The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  These rituals were accompanied by poems and songs that described their proper performance; poems which, handed down orally from times before writing, acted as a living handbook of proper ceremony. Confucius, born with a naturally rententive memory, knew hundreds of them by heart.

  For ten years or so, Confucius remained a government record-keeper. But he also gained a greater and greater reputation as a sort of walking repository of ritual performance. The Lu court called on him, when necessary, to make sure that visitors to the court were received with the proper rites. And he had begun to acquire pupils who were anxious to learn from the library inside his head.

  By the time he was in his early thirties, the Duke of Lu consulted him on a regular basis. He was also hired away from his record-keeping to act as a tutor to the sons of at least one high Lu official.6 Just as he entered into this new phase of his professional life—in which his knowledge of ceremony, ritual, and the proper performance of duties would be central to his entire working life—the civil war flared up in the Zhou lands.

  The Zhou lack of clout had been partly masked by the general agreement among the lords of the surrounding states that the king still had some sort of ritual importance; that even if he did not actually rule, he stood at the center of some sort of cosmic order that they would prefer not to disrupt. The Chu demand for the Nine Tripods had, perhaps, been the first visible crack in that agreement. The bloody battles between two crowned kings, each boasting the authority conferred by ritual and ceremony, showed that the crack now reached all the way across the surface of Zhou power.

  Confucius was a man who treasured order; and he began to teach his pupils how to find both order and stability in a world where neither was on conspicuous display.

  His teachings tried to preserve the best aspects of the past—or at least a past that he believed had once existed. He collected the oldest poems and songs of China into the Shi jing, the Classic of Poetry, an anthology for future use. (“From them,” Confucius remarked, “you learn the more immediate duty of serving one’s father, and the remoter one of serving one’s prince.”)7 He is also credited with collecting together a shoal of rituals and ceremonies into a text originally called the Li ching, which regulates everything from the proper attitude of mourners (“When one has paid a visit of condolence, he should not on the same day show manifestations of joy”)8 to the orderly succession of monthly tasks (“In the second month of autumn…it is allowable to rear city and suburban walls, to establish cities and towns, to dig underground passages and grain-pits, and to repair granaries.”)9 His sayings were gathered together by his followers into a third collection called Lun yu, or the Analects.

  Confucius was not the inventor of the philosophy laid out in the Analects, any more than the Mahavira was the originator of Jainism. His innovation was in turning back to the past in order to find a way forwards. “I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge,” he told his followers, “I am one who is fond of antiquity and earnest in seeing it there.”10 His study of the past told him that, in a fractious China, both tranquillity and virtue lay in the orderly performance of duties. “It is by the rules of propriety that the character is established,” he is reported to have said. “Without the rules of propriety, respectfulness becomes laborious bustle; carefulness, timidity; boldness, insubordination; and straightforwardness, rudeness.”11

  In a world where force of arms seemed to be the only glue holding a state together, Confucius offered another way for men to control the society that surrounded them. The man who understood his duties towards others and lived them out became the anchor of a country—in place of the king, or the general, or the aristocrat. “He who exercises government by means of his virtue,” the Analects say, “may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place, and all the stars turn towards it…. If the people be led by virtue…they will become good.”17412

  BEFORE CONFUCIUS WAS FORTY, he was forced to flee from Lu when its duke was driven out by a rival aristocratic family. Confucius followed the exiled ruler of Lu up into the neighboring state of Qi, where both had to throw themselves on the mercy of the lord of Qi, who had not always been particularly friendly to his southern colleague.

  However, it suited the Duke of Qi, for the moment, to play host; he offered his hospitality to the exiled ruler of Lu. Confucius, on the other hand, found his own welcome to the court ruined by jealous Qi courtiers, who banded together to block his access to the Duke of Qi.13 Finding himself with no job, Confucius left Qi and went back to Lu, where he made it quite clear that he intended to stay uninvolved with politics. This was wise, as Lu was divided between three quarrelling families, none of whom had a clear upper hand. (Eventually, Confucius would return to civil service for a time, but he devoted most of his later years to writing out the history of Lu, an account now known as the Spring and Autumn Annals.)

  A little farther to the west, Ching II, now nominally in control of the Zhou palace, was about to have troubles of his own. His vassal-brother, the onetime King Tao, remained in simmering submission for twelve years; and then rose up with his followers (who perhaps resented the Jin tampering in their affairs), reattacked the capital, and drove his brother back. Ching II returned to Jin and asked the duke for help. The following year, the Jin army once again “successfully escorted King Ching [II] back to Zhou.”14

  It was the last great Jin victory. Before long, the Duke of Jin began to find himself in difficulties. In the constant campaigning against the barbarians, several large families of Jin had grown steadily richer: one family claimed by birth the hereditary right to command the army; another had not only claimed huge amounts of barbarian land, but had also made alliances and treaties with the barbarian tribe. Men from these families and several others began to push against each other for more control of the Jin court. By 505, the divisions were serious enough to hamper the ongoing Jin fight against barbarians; according to the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Jin army, apparently divided by internal bickering, had to retreat from a siege laid against a barbarian town without success.15

  In 493, Cheng and Jin waged a brief vicious war with each other; in 492, Qi, Lu, and Wey agreed to join with one of the Jin aristocrats and marched into Jin itself to push another Jin family off the map, in a combination civil war/invasion.

