by Tom Holland
6 Herodotus, 1.1.
7 ). S. Mill, p. 283.
8 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 2.2.3.
9 Herodotus: 7.228.
10M. de Montaigne, 'On the Cannibals', in The Complete Essays, p. 238.
11Lord Byron, 'The Isles of Greece', 1. 7.
12W. Golding, 'The Hot Gates', in The Hot Gates, p. 20. It was reading this essay
at the impressionable age of twelve that first inspired me with a passion for the story of the Persian Wars.
13 Quoted by David, p. 208.
14 Aeschylus, 104-5.
15 Curzon, Vol. 2, pp. 195-6.
16 'The historical record of the Imperial visit to India, 1911' (London, 1914), pp. 176-7.
17 Green, p. xxiii.
18 Murdoch, p. 171.
19 Starr (1977), p. 258.
20 Ehrenberg, p. 389.
21 Or, to be strictly accurate, since the author, Francois Oilier, was French, Le Mirage Sparliale.
22 Plutarch, in his youthful and uncharacteristically splenetic essay 'On the malignity of Herodotus'.
23 Davidson (2003).
I The Khorasan Highway
1 The annals of Ashurnasirpal, Column 1.53, trans. Budge and King, p. 272. The phrase refers to Ashurnasirpal's campaigns in the mountains north of Assyria.
2 Quoted by Kuhrt (1995), p. 518.
3 That the Aryans arrived in the Zagros from the east is almost universally accepted, although hard proof is hard to come by. A minority view asserts that the Medes and Persians entered the Zagros from the north, over the Caucasus.
4 From the campaign records of Shalmaneser III (843 bc); see Herzfeld, p 24.
5 The precise geographical limits of Media between the ninth and seventh centuries bg are unclear. According to Levine (Iran 12, p. 118), it was most likely 'a narrow strip restricted to the Great Khorasan Road'.
6 Nahum, 3.3.
7 This account of the Median Empire depends heavily — and inevitably — on the testimony of Herodotus, who wrote more than a century after the events he was describing. The broad outline of his narrative appears to have been confirmed by contemporaneous Babylonian records, which make mention of both Cyaxares (Umakishtar) and Astyages (Ishtuwigu), but nothing is clear cut. The archaeology of key Median sites shows a precipitous drop in living standards following the overthrow of the Assyrian Empire — precisely when the Medes were supposed to have flourished. This seeming discrepancy between written and material evidence has led some scholars (most notably Sancisi-Weerdenburg in Achaemenid History (hereafter
Ach Hist) 3, pp. 197-212, and Ach Hist 8, pp. 39-55) to doubt the existence of a Median Empire at all. Of course, lesser empires built on the ruins of greater ones can often appear impoverished in comparison — the history of Europe in the Dark Ages provides an obvious analogy. All the same, even if one does accept - as most scholars do - that Herodotus got his basic facts right, the details of Median history remain frustratingly vague.
8 The accounts of the two expeditions are to be found in Xenophon and Ctesias, respectively. While neither historian is renowned for his accuracy, there seems no particular cause to doubt them on this occasion. True, there is a tradition preserved by Aristotle (Politics, 1311b40) that Astyages was soft and self-indulgent, but this is flatly contradicted by all the other sources, to say nothing of the evidence of the length of his reign: weak kings, in the ancient Near East, rarely lasted for long.
9 The precise date of Ecbatana's foundation is unknown, but there is no record of it in Assyrian sources. This supports Herodotus' claim that the city was first established as an expression of Median royal power.
10 See Herodotus, 1.98.
11 Diogenes Laertius, 1.6.
12 The current scholarly consensus is that they were not.
13 Persian rule over Anshan was established shortly after 650 bc. The last native king of Anshan can be dated to this period, and the first Persian to claim the title did so a generation later. Anshan itself had been shored against the ruin of the even more ancient kingdom of Elam.
14 The main source for legends about Cyrus' upbringing is Herodotus, who claimed to have learned them from Persian informants (1.95); variants are recorded by Nicolaus of Damascus — who derived his account from Ctesias -and Justin. It seems probable that the elements of folklore in the story do derive from the Near East: a very similar upbringing is ascribed to Sargon of Akkad, a proto-King of Kings from the third millennium bc (see pp. 42—3). Only the tradition that Cyrus was the grandson of Astyages can really be considered historically reliable: Xenophon and Diodorus Siculus, as well as Herodotus, insist upon it, and we know from Babylonian sources that Astyages was indeed in the habit of marrying off his daughters to the princes of neighbouring kingdoms. For the inevitable counter-view, however, see Sancisi-Weerdenburg, Ach Hist 8, pp. 52—3.
