Nevertheless, he found himself in a dilemma arising from religious conviction. His sacred and secular duties clashed, and since he had to sacrifice one or the other, he sacrificed the secular. He did not even return to Babylon for the New Year’s Festival, in which the king accompanied Marduk on his triumphal procession through the Ishtar Gate, in order to re-affirm his own right to the throne. Nabonidus, gripped by his love for his own deity, could not bring himself to do it.159
This ultimately weakened Babylon, and gave Cyrus his chance.
By 540, Cyrus had begun to send assault troops into skirmishes with the Babylonians along the eastern border. Their intrusions became serious enough that Nabonidus prepared himself to travel north, back up into the heart of his own country.26
By the time he arrived, Cyrus was planning an attack on Babylon itself. Nabonidus, now back in charge, ordered the Babylonian troops to march towards the enemy. They crossed the Tigris and met the Persian troops, under Cyrus, at Opis.
“The Babylonians engaged him,” Herodotus remarks, baldly, “but they lost the battle and were driven back into the city.”27 Immediately the Babylonians barricaded themselves in under Nabonidus’s direction. They were well supplied with food and water; according to Xenophon, enough to last twenty years.28 Cyrus’s rise to power had been gradual enough for the Babylonians to prepare themselves well for a siege (a prudent action, but one that suggests they did not have a great deal of faith in the army’s ability to keep Cyrus off).
Cyrus, realizing that it would take months if not years to starve the defenders out of such a huge and well-supplied city, formed another plan. Xenophon explains it: The Tigris, which flowed right through the middle of Babylon, was deeper than two men’s height. The city could not easily be flooded, thanks to Nebuchadnezzar’s reinforcements, but Cyrus had another strategy in mind. He had trenches dug all along the Tigris, upstream from the city, and during one dark night he had his men open all the trenches simultaneously. Diverted away from its main stream in many directions, the level of the Tigris that ran through the city sank at once, enough that the Persian soldiers could march through the mud of the riverbed, under the walls of the city. The core assault unit climbed up out of the riverbed inside the city at night, covered with mud, and stumbled along through the streets, shouting as if they were drunken revellers, until they reached the palace and took it by storm. Xenophon points out that there was some sort of religious celebration going on which helped to mask the invasion; the book of Daniel agrees, saying that Belshazzar, the co-regent, was feasting in the palace with hundreds of his noblemen and had grown thoroughly drunk, when the Persians broke into the palace.
Nabonidus was apparently elsewhere in the city; he was captured and made prisoner without injury. But Belshazzar was killed in the fight that followed. The gates were opened from the inside. The rest of the Persians came in, and the city fell. The date was October 14, 539 BC.
Undoubtedly Cyrus had heard the grumblings that Nabonidus had slighted Marduk, and that Marduk was punishing the city for this insult. At once, Cyrus became the chosen of Marduk. He rode into the city to “take the hand of Marduk” in the traditional religious ceremony. He was, after all, Nebuchadnezzar’s great-nephew by marriage, and thrones had been claimed on less of a blood relationship. And he had his scribes explain, in the Merodach-baladan/Napoleonic tradition, that he was in fact Babylon’s liberator, the restorer of its ancient greatness.
He saved Babylon from need
Nabonidus, the king who did not venerate Marduk,
him Marduk delivered into the hands of Cyrus.
All the people prostrated themselves and kissed his feet,
They rejoiced in his sovereignty and their faces shone.
I, Cyrus, freed the inhabitants of Babylon from their yoke.
I repaired their dwellings, I removed the ruins,
Marduk the great lord rejoiced because of my deeds.
I returned the gods to their proper place
at the command of Marduk, the great lord.29
In exactly the same way, he announced to the Jews that he would restore the honor of their own God Yahweh. This made him very popular with the Jewish exiles. “In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia,” begins the book of Ezra, meaning the first year of Cyrus’s domination in Babylon, “the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation: ‘The Lord, the God of Heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel.’”30 Cyrus also returned the valuables from the Temple of Solomon that he found in the treasury of Babylon, in another example of his using wealth (in this case, captured by others) to strengthen his own position. For this, he earned himself the title from the Jews “Anointed of the Lord.”
