6
Marathon, trumpeted by the Athenians as the greatest victory of all time, was regarded by the King of Kings in an understandably different light. True, Persian propagandists were hardly in the habit of drawing attention to their master’s setbacks—yet neither was it entirely stretching a point for them to dismiss the battle as a minor border skirmish. While it was certainly to be regretted that the pestilential Athenians had managed to wriggle free of their punishment, the failure to take their city detracted only mildly from an expedition that had otherwise been a great success. Anyone doubting this had only to watch the Eretrians as they were led cringeing through the streets of Susa. Darius, exceedingly gracious, responded to the spectacle of his captives’ misery and submission by ordering their chains struck off and settling them just to the north of modern-day Basra. This region was already widely celebrated for the mysterious black liquid that bubbled up from beneath its sands, and the smell of what the Persians called “rhadinake” hung heavy in the air—a far cry from the salt tang of the Aegean. Just as the Judaeans had once wept beside the rivers of Babylon, so now the Eretrians mourned their homeland amid the oil wells of southern Iraq. “Farewell, famous Eretria, our country no more. Farewell, Athens, once our neighbour across the straits. Farewell, beloved sea.”1 Their exile, as Darius had recognized, was punishment enough.
Such magnanimity, of course, could only ever be the sunshine after the storm of the Great King’s righteous anger. On Athens, that obdurate stronghold of daivas and the Lie, the death sentence still stood as immutably as before. But not on Athens alone. The sin committed by the Spartans in murdering the Great King’s ambassadors had been neither forgotten nor forgiven, and Darius, reformulating his western strategy in the aftermath of Marathon, was now resolved that Sparta as well as Athens should be destroyed. By good fortune, his intelligence chiefs, always at the forefront of the Great King’s military planning, had recently pulled off a particularly spectacular coup: the recruitment as an agent of none other than a former king from that closed and mysterious city. Demaratus, publicly insulted by Leotychides in the full view of the Spartan people, had finally snapped: making his way first by stealth and then in open flight to the court at Susa, he had been greeted there with lavish marks of favor—and pumped greedily for information.2 The defector, already homesick for his city, had duly answered his interrogators with an unstinting and embittered relish.
Yet, for all that Demaratus found himself pushing at an open door when encouraging his patrons to consider an invasion of the Peloponnese, Darius’ plans for conquest could not easily be hurried. Whereas Datis’ expedition had been little more than a glorified razzia, the full-scale pacification of a land as remote and mountainous as Greece was a challenge of a wholly different order of complexity. The wheels of Persian bureaucracy ground both slowly and exceeding small. In June 486 BC, three years after Darius had first given orders for the mobilization of his empire, the Egyptians, oppressed by their master’s ceaseless demands for grain and levies, rose in sudden revolt. From Athens, the gaze of the Great King swung abruptly southward. Egypt, so rich, so fertile, so golden, was far too precious a prize to be risked for the barren wilds of Greece. A task force that had imagined Athens its target was duly ordered to prepare itself instead for an assault on the land of the Nile. As summer shaded into the blessed cool of autumn, preparations were made for its departure from Persia. The King of Kings readied himself to ride in person at its head.
At court, everyone could recognize this as a potentially fateful moment. Darius had embarked on many expeditions before, but he was no longer, at the age of sixty-five, a young man, and rumors of his frailty were rife. Courtiers with painful memories of what had happened the previous time that a Persian king had set off for Egypt dared to contemplate the end of an era—and they dreaded it. Cambyses, after all, campaigning beside the Nile, had left behind him in Persia only a single brother; Darius, a serial wife-taker and proudly prolific, had bred any number of ambitious sons. War in the provinces, a looming succession: here, if the past offered any guide, was a recipe for disaster. Fratricide, its malignant effects threatening the foundations of Persian rule, had already brought one line of kings to extinction—who was to say it might not do so again?