15 From the so-called 'Dream of Nabonidus' (Beaulieu, p. 108). It is from another contemporary source, the Nabonidus Chronicle, that we know it was Astyages - and not, as Herodotus claims, Cyrus — who began the war.
16 Darius, inscription at Persepolis (DPd 2).
17 Herodotus, 1.129.
18 Nabonidus Chronicle, II. 17. The applicability of this verse to Lydia is almost certain; damage to the inscription prevents it from being incontrovertible.
19 Diodorus Siculus, 9.35.
20 Darius, inscription at Persepolis (DPg).
21 Herodotus, 1.164.
22 Xenophanes, Fragment 22.
23 Our ignorance of the details of Cyrus' campaigns in the east is almost total. While there is no doubt that a vast swath of provinces to the north-east of Iran were brought under Persian control, the likely dates of these conquests have to be argued for from virtual silence. We do know that Cyrus was in Babylon in 539 bc, but for the eight years preceding that date, and the nine years following it, the records are effectively non-existent. That said — and although historians have argued for both - an earlier date for Cyrus' conquest of the east seems more plausible than a later. It certainly makes better strategic sense — and Cyrus was nothing if not a master strategist. Moreover, the apparently successful integration of the eastern provinces into the Persian Empire by the time of Cyrus' death is more readily explicable if one assumes a longer rather than a shorter period of pacification. Finally, there is the evidence of Herodotus, whose knowledge of eastern affairs was inevitably hazy, but who does state categorically that 'While Harapagus was turning upside-down the lower, or western part of Asia, Cyrus was engaged with the north and east, bringing into subjection every nation without exception' (1.177). Berossus, a Babylonian scholar who lived shortly after the reign of Alexander the Great, but who would have had access to records unknown to the Greeks, corroborates this assertion.
24 Mihr Yasht, 14-15.
25 Ibid., 13.
26 Tentatively identified by some scholars as the Volga.
27 In Persian, 'Kurushkath'. The Jaxartes is the river now known as the Syr Darya, which runs through Kazakhstan.
28 CyrusCylinder.il.
29 This account of Cyrus' death derives from Herodotus (1.204-14), and seems to make the best sense of the many different versions of it that have survived. According to Xenophon, for instance, Cyrus did not even die in battle, but in his own bed, back in Persia: such are the contradictions that plague the sources for Persian history. That Cyrus was seventy when he died is recorded by Cicero (On Divination, 1.23) — again, with what accuracy it is impossible to say for sure. Three score years and ten might perhaps be considered a suspiciously rounded age.
30 Xenophon, Cympaedia, 1.4—5.
31 The practice of khvaetvadatha, or endogamous marriage, had been approved by Zoroaster as a positive religious duty, and it is possible - maybe even likely — that Cambyses' incestuous marriages reflect the influence of the Prophet's teaching. As with most things Zoroastrian, however, this must be speculation. The philosopher Antisthenes, an associate of Socrates, claimed that a Persian male habitually 'enjoyed intercou
rse with his mother, his sister, and his daughter' - maybe a garbled retelling of a genuine tradition.
32 Some of the sources appear to contradict this reading. According to Ctesias, Bardiya was summoned twice by his brother to court, but only came on the third command, and even then reluctantly. According to Herodotus, he was briefly present with Cambyses in Egypt, but then sent back to Persia in disgrace. Neither story seems likely. Bearing in mind what happened subsequently, Bardiya must have been in the eastern half of the empire for most - if not all - of the period that Cambyses was in Egypt, and his role there could only have been as his brother's lieutenant; anything else would have been politically inadmissible. Evidently, Cambyses felt that he had reason enough to trust Bardiya, and for four years, at least, he was not let down.
33 This story is found in the seventh book of Polyaenus' Strategies, written in the second century ad - perhaps a suspiciously late date.
34 The town of Anthylla. See Herodotus, 2.98.
35 Herodotus, 3.89.
36 According to Herodotus, it was his ability to draw a bow that no one else in the court had been able to string that had prompted his expulsion from Egypt in disgrace.