A little more than a year after the return to Jerusalem began, the returned exiles laid the foundation of the Second Temple during a great festival of celebration. The priests were back in vestments that had not been used since Nebuchadnezzar’s sack of the city; there were trumpets and cymbals and singing. But the new foundation, shabby and makeshift among the rubble, was so unlike the previous glories that the older onlookers could not bear the difference. While the younger exiles were shouting, “the older priests…and family heads, who had seen the former temple, wept aloud when they saw the foundation of this temple…. No one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping; and the sounds were heard from far away.”31
CYRUS’S OWN VICTORY was unmixed. He took over the great palace of Nebuchadnezzar as one of his royal houses, and kept Ecbatana as a summer residence; high in the mountains, it was snow-blocked for much of the winter, but much more pleasant than the hot Persian plain during the summer months. His palace in Anshan remained another of his homes. But for the administration of his new empire, Cyrus built himself a new capital city: Pasargadae.
In his Persian empire, the conquered peoples managed to carry on their daily lives without too much disruption. The newness of Cyrus’s empire lay in his ability to think of it, not as a Persian nation in which the peoples must be made more Persian, but rather as a patchwork of nations under Persian rule. Unlike the Assyrians, he did not try to destroy national loyalties or identities. Instead he portrayed himself as the benevolent guardian of those very identities. And meanwhile, he continued to pay his Eyes and Ears to keep a watch out for trouble.
Chapter Sixty
The Republic of Rome
Between 550 and 501 BC,
Celts and Carthaginians enter the scene,
while Rome throws out its kings
THE NEWLY VICTORIOUS CYRUS had left Harpagus in Asia Minor to finish up the conquest of Lydia by capturing the Ionian cities, along the coast, that had been Lydian allies.
According to Herodotus, Harpagus’s campaigning caused a domino effect. He began his operations with Phocaea, in the middle of the coast: a city whose people were “the earliest Greeks to make long voyages by sea.” Besieged by Harpagus, who was busily building earthworks up against their stone walls, they told Harpagus that they might consider negotiations for surrender if he would pull back for a day and let them debate the matter in peace. He did so, and the Phocaeans “launched their penteconters” (ships with fifty oars and a square mainsail which were peculiarly theirs), “put their womenfolk, children, and all their personal effects on board…embarked themselves,” and sailed away: “So the Persians gained control of a Phocaea which was emptied of men.”
The Phocaeans had already built themselves a trading post called Alalia on the island of Cyrnus—the Greek name for Corsica. Half of the Phocaeans, overwhelmed by homesick longing, decided to go back to their deserted city and chance the Persian wrath. The other half set sail for Alalia.1
Once settled on Corsica, they set out to form a trading empire of their own. Penteconters were perfect for trade
; they carried a large crew (fifty oarsmen plus the deck crew and captain, at a minimum), all of whom could fight, if necessary, which made the penteconter much more daunting to pirates than a merchant ship (which often had only five or six men aboard).2 The Phocaeans planned to dominate the western Mediterranean trade routes, to which the other Greek cities had not yet paid much mind. To act as a trading post to the west, they built a colony on the coast of what is now southern France.
This new colony, Massalia, connected the Greek merchant net to a web-work of tribes that were, as yet, barely known. They were wild fighting barbarian tribes who came out of the depths of the rough lands farther away from the coast, bringing with them gold and salt, amber and fur, and (most valuable of all) tin.
The Phocaeans had come face-to-face with the Celts.