  Now Lu was divided, Jin was fractious, and the Zhou were weak. Chu, which had been dominant in the south for a century, was fighting against the invasions of Wu and Yueh on its southeastern flank; Wu, temporarily gaining the upper hand, announced itself the ruling state of the entire south, at which the Yueh turned against its ally and attacked it.16 The Zhou monarch had ceased to be even a blip on the political screen. The years between 481 and 403 were so confused that many historians, who divide the period when the Zhou occupied their eastern capital (the Eastern Zhou Period, 771–221) into two halves (the Spring and Autumn Period, 771–481, and the Warring States Period, 403–221), do not even try to give a name to the roil of years between the halves. It is a kind of interregnum.

  During these years, another philosopher (of a sort) made another attempt to lay out principles by which China might find unity (of a kind). Sun-Tzu, the general who fought for the Duke of Wu,175 had no illusions over what constant warfare was doing to his country: “There is no instance of a country having benefitted from prolonged warfare,” he warned.17 The Art of War is about conquering your enemies while avoiding as much actual fighting as possible. “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting,” Sun-Tzu wrote,18 and “When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull, and their ardor will be damped…. Cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.” Sieges, that staple of Middle Eastern warfare, were not recommended: “Do not besiege a town,” Sun-Tzu ordered. “If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.…Other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert
the consequences.”19

  These are the words of a man who knew that enemies from your own state were just as dangerous as enemies in the next state over. In a country where your friends were as likely to be plotting against you as your enemies, deceit became a way of life: “All warfare is based on deception,” wrote Sun-Tzu. “When able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”20 The good general not only deceives the enemy himself, but assumes that his enemy is always deceiving him: “Humble words and increased preparations are signs that the enemy is about to advance,” Sun-Tzu explains. “Violent language and driving forward as if to the attack are signs that he will retreat…Peace proposals accompanied by a sworn covenant indicate a plot.”21

  Both Confucius and Sun-Tzu, roughly contemporary as they are, offer a philosophy of order, a way of dealing with a disunified country; stability through the proper performance of social duties, or stability through intimidation. Sun-Tzu’s method is no less systematic and all encompassing than that of Confucius. And, for a time, it gained the upper hand. The states of the Eastern Zhou were, as the first-century Chinese historian Liu Xiang wrote, “greedy and shameless. They competed without satiety…. There was no Son of Heaven above and there were no local lords down below. Everything was achieved through physical force and the victorious was the noble. Military activities were incessant and deceit and falsehoods came hand in hand.”22

  China’s government had become a constellation of military rulers, each holding onto his power by constant warfare. Without war, which acted to push the borders of the states outwards against the borders of the next state, the states would collapse inwards like pricked balloons; they had to stay inflated with the hot air of battle.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The Spreading Persian Empire

  Between 539 and 514 BC,

  Cyrus the Great falls in battle,

  Cambyses conquers Egypt,

  and the Indian kingdom of Magadha grows strong

  AFTER THE CONQUEST OF BABYLON, Cyrus the Great ruled over his empire for a little less than nine years, and then fell in a skirmish with an unknown queen.

  He was fighting his way up north into brand new territory, across the Oxus river and up into the wilds of central Asia, east of the Aral Sea. The mountain tribes up in this area were an offshoot of the Scythians: Herodotus calls them the Massagetae, fierce fighters who used bronze-tipped bows and spears, worshipped the sun, and “do not cultivate the land, but live off cattle and fish.”1

  Cyrus first tried to conquer the Massagetae by treaty. He sent a message to their queen Tomyris, offering to marry her. She not only declined, but sent her son to lead an attack against the rear wing of the Persian army. The attack failed and Tomyris’s son was taken captive.

  Unable to bear his shame, he killed himself. At this, Tomyris sent Cyrus a message, vowing, “I swear by the sun that I will quench your thirst for blood.” Then she led the rest of her people against the advancing Persians. The two armies met in 530 BC, a minor clash with epic proportions: “I consider this to be the fiercest battle between non-Greeks there has ever been,” Herodotus says, which (given his attitude towards non-Greeks) may mean that it was the most savage fighting ever seen. They fought with bows and arrows, and then with spears, and then with daggers.

  The Massagetae did what the Assyrians could not: they wiped out most of the Persian troops. Cyrus himself, fighting on the ground among his men, fell. When the Massagetae had gained dominance over the field, Tomyris searched through the Persian bodies lying in their blood until she found the king’s corpse. She lifted his head and shoved it into a wineskin filled with blood: “I warned you that I would quench your thirst for blood,” she told the body.2

  63.1 Persia and Central Asia

  With her son avenged, Tomyris allowed the Persian survivors to take the body of the Great King from the battlefield. They washed the blood from his face and took the corpse in a defeated funeral procession back to Pasargadae.

