-Persian Wars

  Tom Holland

  The invasion of Iraq, when it finally came, was merely the climax

  of an ongoing period of crisis and upheaval in the international

  order. The stand-off between the two sides had been a geopolitical fix-

  ture for years. Both had surely long suspected that open conflict was

  inevitable. As the invaders crossed into Iraqi territory, they would have

  known that they faced a regime that was hardly unprepared for war. It

  had been assiduous in stockpiling reserves of weaponry and provisions;

  its troops, massed along the border, blocked all the roads that led to the

  capital; the capital itself, an intimidating blend of grandiose prestige

  projects and warren-like slums, was darkly rumored to be capable of

  swallowing up a whole army. Yet all the regime’s defenses, in the final

  reckoning, might as well have been made of sand. What it confronted

  in its adversary was nothing less than a superpower, the most formi-

  dable on the planet. The task force brought to bear by the invaders was

  a quite devastating display of shock and awe. Those of the defenders

  who were not left corpses by the first deadly impact of the enemy on-

  slaught simply melted away. Even in the capital itself, the population

  proved signally unwilling to die for the sake of their beleaguered leader.

  A bare few weeks after hostilities had begun, the war was effectively

  over. So it was, on October 12, 539 BC, that the gates of Babylon were

  flung open “without a battle,”1 and the greatest city in the world fell

  into the hands of Cyrus, the king of Persia.

  To the Babylonians themselves, the capture of their metropolis by

  a foreign warlord was only readily explicable as the doing of Marduk,

  the king of their gods. Over the centuries, Babylon’s peerless glamour

  and pedigree had served to burnish the conceit of its inhabitants to a

  truly lustrous sheen. Although long subject to the rule of Assyria, a rival

  kingdom to the north, Babylon had always chafed at its subordination,

  and in 612 BC, when its armies took the lead in sacking the Assyrian

  capital of Nineveh, the city had exacted a splendid and bloody revenge.

  From that moment on, it had found itself positioned to play the role

  that its people had always seen as its right: as the very fulcrum of world

  affairs. Although the col apse of the Assyrian Empire had left the Near

  East divided between Babylon itself and three other kingdoms—Media

  in northern Iran, Lydia in Anatolia, and Egypt—there had been little

  doubt as to which among these four great powers ranked as primus inter

  pares. Over the wreckage of Assyrian power the kings of Babylon had

  soon succeeded in raising their own far-spreading dominion. Upon their

  lesser neighbors they had imposed “an iron yoke of servitude.”2 Typical

  of the fate meted out to those who presumed to stand on their indepen-

  dence had been the crushing, in 586, of the valiant but foolhardy little

  kingdom of Judah. Two years after staging a revolt against Babylonian

  rule, the Judaeans had been left to mourn their temerity amid the wreck-

  age of al that had previously served to define them. Jerusalem and its

  Temple had been reduced to a pile of blackened ruins, its king had been

  obliged to watch the murder of his sons before himself being blinded,

  and the Judaean elite had been hauled off into exile. There, weeping by

  the rivers of Babylon, it had seemed to one of their number, a prophet

  by the name of Ezekiel, that the shadows of Sheol were closing in on

  the entire global order. Not a great power, but it had been dispatched to

  the underworld by the king of Babylon: “al of them slain, fal en by the

  sword, who spread terror in the land of the living.”3

  But now Babylonian supremacy itself was a dead thing. The fall

  of the great city appeared to contemporaries a veritable earthquake.

