Empire-building, co-opting a religious tradition for political gain, family hostilities in the royal line, a professional army: northern India had joined the world to the west.
THE INDUS RIVER had probably been reached once by Persian soldiers, under Cyrus’s command, although this is about all that we can surmise. Cyrus certainly didn’t encounter any of the Indian tribes or fight his way into the Indus river valley. But Darius knew that the Indus was there. He just had no idea where it went.
So he hired a Carian sailor named Skylax, a Greek from southwest Asia Minor, to accompany an expedition down the river and make a map of what he saw. According to Herodotus, the starting point for the journey was the land he calls Pactyice, which is on the northern Indus: presumably both Cyrus and Darius reached the Indus by going through the Khyber Pass. Once through the pass, Darius’s expedition must have built boats on the shore of the Indus river and then sailed down it, through the territory of the mahajanapada called Gandhara. They passed the Thar desert, before coming to the sea. Then they sailed west, around the entire southern coast of the Arabian peninsula, and came back up the Red Sea. Darius had ordered the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea dug out after it had begun to silt up, so the ships could then go through the Delta into the Mediterranean.
63.1. First World Map. The first known map of the world shows Babylon at its center, surrounded by a circular “Salt Sea.” British Museum, London. Photo credit HIP/Art Resource, NY
“After this successful circumnavigation,” Herodotus says, after describing a three-year journey, “Darius conquered the Indians.”25 The conquest was certainly not “all of the Indians,” but Darius got some ways into the Punjab, perhaps dominating the Gandhara and Kamboja kingdoms: in an inscription at Susa, he lists goldwork from Egypt, Lydian stone, and timbers from Gandhara as the materials brought from the far places of his empire to build a new palace. Another inscription calls his far eastern conquest the “Hindush satrapy.” It became the twentieth satrapy in his kingdom, with the duty of sending a yearly tribute of gold dust to Susa.26
During these years, some scribe in Babylon drew the earliest surviving map of the world. The clay tablet shows Babylon on the Euphrates, Assyria to the east, and other cities, all of it ringed with “bitter water”—the Persian Gulf. Eight lands lie beyond, impossibly distant but nevertheless close enough to put on a map for the first time.
It is also in these years that a Babylonian inscription mentions a woman from India, Busasa, who kept an inn in the city of Kish. Presumably she had travelled down the Indus and up the Persian Gulf by sea: not moving from India to Babylon, but rather moving from one part of Darius’s empire to another.27 Persia had become a bridge between India and the peoples farther west.
Chapter Sixty-Four
The Persian Wars
Between 527 and 479 BC,
Darius fails to defeat Athens,
and the cities of Greece unite against his son Xerxes
THE PERSIAN EMPIRE, bulging out in almost all directions, made little progress to the northwest, where the Scythians lived.
“Scythia,” which Herodotus and other ancient historians refer to as though it were as easily located on a map as New Jersey, was no such thing. The Scythians had a score of tribes and a handful of kings, and they had been on the move for over two hundred years. In 516 BC, the center of their homeland lay between the two great rivers that ran into the Black Sea: the Danube to the west, and the Don river to the east.
These Scythians had been nomads when they first appeared in the records of the Assyrians, back before 700 BC, and they were still nomads in 516. “If we had towns, we might worry that they would be captured,” one of the Scythian kings told Darius, when he first threatened Persian invasion, “and if we had farmland we might worry about it being laid waste…. but we don’t haveeither.”1 Their customs were fierce. They made cups from the skulls of fallen enemies, and skinned their right arms (“fingernails and all,” Herodotus remarks) to use as covers for arrow quivers; they hauled the dead bodies of their kinsmen to feasts for forty days after death, offering food and drink to the corpses; they threw cannabis seeds onto glowing stones and inhaled the smoke, “shrieking with delight at the fumes” (an exception to the common wisdom that a marijuana habit inevitably makes one dreamy and nonaggressive).2
By 516, Darius had begun to plan his campaign against the Scythians. He had already paid a good deal of attention to the northwest frontier. Sardis, in Asia Minor, had become his secondary center of administration. To give himself easy access to Sardis, Darius built a new road from Susa all the way into Asia Minor. This Royal Road was dotted with post stations for the change of horses, so that a messenger could get rapidly from the west to the capital and back again.
64.1 Homeland of the Scythians
Now Darius himself rode along the Royal Road to Sardis, and then from Sardis to the edge of his territory. To attack the Scythians, he would bring his navy up the coast of Asia Minor, through the pass known as the Hellespont and into the Bosphorus Strait. From there, they would sail into the Black Sea and then up the Danube river (which Herodotus knew as the Ister), along the southern edge of Scythian territory.3
Meanwhile, his land forces would have to cross over the strait that separated Asia Minor from the land we now call Europe. It was not a particularly impressive expanse of water, but no eastern empire had yet crossed it. Darius assigned the job of building a bridge across the Bosphorus Strait to one of his Greek engineers, an Ionian named Mandrocles. Then he sent for his men.