“CELT” IS AN ANACHRONISTIC NAME for the tribes who roamed around in western central Europe between 600 and 500 BC. Both the Greeks and the Romans referred to these peoples as “Gauls” or “Celts,” a little later, but between 600 and 500 BC they had no kind of “ethnic identity.”3 They were merely a scattering of tribes with a common origin.
This origin was Indo-European, which meant that they had come, long ago, from that same homeland between the Caspian and the Black Seas once occupied by the peoples later known as Hittites, Mycenaeans, and Aryans.4 Similarities between the languages of these four Indo-European peoples suggest that they wandered from a common point to settle in four different areas: the Hittites went west, into Asia Minor; the Mycenaeans west and then south into the northern Greek peninsula; the “Celts” to the north of the Alps; the Aryans first east and then south into India.
The particular Indo-Europeans later known as Celts did not write, so we can only try to read the graves and goods that they left behind. By the time that Massalia was built, around 630 BC, one particular style of burial had spread from modern Austria across to the southern Loire river. We call it the Hallstatt civilization, after its best-known site: a cemetery and salt mine south of the Danube.160
The Hallstatt tribes filled their graves with gold jewelry, swords and spears, food and drink and dishes for the use of the dead. Their dead chiefs were surrounded by the graves of warriors who were interred with their long iron swords, their most precious possession.5 Merchants from Hallstatt tribes drove their wagons to Massalia, loaded with amber, salt, and tin from as far away as the mines in modern Cornwall. These were all valuable and scarce items, and the trade made Massalia into a boom town.
The profitable Phocaean trade carried on from Massalia grew increasingly intolerable to the Etruscans. Cities from Etruria proper had been busy establishing cities farther and farther north. Now the aggressive Greeks were pushing into territory that the Etruscans considered their own to exploit. Greek colonies sprang up all along the southern coast of modern France; Monaco, Nice, and St. Tropez all had their origins as Greek trading posts.6
The pressure pushed the cities of Etruria—as spikily independent as those of Greece—into an association. Five Etruscan cities of Italy had joined together in an alliance against Rome a century before. Now, twelve Etruscan cities were ready to link their fates together into an association formed in imitation of the Greek amphictyonys, cities joined together for a common purpose while preserving their political independence. The Etruscan League, which formed around 550 BC, included Veii, Tarquinii, and Volsinii.7
Even united, though, the Etruscan League could not hope to fight successfully against the Phocaean invaders. The Phocaeans could call hundreds of allied Greek ships into any erupting war. And so, Herodotus continues, the Etruscans entered into league with the Carthaginians.
CARTHAGE, which lay on the northern coast of Africa at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, was already three hundred years old by 550. The two oldest cities of the loose Phoenician federation, Tyre and Sidon, now lay in Cyrus’s dominion. But Carthage, farther away, was the center of its own little kingdom. In 550, its king was Mago, the first Carthaginian monarch of whom we have any historical record.8
By Mago’s day, Carthage had planted trading colonies of its own in the Mediterranean. The Carthaginians were no happier than the Etruscans to see the Greeks busily colonizing around them, and they were very amenable to joining in an attack on the Phocaeans at Alalia.161 A historical record of the alliance survives in Aristotle’s Politics, which mentions that the “Etruscans and Carthaginians” once formed a community “for the sake of trade and of business relations.”9
60.1 Romans, Carthaginians, and Gauls
The Greeks on Alalia (or Corsica), getting wind of the plot, prepared for war: “The Phocaeans got sixty of their own ships ready,” Herodotus writes, “and went out to meet the enemy in the Sardinian Sea.” In the fighting that followed, forty Phocaean ships were destroyed, and the remaining twenty damaged so badly that they could no longer fight. But they could still float, so the Phocaeans sailed back to Corsica, loaded up their womenfolk and children once more, and retreated to Rhegium, a Greek city on the toe of the Italian boot.