  What rendered it all the more seismic, however, was the identity of its

  conqueror: for if Babylon could lay claim to a history that stretched

  back to the very beginnings of time, when the gods had first begun to

  build cities from the world’s primal mud, then the Persians, by contrast,

  12 Holland

  appeared to have come almost from nowhere. Two decades earlier,

  when Cyrus had ascended to the throne, his kingdom had been not

  merely inconsequential but politically subordinate, for he had ranked

  as the vassal of the king of Media. In a world dominated by four great

  powers, there was little scope, it might have been thought, for any out-

  sider to make his way. Cyrus, however, over the course of his reign

  had demonstrated the very opposite. The muscle-bound character of

  the global order confronting him had been turned dazzlingly to his

  own advantage. Decapitate an empire, he had demonstrated, and all

  its provinces might be seized as collateral. First to go had been his erst-

  while overlord, the king of Media: toppled in 550. Four years later it

  was the turn of Lydia. By 539, when Babylon too was added to Cyrus’s

  bag of scalps, he was the master of a dominion that stretched from the

  Aegean to the Hindu Kush, the largest agglomeration of territory the

  world had ever seen. Well might Cyrus have described his own rule in

  totalizing, indeed nakedly cosmic terms: he was the King of Kings, the

  Great King, “the King of the Universe.”4

  How had he pulled it off ? It goes without saying, of course, that the

  building of an empire is rarely achieved without the spilling of a great

  deal of blood. The Persians, as tough and unyielding as the mountains

  of their homeland and raised from childhood to an awesome degree

  of military proficiency, were formidable warriors. Just like the Assyr-

  ians and the Babylonians before them, they had brought to the Near

  East “the tearing down of walls, the tumult of cavalry charges and the

  overthrow of cities.”5 During the invasion of Babylonia, for instance,

  all the characteristics of Cyrus’s generalship had been on devastating

  display: the ability to marshal “numbers as immeasurable as the waters

  of a river,”6 to crush all those who thought to oppose him, and to move

  with an utterly disconcerting speed. Certainly, the sword of such a con- />
  queror did not sleep easily in its scabbard. A decade after his trium-

  phant entry into the capital of the world the by now aged Cyrus was

  still in his saddle, leading his horsemen ever onward. Various stories

  are told of his end, but most agree that he died in Central Asia, far

  beyond the bounds of any previous Near Eastern empire. Even though

  it is evident that his corpse was transported back with full honors to

  Persia, for burial in a splendid tomb, numerous eerie stories gave a

  From Persia with Love 13

  different account. According to one of them, for instance, the queen

  of the tribe that had killed Cyrus ordered his corpse to be decapitated,

  then dropped the severed head into a blood-filled wineskin, so that his

  thirst for slaughter might be glutted at last.7 Such a tale powerfully sug-

  gests the terror that the great conqueror was capable of inspiring in his

  adversaries, for vampires, demons hungry for human flesh, had long

  haunted the nightmares of the peoples of the Near East.

  Yet a very different tradition also served to keep alive the memory

  of Cyrus the Great. He had not merely conquered his enemies, he had

  assiduously wooed them as well. Brutal though he could certainly be in

  the cause of securing an enemy’s speedy surrender, his preference, by

  and large, had been to live up to the irenic claims of his own brilliantly

  crafted propaganda. His mastery once established over the corpses of

  shattered armies, further bloodshed had tended to be kept to the bar-

  est minimum. If the Babylonians chose to attribute his conquest of

  their city to the will of Marduk, then Cyrus was perfectly content to

  play along. Invading Iraq, he had made sure to proclaim himself the

  favorite of his enemies’ greatest divinity; toppling its native dynasty, he

  had posed as the heir of its most venerable traditions. Not only in Baby-

  lon but in cities and kingdoms across his vast empire he had presented

  himself as a model of righteousness and his rule as payback from his

  various subjects’ gods. The very peoples he had conquered had duly

  scrabbled to take him at his own estimation and to hail him as their

  own. With a brilliant and calculating subtlety, Cyrus had succeeded in

  demonstrating to his heirs that mercilessness and repression, the key-

  notes of all previous imperialisms in the region, might be blended with

  a no less imperious show of graciousness, emancipation, and patron-

  age. War on its own, Cyrus’s career appeared to imply, could take an

  empire only so far. Guarantee peace and order to the dutifully submis-

  sive, however, and the world itself might prove the limit.

  So it was, for instance, that 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. The Persian high com-

  mand had recognized in these homesick captives a resource of great po-

  tential. Judaea was the pivot between the Fertile Crescent and the as yet

  unconquered kingdom of Egypt; a land of such strategic significance

  14 Holland

  might certainly be considered worth a smal investment. Not only had

  Cyrus permitted the Judaeans to return to the weed-covered rubble of

  their homeland but funds had even been made available for the rebuild-

  ing in Jerusalem of their obliterated Temple. The exiles themselves had

  responded with undiluted enthusiasm and gratitude. Whereas Ezekiel

  had portrayed Babylon as merely the agent of Yahweh, the Judaeans’

  prickly and boastful god, the prophet who wrote under the name of Isa-

  iah cast the Persian king in an altogether more bril iant light. “Thus says

  the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped,

  to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open

  doors before him, that gates may not be closed: ‘I wil go before you and

  level the mountains, I wil break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut

  asunder the bars of iron, I wil 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 cal you by your name.’ ”8

  Cyrus himself, had he ever been made aware of this extraordinary

  brag, would surely have marked it down as what it so clearly was: a

  signal triumph for his policy of governing through willing collabora-

  tors. While the Persians’ tolerance of foreigners and their peculiar cus-

  toms in no way implied respect, their genius as world conquerors was

  to indulge the instinctive longing of any slave to believe himself the

  favorite of his master, and to turn it to their own advantage. What

  greater source of self-contentment for a peripheral and insignificant

  subject people such as the Judaeans, after all, than to imagine them-

  selves graced by a special relationship with the far-off King of Kings?