The aged Darius himself, however, having labored all his reign to give to the world the fruits of truth and order, was hardly the man to regard the prospect of their ruin after his death with equanimity. An immense reservoir of able sons, far from threatening his empire, might, he preferred to believe, serve to buttress it. The Persian people could be reassured, rather than alarmed, by his fecundity. Not for nothing had it always been a fundamental principle of theirs that “the surest gauge of manliness, after courage in battle, is to be the father of a great brood of children.”3 Darius, scrupulous in all things, had certainly not neglected the education of his sons. Mollycoddling was hardly the Persian way. Even the Greeks, who liked to reassure themselves that a people who wore trousers as their national dress could only ever be hilariously effeminate, were obliged to acknowledge that. Sheathed in brightly colored patterns his legs might be, but a Persian prince was still raised to be very tough indeed.
Granted, he might well pass the first years of his life amid the silken comforts of the women’s quarters—but only so that the eunuchs there could better mold him, “forming his infant beauty, shaping his toddler’s limbs, straightening out his backbone.”4From the age of five, he would find himself subject to a curriculum quite as exacting as the Spartan: woken before dawn by the blaring of a brass trumpet, a young prince would start his day with a brisk five-mile run, before embarking on a grueling round of lessons, voice-training, weapons practice, and immersions in icy rapids. To teach him the arts of leadership, he would be given the command of a company of fifty other boys. To teach him a properly regal facility with the lance and the bow, he would go hunting with his father. To teach him the principles of justice, of the glories of Persian history, and of devotion to Ahura Mazda, he would receive instruction from the Magi. Born into the lap of luxury he might have been—but luxury existed to dazzle the gaze of inferiors, not to soften the steel of the elite. Even a princess, although she might own whole towns with no function save to keep her shod in exquisite slippers, was expected not to loll around in vapid idleness but rather to study hard under her governesses, to practice her riding, and perhaps, like her brothers, to prove herself “skilled with bow and lance.”5 Much was expected of the children of the King of Kings. Awesome and splendid beyond compare as were the privileges of royalty, so too, and just as terrible, were the responsibilities that it brought. The inheritance of Darius’ progeny, after all, was nothing less than the mastery of the world. No children in history had ever been born with quite such golden spoons in their mouths. Empire had become, under the artful and calculating management of Darius, a family concern—and it was in the interests of none of his children to scrap over the dazzling spoils. Prove themselves worthy of their father’s favor, and they might all look forward to the rule of ancient kingdoms, of mighty satrapies, of splendid armies. The more deserving they were, of course, the more extravagantly they could hope to profit—with the supreme prize of Darius’ own universal monarchy going, as was only fitting, to the most deserving prince of all.
Darius had decided who that should be years previously.6 One son of his in particular shone out from the crowd: Xerxes was not the oldest of the royal princes, but he had long been the Great King’s heir apparent. Many circumstances had combined to win him this title. Most crucially of all, perhaps, Xerxes, unlike many of his half-brothers, had the right mix of blood flowing in his veins—for his mother was the imperious Atossa, the best-connected woman in the kingdom, widow of both Cambyses and Bardiya, and daughter of Cyrus the Great. Yet such a pedigree, although certainly an advantage, would hardly have been sufficient to win Xerxes his father’s blessing had he not possessed manifold other qualities, too. As a graduate of the most exclusive education in the world, he would have more than demonstrated his proficiency in riding, the handling of weapons, and the wisdom of the Magi—“for no man could be King of Persia who had failed to be instructed properly in that.”7 Likewise, in the hunt and on campaign, leading from the front, he would have given ample evidence of his personal bravery. Perhaps the clincher, however, was that Xerxes, tall and handsome, looked a king. This was a crucial consideration: the Persians were a people so obsessed by physical appearance that every nobleman kept a makeup artist in his train; the must-have fashion item was a pair of platform heels; and false beards and mustaches were so valued that the treasury ranked them as taxable items. Not even Xerxes’ father could compare with the prince for good looks: for Darius, who was otherwise reckoned a strikingly handsome man, had arms like a gibbon’s “that reached down to his knees.”8 Xerxes suffered from no such physical peculiarities: “both in his stature, and in the nobility of his bearing, there was no man who appeared more suited to the wielding of great power.”9
So it was that when the ailing King of Kings, in the late autumn of 486 BC, and before he could set out for Egypt, finally “went away from the throne,”10 as the Persians euphemistically put it, Xerxes was able to succeed to the monarchy of the world without opposition. Nothing, perhaps, became Darius’ reign like the leaving it: in the contrast between the violent illegalities of his own accession and the stately smoothness of his son’s lay striking testimony to the order he had brought to his wide dominions. Coated with wax, laid upon a magnificently ornamented chariot, pulled by horses whose manes had all been cropped, the body of the dead king was borne from Persepolis amid scenes of awful mourning. Led by Xerxes himself, the whole population of the city spilled out after the bier, wailing and hacking at their hair, stumbling in the ostentation of their grief toward a distant line of rugged limestone cliffs, out of which, high up on the rock face, had been carved the royal tomb. There the Great King was laid to rest; and all across Persepolis, and Persia, and every satrapy of the empire, wherever the blessings of Arta had been brought, the sacred fires kept alive for the thirty-six-year span of Darius’ reign were solemnly extinguished, and the glowing embers left to fade away into dust.