The Persian army began the long march along the Royal Road towards Sardis, a force so concentrated that they shook the earth as they passed subjugated city after subjugated city. Meanwhile, the engineer Mandrocles had taken the measure of the strait. At its narrowest, it is around 650 meters, or 720 yards, wide (the length of seven American football fields), far too wide for a traditional bridge. Instead, Mandrocles designed a bridge built across galleys: low, flat-decked ships, roped together to form a floating foundation for a plank road covered with dirt and stones. This was the first pontoon bridge in history: “A bolted roadway, sewn with flax,” in the words of the Greek poet Aeschylus.4 It would still serve as a pattern for army bridge-builders centuries later.
Thousands of Persian foot soldiers and cavalry marched across the bridge, headed for a narrow place in the Danube. There they would meet the naval detachment and build another pontoon bridge into Scythian territory. The cities of Thrace on the other side did not attempt to block the advance. Most Thracians were afraid of the Scythians, and the Persian army might serve as protection against them.
64.1. Pontoon Bridge. Pontoon bridges remained a staple of military strategy for centuries; this pontoon bridge was constructed across the James River in Virginia during the American Civil War. Photo credit Medford Historical Society Collection/CORBIS
The Scythians did not line up in opposition. Instead, the tribes retreated constantly in front of the Persians, filling in wells and springs and torching trees and grasslands as they went. The Persians, following on, found themselves marching through rough wastes, foraging constantly for food and water, horses and men growing ever hungrier. They were never able to set up and fight a pitched battle, so they were never able to use the skills in which they were trained. “The whole business dragged on endlessly,” writes Herodotus, “…and things began to go badly for Darius.”5
Badly enough that, finally, the Great King turned back. The entire Persian force marched back to the south, back over the pontoon bridge across the Danube, leaving the unconquered Scythians behind. Persian court historians, and later Persian kings, dealt with this problem by only writing the history of the lands south of the Danube. For all practical purposes, the land on the other side of the river simply ceased to exist. If the Persians couldn’t take it, it clearly wasn’t important.6
But Darius did not leave without spoils. He headed back to Sardis and left the army behind him under his most trusted general, the Persian Megabazu
s, with orders to conquer Thrace.
The Thracian cities which had hoped for deliverance from the Scythian threat now found themselves falling, one by one, under Persian dominance. Megabazus was a competent general, and the Persian soldiers skilled fighters, but their task was made easier by the fractured nature of Thrace: each city had its own warrior-chief and its own army. “If the Thracians were ruled by a single person or had a common purpose,” Herodotus remarks, “they would be invincible and would be by far the most powerful nation in the world…. There is no way that it will ever happen, and that is why they are weak.”7
Megabazus turned Thrace into a new Persian satrapy, Skudra.8 Then he turned south and set his eyes on the next kingdom: Macedonia.
MACEDONIA, which stood between Thrace and the city-states of the Greek mainland, differed both from the Thracians above and the Greeks below. The cities of Macedonia belonged to a single kingdom, ruled by a single king.
The first Macedonian kings came from a warrior-chief clan called the Argead. The Argead hailed, originally, from the south, and were probably mostly Greek; the poet Hesiod provides the Macedonians with a mythological ancestry that makes them cousins of the Greek heroes and descendants of Zeus, probably reflecting a real ancient relationship of some kind.178
Moving north, the Argead conquered the land around the Thermaic Gulf and a little farther north, built a capital city (Aegae, near the ancient fortress of Edessa), organized an army, and collected taxes. Macedonia was the first state in Europe to achieve this level of organization.9
But it was a pretty rough and tumble kingdom. The kings of Macedonia did not come from the eastern tradition of divinely ordained kingship. They were warriors who held their thrones by force. And although the center of Macedonia was firmly under their control, their hold over the northern parts of Macedonia was much shakier. To the west lay a loose alliance of tribes called Illyrians (probably migrants down from the northwest, since the archaeological traces they have left behind bear a strong resemblance to those of the Celtic West Hallstatt, ranging north of Italy); to the north, Thracian tribes known collectively as the Paeonians.
In the year that Megabazus and his Persians appeared on the horizon with a well-conquered Thrace behind them, the king of Macedonia was Amyntas I (according to tradition, the ninth Argead king). The Persians rolled towards the Macedonian heartland, burning the towns of the Paeonians. Amyntas, seeing the smoke on the horizon, decided at once that resistance was futile.
When seven Persian delegates, led by Megabazus’s own son, crossed the Macedonian border with a message, Amyntas received them with honor at his palace at Aegea. “They demanded earth and water for King Darius,” Herodotus tells us,10 a Persian custom symbolizing dominance over the land and sea of a captured country. Amyntas agreed at once. He also offered his daughter in marriage to Megabazus’s son, by way of making him particularly welcome. This alliance turned out to be very good indeed for Macedonia; neither the Illyrians nor the remaining Paeonians would trouble their northern border, since to do so might be to risk Persian wrath.
Meanwhile, the Greeks to the south were rapidly approaching a state of panic. With Megabazus storming around to the north, and Amyntas of Macedonia now a Persian ally, there was little barrier now between Persian ambitions and the Greek peninsula.
Unfortunately the Greek cities had long been as divided as the Thracian tribes, and the two most powerful, Athens and Sparta, were suffering from internal convulsions.