The sea battle at Alalia was the second great naval battle ever fought (Rameses III against the Sea Peoples being the first). The immediate effect was that the Etruscans were temporarily top dog in the area. They took over Corsica and, untroubled by roving Phocaeans in penteconters, built trading colonies themselves, as far west as the coast of Spain (or so writes Stephanus of Byzantium.) They were at the height of their power, masters of the peninsula north of the Tiber.10
Massalia itself had its ties with Alalia cut, but the Etruscans did not destroy it. Having wiped out the mother city, they were not too worried about far-flung children. Massalia likely struggled for some time, but instead of collapsing, the city survived into the twenty-first century; it is now called Marseilles.
The battle had also given Carthage room to spread itself. By treaty with the Etruscans, they claimed rulership of Sardinia; and, untroubled by Greeks in the western Mediterranean, they too extended their reach to the Spanish coast.
WHILE THE GREEKS retreated and the Carthaginians and Etruscans sailed the Mediterranean, Rome was growing in both size and power. The more outlying areas that it claimed, the greater its internal troubles. How could a king of one race rule over a set of peoples so hostile to each other that they still refused even to intermarry? And how could that king deal with an aristocracy so opinionated and independent that it could be accused of assassinating its first, semidivine ruler?
In the days of Etruscan rule, Rome’s king and Rome’s people seem to have tried to work out some sort of compromise between monarchic absolutism, Cyrus style, and rule by the people, as in Athens. The history of the compromise is obscured by the early historians of Rome, who all seem to be reading later structures back into much earlier times. But it seems that, even in the days of the kings, Romans were already given a voice in the city’s affairs.
The Roman historian Varro mentions an early division of Rome’s people into three “tribes” of some kind, which may represent the three national groups of Sabines, Latials, and Etruscans (although the earliest accounts of Rome say nothing about this).11 Livy, on the other hand, credits Servius Tullius with dividing the people of Rome into six “classes,” based not on ancestry but on wealth; a useful way of starting from scratch, for a city in which the self-made man first made his appearance. The richest Romans were expected to defend the city with bronze helmet, shield, greaves, breastplate, sword, and spear; the poorest were required to bring only slings and stones.12 Even under the kings of Rome, the citizens of Rome were expected to defend their own city—and, presumably, to decide when and where attack was needed. Given this much power over their city, the Roman citizens would not put up with the rule of a king for much longer.
At the end of Servius Tullius’s forty-four-year rule, the monarchy imploded.
The culprit was Servius Tullius’s nephew, Tarquin the Younger. He was not only ambitious but evil; his wickedness soon found an outlet when he started an affair with his younger brother’s w
ife Tullia, who was also evil: “There is a magnetic power in evil,” Livy observes, “like draws towards like.” Tarquin the Younger was himself married, but rather than allowing this to get in their way, the lovers plotted the deaths of both of their spouses, and then married.
“From that day on,” Livy writes, “Servius, now an old man, lived in ever increasing danger.” Tullia, the prototype of Lady Macbeth, was filled with ambition that her new husband be king, and “soon found that one crime must lead to another…. she gave her husband no rest by day or night.” “I didn’t want a man who would be content just to be my husband,” she lectured him, “I wanted a man who was worthy of a crown!”
Pricked into action, Tarquin the Younger broke into the throne room while Servius Tullius was out, seated himself on the throne, and declared himself king. Servius, hearing of the invasion, ran to the throne room to confront the usurper, but Tarquin, who had “gone too far to turn back,” hurled the old king out into the street with his own hands, where his assassins finished the old man off. “With Servius,” writes Livy, “true kingship came to an end; never again was a Roman king to rule in accordance with humanity and justice.”13
Tarquin the Younger, now in control of the throne, quickly earned himself the nickname Tarquinius Superbus: “Tarquin the Proud.” He formed a bodyguard to strong-arm the citizens of Rome into obedience; he executed Servius Tullius’s loyal supporters; he accused innocent people of capital crimes so that he could confiscate their money. “He had usurped by force the throne to which he had no title whatever,” Livy tells us.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 48