37 Herodotus, 3.20. The Egyptians and Persians knew Ethiopia as Nubia. According to Herodotus, Cambyses' invasion of Ethiopia was a catastrophe, but this again seems to reflect his reliance upon Egyptian sources. Persian records make it clear that at least northern Nubia had been brought into the empire.
38 Specifically, in Babylon.
39 Precisely when is not clear. This is a considerable frustration, for it is possible that Cambyses died before Bardiya proclaimed himself king, in which case it is also possible that there was never, strictly speaking, an attempted usurpation at all. Some of the later sources imply this, but they should probably be discounted. The tradition that labelled Cambyses the victim of an attempted coup is very strong, and it is hard to make sense of the chaos that engulfed the Persian world on Cambyses' death if one does presume an orderly succession from brother to brother. Also in favour of this argument is the fact that the last known document from Cambyses' reign is dated 18 April, while the earliest known document which mentions 'King Bardiya' is dated the 14th of the same month. This may not be conclusive evidence of a coup, but it is suggestive, at the very least.
40 It is nowhere explicitly stated that Bardiya was in Ecbatana during the summer months, but since it was the favored summer residence of the Persian monarchs, and we know that the king was definitely in Media in September, it seems a safe assumption.
41 Darius, the Bisitun inscription (DB 14).
42 Aeschylus, 1.774.
43 One other scrap of evidence - albeit faint - has been used as evidence against Darius. In his own account of the events of the summer of 522, he employs the curious circumlocution 'Afterwards, Cambyses by his own death was dead' (DB 11). As Baker has pointed out, 'It may well be that Cambyses had not simply died, but that for a specific reason his death had caused the framers of the Bisitun texts to emphasise that he had "died a death of his own" when perhaps he had not. Thus, the framers may have left us with the hint that something peculiar had happened to cause Cambyses' death' (Herodotus and Bisitun, p. 98).
44 For the active presence of foreign merchants and bankers in Iran, see Zadok.
45 Strabo, 11.13.7.
46 This account of Bardiya's murder is a conflation of Darius' own and those of various Greek authors. Even though he mislocates the site of the assassination, Herodotus appears on this occasion to have had unusually precise information. Historians have long suspected that the source was Zopyros the Younger, the great-grandson of Megabyzos, one of the seven conspirators. In the 440s bc, Zopyros was an exile in Athens, where he may have met Herodotus, and given him a full account of the coup. The details of Bardiya being with a concubine and defending himself with a stool come from Ctesias (14-15) — and are typically tabloid touches. The claim that it was Darius' brother who slew Bardiya comes from Aeschylus (776), and is altogether more convincing, since Artaphernes would subsequently become a major player in the affairs of Athens, and his biography must have been widely known. Certainly, the presumption of most historians, that 'Artaphernes' is a misspelling of 'Intaphernes' - listed by Herodotus as one of the seven conspirators — seems mistaken, particularly since Herodotus' contemporary, the Ionian ethnographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, also fingered Artaphernes as the man who had struck down Bardiya. Sikyavautish, the site of the assassination, has never been precisely identified, but it was somewhere near modern-day Harsin, just to the south of the Khorasan Highway.
47 DB11.
48 DB55.
49 Herodotus, 1.136.
50 Mihr Yask.
51 Herodotus, 3.84.
52 Yaaia,43.4.
53 Amesha is generally translated as 'immortal', but Spenta is an altogether more untranslatable word: its definitions include 'strong', 'sacred', 'possessed of power', 'beneficent' and 'bounteous'. See Boyce (1975), 1.196—7.
54 Yasna, 30.2.
55 For Persian opinion, we have to rely on the evidence of the Greeks:
Zoroaster was dated by Xanthus of Lydia (fifth century Be) to six thousand years before the time of Xerxes, a number which almost certainly reflected Zoroastrian notions of the cycle of world ages. The first Greek to date him to Astyages' reign was Aristoxenus, in the fourth century bc, who also cast the Prophet as the teacher of Pythagoras. Both traditions appear to be worthless, although the fact that they could coexist suggests the degree to which Zoroaster was a figure of mystery and myth. The confusion has continued to plague contemporary scholarship. The current consensus — arrived at by dating the most ancient Zoroastrian texts — places Zoroaster in or around 1000 bc, but wide divergences of opinion remain. Some (notably Boyce) date him to 1700-1500 bc; others (notably Gnoli) to the end of the seventh century BC. As Gnoli (p. 5) himself ruefully acknowledges, though, arguing about the date of Zoroaster is, for Iranianists, 'the favourite pastime of scholars'.