The altars would not blaze into life again, and the reign of the new king officially begin, until Xerxes, proceeding northward to Pasargadae, had been inducted into certain secrets which only the wisest of the Magi, and the king himself, were permitted to know. As part of this initiation, Xerxes was obliged first “to divest himself of his own clothes, and put on a robe which Cyrus had worn before becoming king,”11 and then to down various foul concoctions prepared for him by the Magi, necromantic brews of curdled milk and sacred herbs. A scepter was placed in his right hand; thekidaris, the fluted tiara of royalty, upon his head. Xerxes was then led into the glaring brightness of the Persian day. The satraps, the high officials, the expectant, swirling crowds, all of whom had assembled at Pasargadae for just this moment, now fell to the ground, prostrating themselves, as it was their duty and their honor to do, whenever graced by the presence of their king. Heir of Cyrus and chosen one of Ahura Mazda, Xerxes stood resplendent before the Persian people as both.
Not that he lingered long to enjoy the acclaim. Urgent business awaited him. Taking up the reins of Darius’ command, Xerxes was soon leaving his still festive capital for Egypt. Descending on the rebels, he briskly demonstrated that he was indeed, just as his father had hoped he would prove to be, a chip off the old block: not only was the revolt summarily crushed, but Xerxes, showing that same eye for constructive nepotism that his father had always practiced to such advantage, installed there as satrap one of his numerous brothers. The Great King himself, even more militantly than Darius would have done, regarded this as a triumph not merely over mortal adversaries but over the far more sinister forces of cosmic evil. That countries where daivas were worshipped should be attacked and brought low; that their sanctuaries should be obliterated; that territories once given over to the Lie should be reconsecrated to the cause of Truth: this, throughout Xerxes’ reign, was to be the guiding manifesto of the Persian people. Just in case there should be any doubt, inscriptions set up at Persepolis proclaimed it sternly to the world, reminding Xerxes’ courtiers that there was no path of righteousness save for that set out by their king: “The man who respects the Law given by Ahura Mazda, who worships Ahura Mazda and Arta with the reverence that they are both due, he will find happiness in life, and become one with the blessed after death.”12 King of Kings though he was, “King of Persia, King of the Lands,” Xerxes never forgot that all his unexampled power had been entrusted to him for a holy and momentous purpose. The obligations laid upon his broad shoulders were hardly of the kind that might be shrugged off casually. Those who had chosen him to bear their heavy weight could not be disappointed. “Darius had other sons,” Xerxes freely confessed, “but Darius my father made me the greatest one after himself.” And this, in turn, had been done as the expression of an even higher purpose: “For all was done in accordance with the wishes of Ahura Mazda.”13
Certainly, once Egypt had been successfully pacified, there could be no question of neglecting the other great business left unfinished by Darius’ death. No sooner had Xerxes returned to Persia than any number of different interest groups, clamoring for the Great King’s attention, began urging him to set in motion a new expedition, to push deeper into Europe, to punish Athens, to conquer Greece. Most insistent of all in the royal ear was Xerxes’ cousin, Mardonius, long since recovered from the wound he had received in Thrace, and spoiling for a return to the Aegean, which he regarded as very much his personal sphere of expertise. Nor was he the only glory hunter: one brother might have been installed in the pharaoh’s palace, but there were any number of the Great King’s other relatives eager to prove their mettle, to revel in the glamour of high command. After all, conquering far-distant “anairya” was what being a Persian was all about.