  Cyrus had already built himself a tomb: a gabled stone house, carved to look like timber, that stood on the top level of a seven-level ziggurat of steps. His body was dressed in royal robes and ornaments, provided with weapons, and placed on a gold couch. The tomb was sealed, and a cadre of Persian priests was given the task of living in a small house nearby as guardians of Cyrus’s final resting place.

  Cambyses II, the oldest son of the king, was crowned as his successor. He had acted as his father’s commander for some years; in fact, he had been with Cyrus just before the crossing of the Oxus, but the king had sent his son back to Pasargadae to take care of matters there while he fought what must have seemed like a very minor engagement.

  Surveying his father’s empire, Cambyses seems to have suffered from the exact same impulse as so many other sons of great men: he wanted to outdo his father. This was not a matter of vengeance, since he left the northeastern frontier where Cyrus had died untouched. Instead, he first moved his palace and the center of the administration of the empire from his father’s capital, Pasargadae, to a new city: the old Elamite capital of Susa, closer to the middle of the empire. And then he set his eye on Egypt.

  DOWN IN EGYPT, the pharaoh Apries had led his armies straight into a huge disaster.

  West of the Delta, the Greek settlement of Cyrene—the colony planted on the North African coast by the people of Thera—had finally begun to grow, after almost sixty years of bare survival. Its third king, Battus the Prosperous, had issued an all-points bulletin to every Greek city, begging for additional settlers and promising everyone who came a plot of land. Soon a “considerable mass” of people had gathered in Cyrene, mostly coming from the Greek mainland, and were claiming land all around the city.

  This did not go over well with the native North Africans, whom Herodotus knows as “Libyans.” They sent a message to Egypt asking for help, and “put themselves under the protection of the Egyptian king Apries.” So Apries sent out an Egyptian army to help his fellow North Africans against the Greek invaders. Unfortunately the Egyptian army was decimated by the Greeks: they were, in Herodotus’s words, “so thoroughly annihilated that hardly any of them found their way back to Egypt.”3

  This disaster turned the Egyptians against Apries, who was apparently already suffering from huge unpopularity: “They believed that Apries had deliberately sent them to certain death,” Herodotus writes, so that after their destruction, with fewer subjects left to rule over, his reign would be more secure. The survivors who returned home from Cyrene took this hard: they “combined with the friends of those who had met their deaths and rose up in open rebellion.”4

  Apries sent out his chief Egyptian general, Amasis, to put down the rebellion.

  This proved to be a mistake. The pharaoh had inherited Amasis from his father, Psammetichus II, which meant that Amasis had been around, and in power, longer than Apries had been king. Face-to-face with an armed Egyptian uprising that wanted to get rid of Apries, Amasis yielded to temptation and allowed it to be made known that, if the rebels pleased, they could make him king instead.5

  Someone carried news of this treachery to Apries, who sent an official from his court demanding that Amasis return at once to the palace at Sais and give an account of his actions. “Amasis,” Herodotus remarks, “happened to be on horseback at the time; he lifted himself up in the saddle, farted, and told him to take that back to Apries.”6

  Apries, receiving the message, cut off the nose and ears of the messenger, which had the effect of turning even more Egyptians against him. It was clear that he would have to fight for his throne, but pretty much all he had left were his mercenary forces, of which he had about thirty thousand, both Ionian Greeks and Carians (mercenaries of Greek descent, from the southwest coast of Asia Minor).

  63.2 Egypt and Cyrene

  The two armies met halfway between Memphis and Sais, at a battlef
ield called Momemphis. The Egyptian forces outnumbered the mercenaries, and Amasis was a shrewd general; the Egyptians won the day, and Apries was captured. He was taken off to the palace at Sais as a prisoner, but not killed.

  Apparently Apries then escaped, because three years later, a fragmentary inscription from Elephantine relates that Amasis was in his palace at Sais when he received news that Apries was sailing down on him from the north with “Greeks without number,” who were “wasting all Egypt” while the army of Amasis fled in front of them.7 Apries had gone north to hire reinforcements.

  The inscription is too damaged to know exactly how the battle progressed, but it concludes, “His majesty [Amasis] fought like a lion, he made a slaughter among them…. numerouss hips took them, falling into the water, whom they saw sink as do the fish.”8 Among those caught on the sinking Greek ships was Apries, who died in the slaughter.

  So Amasis was on the throne in Sais when word came down to Egypt that Cambyses, new king of the Persians, was preparing for an attack.

  Cambyses had to begin by making himself a navy. The Persians had no seafaring tradition of their own; but Cyrus had provided his son with an empire that stretched all along the Mediterranean coast, and Cambyses considered the Ionian sailors of the Asia Minor coasts to be his subjects. He required them to build ships and staff them; and he made the same demand from the Phoenician cities under his control. The fledgling Persian navy combined the skills of Greeks and Phoenicians, two cultures who had been on the water since the beginning of their civilization.