The Rise of Athens

Against Ahura Mazda stood a destructive spirit, Ahri-man. As in Zoroastrianism (a religion, to which that of the Achaemenids seems to be related, founded by the prophet Zarathustra or, as the Greeks called him, Zoroaster, who may have lived around the year 1000), the essential struggle in the universe was that between the “Truth” and the “Lie.” So far as the Achaemenid kings were concerned, the Lie referred to the ever-present dangers that threatened Persia and its empire. By contrast, they believed that “the man who has respect for that law which Ahura Mazda has established and worships Ahura Mazda and Arta [one of the other gods in the divine pantheon] reverently, he becomes happy while living, and blessed when dead.”

—

The Achaemenids were expansionist. Cyrus’s son Cambyses succeeded him and in 525 launched an attack on the Egypt of the pharaohs, a civilization that had already lasted for millennia. He defeated the Egyptians at the Battle of Pelusium, the fortress town that is the gateway into the kingdom from the east. He made himself pharaoh, assuming the ruler’s official titles, regalia, and uniform.

Then in 522 something happened that made him rush back to Persia. His long absences in Egypt and his despotic style of government had led to unrest back home. Cambyses had a younger brother or half brother, Bardiya (the Greeks called him Smerdis), who revolted and set himself up as Great King. He was extremely popular in Persia and Media, the heartland of the empire. The challenge had to be addressed, but en route from Egypt, Cambyses died childless in disputed circumstances.

There are different versions of what happened. Herodotus says that in March 522, the scabbard of Cambyses’ sword fell off and he accidentally stabbed himself. The wound went gangrenous and in eleven days he was dead. Another account by his lance-bearer, a nobleman called Darius, has it that the Great King “died his own death”—a gnomic phrase that some have taken to mean that he committed suicide.

Whatever precisely happened, this death left Bardiya still on the imperial throne, but only for seven months. Darius, who was a member of the imperial family and the son of a satrap, joined six other nobles in a successful conspiracy to assassinate the pretender. Darius was then appointed his successor.

He himself promoted a different version of events, according to a large inscription carved on a mountainside in Persia. He claimed that Cambyses had his brother Bardiya killed, before he himself died. Darius wrote: “When Cambyses slew Bardiya, it was not known unto the people that Bardiya was slain.” Then a magus, or priest from Media, called Gaumata, seeing the unpopularity of the government, impersonated Bardiya and hijacked the throne.

Darius continued: “The people feared him exceedingly, for he slew many who had known the real Bardiya. For this reason did he slay them, ‘that they may not know that I am not Bardiya, the son of Cyrus.’ There was none who dared to act against Gaumata, the Magian, until I came.”

Darius put Gaumata to death, but had a hard time maintaining his authority. In his first year in office he claims to have fought nineteen battles and captured nine kings. He punished them with horrifying severity; he writes of one rebel, proudly:

Phraortes, seized, was led to me. I cut off his nose and ears and tongue, and put out one eye; he was kept bound at my palace entrance, all the people saw him. Afterward I impaled him at Ecbatana; and the men who were his foremost followers, those at Ecbatana within the fortress, I flayed and hung out [that is, their hides, stuffed with straw].

—

So what are we to believe? There was not much passing trade to read Darius’s mountaintop inscription, although copies were distributed through the empire. He intended his narrative to last forever and to be read by posterity. However, there are inherent improbabilities in his account.

How likely is it that a senior member of the imperial family could be put to death on the order of Cambyses without anyone noticing? And surely many people knew Prince Bardiya by sight and would not have been taken in by a Median magus. And they could hardly all have been put to death. Nothing can be proved, but it is probable that it was Darius who was the usurper, who, Cambyses having died, murdered a real Great King and with barefaced effrontery replaced him. This could never be acknowledged, but the cover story he concocted is so thin as to insult the intelligence. One wonders what Ahura Mazda was supposed to make of this Great Lie.

Darius turned out to be a strong and effective ruler who earned his sobriquet “the Great,” as he came to be called, but the method of his accession exposed the chief weakness of the Persian state. At the center of affairs lay not so much a government as a palace. Intrigues were de rigueur, and maneuvers for the succession frequently fraught and bloody.

—