Turning to his intelligence chiefs for information on the western front, Xerxes was gratified to be informed that all stood fair. Yes, Athens and Sparta remained implacably opposed to his ambitions, but the aristocracy in other areas of Greece—including, not least, the vital territory of Thessaly, just to the north of Boeotia and Thebes—would, so the intelligence chiefs reported, welcome any Persian invasion with open arms. Once Thessaly had fallen, Thebes herself and a host of other cities further south were bound to collaborate. Indeed, even Sparta and Athens might not be utterly lost causes—for Demaratus, comfortably ensconced at Susa, and the Pisistratids, now well into their third decade of life on the Persian payroll, could guarantee the support of a few clients still. The admirably proactive sons of Hippias, indeed, ventured to offer the Great King the support of the heavens themselves—“describing to Xerxes how it was fore-ordained that a native of Persia should bridge the Hellespont, and expounding in detail on the triumphs that were bound to follow.”14 Source of these confident assertions was none other than Onomacritus, that same charlatan who had once been an intimate of the tyrants back in Athens, until falling out with them over accusations that he had been doctoring prophecies. Perhaps he was not the most reliable source of information—but the Pisistratids had an exile’s desperation to see their homeland again and had returned desperately, pathetically, to trusting his every word.
It is doubtful that the Persian high command had quite the same level of confidence in Onomacritus, but that hardly mattered. Already, within months of Xerxes’ return from Egypt, the drive to war had become unstoppable. Those few doves opposed to the invasion found themselves powerless to halt it. If they did speak out, they were labeled cowards. Their warnings, however, despite impatient snorts from the war party, could not so easily be swept aside. That the Athenians, as they had proved at Marathon, were no pushover; that the provisioning of any task force was bound to prove onerous even for the Persians’ practiced bureaucrats; that the mountainous terrain of Greece was notoriously inhospitable: concerns such as these could hardly be dismissed as defeatist scaremongering. Yet even the perils of the venture, for all that they might inspire the occasional spasm of hesitation in Xerxes, served in the end only to stiffen the royal resolve. To have shrunk from risk, to have confessed that Persian power might be susceptible to overstretch, to have abandoned Athens and the continent beyond her forever to the Lie, such would have been an abject betrayal of Darius and, even more unforgivably, of the great Lord Mazda. Yes, the invasion was ripe with hazard—but then again, if it had not been, it would hardly have been a challenge worthy of the attentions of the King of Kings.
How best to meet it? Deep within the innermost sanctum of Persepolis—beyond the looming entrance halls carved in the form of colossal bulls with human heads and the wings of eagles, beyond the brightly painted courtyards manned by officious eunuchs, beyond even the thousand bodyguards stationed on perpetual duty outside their royal master’s door, their long robes gem-studded, the butts of their spears adorned with delicate apples of gold—Xerxes’ most trusted advisers assembled before the royal throne to offer their opinions. Although they were sequestered within the nerve center of Persian power, what was spoken there would in due course come to be shrewdly guessed at, thanks to rumor and to the progress of events.15 At issue, of course, once it had been resolved that the war should go ahead, was a single question: what kind of task force should be marshaled for the invasion and conquest of Greece?
It seems that Mardonius urged that only elite fighters—Persians themselves, Medes, Saka and East Iranians—be conscripted. Such a strike force, he argued, would be able to move like lightning, outpace any foe, descend upon the lumbering infantrymen of the enemy with the same murderous speed that had always proved so lethal to the Greeks of Ionia.16 Yet this strategy, although modeled on glorious precedent, did have a major, indeed, an insuperable drawback. Times had changed: how could an army drawn from so few satrapies possibly be considered sufficient for the dignity of the man who was to command it? What might have served Cyrus in the days of his mountain banditry was hardly adequate for his grandson, who ruled the world. Xerxes, when he conquered the West, would do so not merely as the King of Persia, but as king of all the dominions that lay beyond it, too. The people of even the obscurest frontier had a sacred duty to pay him the tribute of their sons. And in their obedience would be reflected the peerless glory of their master, the King of Kings.
