VIII. SCIENCE AND ART
Medicine—Minor arts—The tombs of Cyrus and Darius—The palaces of Persepolis—The Frieze of the Archers—Estimate of Persian art
The Persians seem to have deliberately neglected to train their children in any other art than that of life. Literature was a delicacy for which they had small use; science was a commodity which they could import from Babylon. They had a certain relish for poetry and romantic fiction, but they left these arts to hirelings and inferiors, preferring the exhilaration of keen-witted conversation to the quiet and solitary pleasures of reading and research. Poetry was sung rather than read, and perished with the singers.
Medicine was at first a function of the priests, who practised it on the principle that the Devil had created 99,999 diseases, which should be treated by a combination of magic and hygiene. They resorted more frequently to spells than to drugs, on the ground that the spells, though they might not cure the illness, would not kill the patient—which was more than could be said for the drugs.128 Nevertheless lay medicine developed along with the growing wealth of Persia, and in the time of Artaxerxes II there was a well-organized guild of physicians and surgeons, whose fees were fixed by law—as in Hammurabi’s code—according to the social rank of the patient.129 Priests were to be treated free. And just as, among ourselves, the medical novice practises for a year or two, as interne, upon the bodies of the immigrant and the poor, so among the Persians a young physician was expected to begin his career by treating infidels and foreigners. The Lord of Light himself had decreed it:
O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One, if a worshiper of God wish to practice the art of healing, on whom shall he first prove his skill—on the worshipers of Ahura-Mazda, or on the worshipers of the Daevas (the evil spirits)? Ahura-Mazda made answer and said: On worshipers of the Daevas shall he prove himself, rather than on worshipers of God. If he treat with the knife a worshiper of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a second worshiper of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a third worshiper of the Daevas and he die, he is unfit forever and ever; let him never attend any worshiper of God. . . . If he treat with the knife a worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; if he treat with the knife a second worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; if he treat with the knife a third worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; then he is fit forever and ever; he may at his will treat worshipers of God, and heal them with the knife.130
Having dedicated themselves to empire, the Persians found their time and energies taken up with war, and, like the Romans, depended largely upon imports for their art. They had a taste for pretty things, but they relied upon foreign or foreign-born artists to produce them, and uponprovincial revenues to pay for them. They had beautiful homes and luxuriant gardens, which sometimes became hunting-parks or zoological collections; they had costly furniture—tables plated or inlaid with silver or gold, couches spread with exotic coverlets, floors carpeted with rugs resilient in texture and rich in all the colors of earth and sky;131 they drank from golden goblets, and adorned their tables or their shelves with vases turned by foreign hands;* they liked song and dance, and the playing of the harp, the flute, the drum and the tambourine. Jewelry abounded, from tiaras and ear-rings to golden anklets and shoes; even the men flaunted jewels on necks and ears and arms. Pearls, rubies, emeralds and lapis lazuli came from abroad, but turquoise came from the Persian mines, and contributed the customary material for the aristocrat’s signet-ring. Gems of monstrous and grotesque form copied the supposed features of favorite devils. The king sat on a golden throne covered with golden canopies upheld with pillars of gold.133
Only in architecture did the Persians achieve a style of their own. Under Cyrus, Darius I and Xerxes I they erected tombs and palaces which archeology has very incompletely exhumed; and it may be that those prying historians, the pick and the shovel, will in the near future raise our estimate of Persian art.† At Pasargadae Alexander spared for us, with characteristic graciousness, the tomb of Cyrus I. The caravan road now crosses the bare platform that once bore the palaces of Cyrus and his mad son; of these nothing survives except a few broken columns here and there, or a door-jamb bearing the features of Cyrus in bas-relief. Nearby, on the plain, is the tomb, showing the wear of twenty-four centuries: a simple stone chapel, quite Greek in restraint and form, rising to some thirty-five feet in height upon a terraced base. Once, surely, it was a loftier monument, with some fitting pedestal; today it seems a little bare and forlorn, having the shape but hardly the substance of beauty; the cracked and ruined stones merely chasten us with the quiet permanence of the inanimate. Far south, at Naksh-i-Rustam, near Persepolis, is the tomb of Darius I, cut like some Hindu chapel into the face of the mountain rock. The entrance is carved to simulate a palace façade, with four slender columns about a modest portal; above it, as if on a roof, figures representing the subject peoples of Persia support a dais on which the King is shown worshiping Ahura-Mazda and the moon. It is conceived and executed with aristocratic refinement and simplicity.