SOLON’S REFORMS had not legislated Athens into peace.
The famous code had reorganized the city’s government. The top officials in Athens were still the archons, but there were two other levels of government below. The Council of Four Hundred, drawn by lot from the middle-and upper-class citizens of Athens, debated laws and decided which ones should be presented for a vote. The voting population of Athens made up the last level of government, the Assembly.
Every citizen of Athens belonged to the Assembly, which was not as democratic as it sounds; in order to be an Athenian citizen, you had to own property.11 But Solon had also legislated that the sons of citizens inherited citizenship, even if their fathers had grown poor and lost their land. This was supposed to keep voting power from becoming concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of wealthy monopolists.
Like the legal reforms themselves, this didn’t please two-thirds of Athenian citizens. Wealthy men wanted more influence than the Assembly gave them; the poorest Athenians were limited to membership in the lowest branch of Athenian government.
The Athenians divided into three squabbling groups over Solon’s reforms, each with its own nickname. The Men of the Coast wanted to keep Solon’s reforms, the Men of the Plain (the oldest families, the Main Line of Athens) wanted to return all power to the hands of the richest Athenians, and the Men of the Hills wanted complete democracy, with the poor and landless granted exactly the same privileges as everyone else. They were the wildest of the three, and their leader, Peisistratus, was, in the words of Aristotle, “an extreme democrat.”12 For one thing, he had been wounded fighting against the enemies of Athens, which gave him a lot of popular appeal (military service was always an advantage for a man who wanted the commoners on his side), and for another he seems to have been a very magnetic personality: “There was something subtly charming about the way he spoke,” Plutarch remarks. “He was so good at simulating faculties with which he was not naturally endowed, that he was credited with them, more than those who really did have them.”13 He also complained that he was in constant danger of being assassinated by his enemies, which was not paranoid, but rather exceedingly clever; it gave him a reason to collect an increasingly powerful bodyguard around him.
His increasing rabble of armed men worried the most conservative Athenians, and even Solon, returning from his travels in wild lands, was concerned. But Solon was by now very old, his voice shaky and his commanding presence reduced. He could not make much difference in the unfolding of events.
In 560, Peisistratus and his club-wielding bodyguards stormed into the Acropolis, and Peisistratus announced that he would take control of the city. The revolt was just about as successful as Cylon’s. He had overestimated the strength of his followers, and the Men of the Coast and the Men of the Plain forgot their differences, joined together, and drove the Men of the Hills out of Athens.
64.2 Greece at the Time of the Persian Wars
Peisistratus regathered himself in exile. He had tried sheer force; now he would try strategy. He made a secret alliance with the aristocratic Megacles, leader of the Men of the Coast, promising to marry his daughter in return for helping him get rid of the Men of the Plain (apparently the two parties had begun to bicker with each other, now that they were no longer united against the poor rabble), and came back.
This time Peisistratus, with the combined support of his own followers and Megacles’s, managed to hold on to power for a little longer. But soon he was in trouble again. This time, he annoyed his wife by “not having sex with her in the usual way,” as Herodotus puts it, and “later she told her mother, who may or may not have questioned her about it.”14 Megacles, informed of this development (and presumably already regretting his alliance with the rough and ready Men of the Hills), decided to switch sides again, and joined the Men of the Plain in driving Peisistratus back out.
Peisistratus had tried revolt; he had tried political alliance; his only path back into power was to buy it, and this path he took. He spent ten years or so working in silver mines, and then, in 546, hired an army of mercenaries and reentered Athens with armed men at his back. He ordered them to take away all weapons of Athenian citizens (the right to bear arms was not, apparently, one of the democratic privileges on his agenda), and from then on ruled as tyrant.15
In his own eyes, he was dominating the Athenians for their own good. And in fact he became quite popular; he reduced the taxes for the poor, “advanced money to the poorer people to help them in their labour,”16 and generall
y behaved like a mild and humble benefactor, as long as no one crossed him.
When he died in 528, his oldest son Hippias (from a previous marriage, before the irregular cavorting with Megacles’s daughter) inherited his job as tyrant, in quite kinglike fashion. This didn’t cause any heartburning until a family crisis ensued. According to Aristotle, Hippias’s younger brother, Hipparchus, fell madly in love with a handsome young man named Harmodius, who refused to have anything to do with him. Spurned, Hipparchus publicly remarked that Harmodius was a degenerate.
Harmodius was infuriated. He recruited a friend, and the two of them rushed Hipparchus at the height of a religious festival and murdered him. They had hoped that noise and celebration would mask their actions, but royal guards killed Harmodius and arrested his accomplice.
The murder of his brother put Hippias into a frenzy of rage. He ordered the young accomplice tortured for an unspeakably long time, until the young man, maddened by pain, accused all sorts of Athenian citizens of plotting against Hippias and his household, and then finally was released by death.
“In consequence of his vengeance for his brother,” writes Aristotle, “and of the execution and banishment of a large number of persons, Hippias became a distrusted and an embittered man.”17 He began a purge of everyone named by the young accomplice, and anyone else who got in his way.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 53