  Cyrus and his successors had grasped a bleak yet strategically mo-

  mentous truth: the traditions that define a community, that afford it a

  sense of self-worth and a yearning for independence, can also, if sensi-

  tively exploited by a conqueror, serve to reconcile that community to

  its very subordination. This maxim, applied by the Persians across the

  vast range of all their many provinces, was one that underpinned their

  entire philosophy of empire. No ruling class anywhere, they liked to

  think, could not somehow be seduced into submission.

  True, this did presuppose that the ruling classes themselves could

  all be trusted to stay in power. Fortunately, in regimes such as were to

  be found across most of the Near East, with their priesthoods, their

  From Persia with Love 15

  bureaucracies, and their cadres of the superrich, it took more than a

  change of overlord to upset the smooth functioning of the elites. Even

  at the very limits of the empire, where the gravitational pull of the

  center was naturally at its weakest, there might often be considerable

  enthusiasm for the undoubted fruits of the Pax Persica. In Sardis, for

  instance, the capital of Lydia, and so far distant from Persia that it was

  only a few days’ journey from the “bitter sea,” as the Persians termed

  the Aegean, initial teething problems had not prevented collaboration

  from soon becoming an accepted way of life. Lydian functionaries still

  dutifully ran the province for their masters, just as they had done un-

  der their native kings. Their language, their customs, their gods—all

  were scrupulously tolerated. Even their taxes, though certainly high,

  were not set so high as to bleed them dry. Indeed, of one Lydian, a

  mine owner by the name of Pythius, it would be claimed that only the

  Great King outranked him on the empire’s rich list. Men such as this, to

  whom Persian rule had opened up unprecedented opportunities, cer-

  tainly had not the remotest interest in agitating for liberty.

  Nevertheless, not everything was quiet on the western front. Beyond

  Sardis, dotted along the Aegean coastline, were the gleaming cities of

  a people known to the Persians as the Yauna. Originally from Greece,

  the Ionians, as they called themselves, remained quite as
determinedly

  and defiantly Greek as any of their countrymen back in the mother-

  land across the Aegean—which meant that, to their masters, they rep-

  resented both an enigma and a challenge. All the Yauna ever did, it

  seemed to the Persians, was quarrel. Even when the various cities were

  not squabbling with one another they were likely to be embroiled in

  civil strife. This interminable feuding, which had contributed enor-

  mously to the initial ease of their conquest back in the time of Cyrus,

  also made the Ionians a uniquely wearisome people to rule. Where

  civilized peoples—the Babylonians, the Lydians, even the Judaeans—

  had their functionaries and priests, the Greeks seemed to have only

  treacherous and ever-splintering factions.

  As a result, despite their genius for psychological profiling, the

  Persians found it a chal enge to get a handle on their Ionian subjects.

  Whereas in Babylon or Sardis they could raise their administration on

  the bedrock provided by an efficient and dutiful bureaucracy, in Ionia

  16 Holland

  they had to base it instead on their own talent for intrigue and espionage.

  The chal enge for any Persian governor was to pick winners among the

  various Ionian power players, back them until they had outgrown their

  usefulness, and then dispose of them with a minimum of fuss. Such a

  policy, however, could hardly help but be a treacherous one. By favor-

  ing one faction over another, the Persians were inevitably themselves

  sucked into the swirl of backstabbing and class warfare that constituted

  Ionian politics. A frustrating and disconcerting experience, and one that

  appeared to lend credence to a theory much favored by certain Ioni-

  ans, wise men known as “philosophers,” to whom it appeared simply

  an observable fact of nature that everything in the universe was conflict

  and tension and change. “Al things are constituted from fire,” as one of

  them put it, “and al things wil melt back into fire.”9

  Here, to the Ionians’ masters, was a truly shocking notion. Fire, in

  the opinion of the Persians, was the manifestation not of a ceaseless

  flux but rather of the very opposite, of the immanence of an unchang-

  ing principle of righteousness and justice. Promiscuous in their spon-

  sorship of foreign gods they might have been, yet they knew in their