The rest of such Persian architecture as has survived the wars, raids, thefts and weather of two millenniums is composed of palace ruins. At Ecbatana the early kings built a royal residence of cedar and cypress, plated with metal, which still stood in the days of Polybius (ca. 150 B.C.), but of which no sign remains. The most imposing relics of ancient Persia, now rising day by day out of the grasping and secretive earth, are the stone steps, platform and columns at Persepolis; for there each monarch from Darius onward built a palace to defer the oblivion of his name. The great external stairs that mounted from the plain to the elevation on which the buildings rested were unlike anything else in architectural records; derived, presumably, from the flights of steps that approached and encircled the Mesopotamian ziggurats, they had nevertheless a character specifically their own—so gradual in ascent and so spacious that ten horsemen could mount them abreast*135 They must have formed a brilliant approach to the vast platform, twenty to fifty feet high, fifteen hundred feet long and one thousand feet wide, that bore the royal palaces.† Where the two flights of steps, coming from either side, met at their summit, stood a gateway, or propyleum, flanked by winged and human-headed bulls in the worst Assyrian style. At the right stood the masterpiece of Persian architecture—the Chehil Minar or Great Hall of Xerxes I, covering, with its roomy antechambers, an area of more than a hundred thousand square feet—vaster, if size mattered, than vast Karnak, or any European cathedral except Milan’s.138 Another flight of steps led to this Great Hall; these stairs were flanked with ornamental parapets, and their supporting sides were carved with the finest bas-reliefs yet discovered in Persia.139 Thirteen of the once seventy-two columns of Xerxes’ palace stand among the ruins, like palm-trees in some desolate oasis; and these marble columns, though mutilated, are among the nearly perfect works of man. They are slenderer than any columns of Egypt or Greece, and rise to the unusual height of sixty-four feet. Their shafts are fluted with forty-eight small grooves; their bases resemble bells overlaid with inverted leaves; their capitals for the most part take the form of floral—almost “Ionic” volutes, surmounted by the forequarters of two bulls or unicorns upon whose necks, joined back to back, rested the crossbeam or architrave. This was surely of wood, for such fragile columns, so wide apart, could hardly have supported a stone entablature. The door-jambs and window-frames were of ornamented black stone that shone like ebony; the walls were of brick, but they were covered with enameled tiles painted in brilliant panels of animals and flowers; the columns, pilasters and steps were of fine white limestone or hard blue marble. Behind, or east of, this Chehil Minar rose the “Hall of a Hundred Columns”; nothing remains of it but one pillar and the outlines of the general plan. Possibly these palaces were the most beautiful ever erected in the ancient or modern world.
At Susa the Artaxerxes I and II built palaces of which only the foundations survive. They were constructed of brick, redeemed by the finest glazed tiles known; from Susa comes the famous “Frieze of the Archers”—probably the faithful “Immortals” who guarded the king. The stately bowmen seem dressed rather for court ceremony than for war; their tunics resound with bright colors, their hair and beards are wondrously curled, their hands bear proudly and stiffly their official staffs. In Susa, as in the other capitals, painting and sculpture were dependent arts serving architecture, and the statuary was mostly the work of artists imported from Assyria, Babylonia and Greece.140
One might say of Persian art, as perhaps of nearly every art, that all the elements of it were borrowed. The tomb of Cyrus took its form from Lydia, the slender stone columns improved upon the like pillars of Assyria, the colonnades and bas-reliefs acknowledged their inspiration from Egypt, the animal capitals were an infection from Nineveh and Babylon. It was the ensemble that made Persian architecture individual and different—an aristocratic taste that refined the overwhelming columns of Egypt and the heavy masses of Mesopotamia into the brilliance and elegance, the proportion and harmony of Persepolis. The Greeks would hear with wonder and admiration of these halls and palaces; their busy travelers and observant diplomats would bring them stimulating word of the art and luxury of Persia. Soon they would transform the double volutes and stiff-necked animals of these graceful pillars into the smooth lobes of the Ionic capital; and they would shorten and strengthen the shafts to make them bear any entablature, whether of wood or of stone. Architecturally there was but a step from Persepolis to Athens. All the Near Eastern world, about to die for a thousand years, prepared to lay its heritage at the feet of Greece.