56 Although the Median city of Ragha, near what is present-day Tehran, would one day promote itself as the birthplace of the Prophet.
57 The phrase 'fire-holder' is Boyce's (Zomastrianism, Vol. 2, p. 52), as is the identification of the three Pasargadae structures as such.
58 Clemen, pp. 30-1.
59 DB63.
60 In Old Persian, Bagastaana.
II Babylon
1 'Enuma Elish', 6.5-6.
2 Jeremiah, 28.14.
3 Ibid., 5.16-17.
4 Quoted by Leick, p. 96.
5 Nabonidus, inscription 15.
6 Cyrus Cylinder.
7 George, p. 41.
8 Herodotus, 1.191.
9 'Instructions of Shuruppak', 204-6.
10 Darius, inscription at Naqsh-i-Rustam (Dna 2).
11 Cyrus Cylinder.
12 Haggai, 2.6.
13 DB 25 (Babylon).
14 DB 1.
15 DB 4.
16 Byron, p. 43.
17 DB70.
18 DB72.
19 DB73.
20 The origins of this title are obscure. The kings of Urartu, in what is now Armenia, employed it, but quite how, and if, it gravitated from them to the Persian monarchs is a puzzle. The kings of Assyria did sometimes lay claim to it, but only rarely; the kings of Babylon not at all.
21 Darius, inscription at Persepolis (DPf).
22 Herodotus, 3.89.
23 Darius, inscription at Susa (DSf 3e).
24 Ibid., 3h-i.
25 Ibid., 3£
26 Darius, inscription at Persepolis (Dpg 2).
27 This is a logical presumption. 'The Persian kings', we are told, 'had water fetched from the Nile and the Danube, which they laid up in their treasuries as a sort of testimony of the greatness of their power and universal empire' (Plutarch, Alexander, 36.4). The list of rivers surely reflects the historian's Greek perspective: it seems improbable that the Indus would not also have been included.
III Sparta
&nbs
p; 1 Herodotus, 1.153.
2 Ibid., 1.4.
3 The Iliad, 3.171.
4 Cicero, On Duties, 2.22.77. Hans van Wees, in his essay 'Tyrtaeus' Eunomia', has conclusively demonstrated the archaic origins ot this anonymous proverb. See Hodkinson and Powell, pp. 1—41.
5 Herodotus, 1.65.
6 Phocylides, Fragment 4. These lines almost certainly post-date the fall of Nineveh, and probably reflect fears of the growth of Persian power in the 540s bc.
7 Who precisely the Dorians were is one of the great imponderables ot a period known even by ancient historians, who are well used to sifting minute fragments of evidence, as the Dark Ages. As with the migrations of the Medes and the Persians, the precise details of the Dorian invasion are irrecoverable. Inevitably, a minority of historians dispute whether it was ever anything more than a myth.
8 Plato, Hippias Major, 285d.
9 Tyrtaeus, 5.2—3.
10 Ibid., 5.4.
11 Ibid., 5.10.
12 Plutarch, Lycurgus, 2.
13 Herodotus, 1.65.
14 Plutarch, Lycurgus, 29.
15 Thucydides, 1.6.
16 Tyrtaeus, 7.31—2.
17 Plutarch, lycurgus, 29.
18 For the best discussion, see Hodkinson, p. 76.
19 For instance, Ephorus, quoted by Strabo (8.5.4). An alternative - and etymologically more convincing - theory equated 'helot' with a word for 'captive'.
20 Tyrtaeus, 6.1.
21 Herodotus, 1.66.
22 Xenophon, Agesilaus, 2.7.
23 The earliest reference to the Spartans' scarlet cloaks does not occur until as late as 411 bc - in Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata - and there is no way of knowing precisely when they first began to be worn. It seems likeliest, however, that they were introduced as part of the increasing standardisation of the Spartan military that was a feature of the mid-sixth century bc. A further complication lies in the ambiguity of the Greek words used to describe the cloak: it may be that the Spartans' tunics, as well as their cloaks, were scarlet.