So it was settled. And perhaps, very faintly, above the issuing of the royal commands, could be heard from the great courtyard outside Xerxes’ audience hall the chiseling of sculptors as they adorned a nearby staircase wall.17 Just like the steps themselves, which swept gracefully upward at a height sufficiently shallow to permit a nobleman in his voluminous robes to ascend them without any impairment to his dignity, the work had to be delicate in the extreme—for the workmen had been commanded to portray, in row after finely detailed row, lines of subject peoples presenting treasure to the king. This, so far, was the most that Xerxes knew of many of his subjects, remote from Persia and savage as the majority of them were; yet now, as his messengers prepared to gallop to every corner of the empire, to rouse the satrapies and summon them to battle, he could look forward to seeing all the fabulous diversity of his tributaries gathered before him and armed for war. Indians in their cotton dhotis, with their tall bows made of cane; Ethiopians draped in leopard skins, armed with arrows tipped with stone; Moschians wearing wooden helmets; Thracians with fox skins wrapped around their heads; Cissians in turbans; Assyrians in linen corselets, wielding their studded clubs. All, as though they had emerged from the stone of Persepolis into exotic flesh and blood, would assemble before their master, and march with him against the West.
Admittedly, this swelling of his task force with a vast babel of poorly armed levies would generate any number of headaches for the Great King’s harassed commissariat. Transporting an army of the size envisaged by Xerxes across the Aegean was clearly out of the question: the only possible way to Athens was by land. This in turn would require wonders of preparation: the Hellespont would somehow have to be bridged; roads driven through the wilds of Thrace and Macedonia; harvests planted, garnered, stored. Burdensome demands on the logistics teams appointed to deal with them, of course—and yet, for the Great King himself, as glorious a manifestation of his power as any number of victories in battle. To tame a wilderness, to conjure from the living earth scenes of order and ripening plenitude: what more perfect image of his global mission could be conceived? The Persians, hemmed in all around by mountains and barrenness, had always regarded the ability to make a desert bloom as the surest mark of any statesman. The satrap who could demonstrate to the Great King’s satisfaction “that he had fostered the cultivation of his province, planted it with trees, and seeded it with crops,”18 was invariably marked down as a highflyer. Present the Great King with a prize vegetable, and even the humblest gardener might be fast-tracked on the spot. As one of Xerxes’ heirs was supposed to have said, when given a monstrous pomegranate, “It should be no problem for someone who can grow fruit of this size, it seems to me, to make a small city just as correspondingly great.”19
Even the Great King himself boasted of green fingers. Justifiably, too—for the young Xerxes, when not practicing with his bow or fording icy streams, had spent happy afternoons out in the garden, “planting trees, cutting and collecting medicinal roots.”20 Indeed, perhaps only the hunt could rival gardening as a passion of the court. To combine the two was, for a Persian, true fulfillment. Rare was the satrapal capital that did not have its own park, well stocked with game, but also, planted beside lakes and murmuring streams, pavilions and lovingly manicured lawns, plants of every description, herb gardens and flower beds, pear and apple trees, pines and cypresses, sunk into the soil and perfumed with the scents of exotic blooms. Empire, not for the last time, had fostered a mania for botany. Darius, even amid the labors demanded of any conscientious universal monarch, had always kept himself abreast of the latest horticultural innovations, tirelessly encouraging his satraps to experiment with cuttings and collect rare seedlings. Mardonius, it was said, eager to stoke his cousin’s war fever, had assured Xerxes that Europe was one vast garden center, “the nursery of every kind of tree.”21 As news began to spread through Persepolis that the invasion of Greece would be going ahead, the royal gardeners could begin rubbing their hands with as much glee as anyone at the prospect of rich pickings.
“Paradaida,” the Persians called their exquisitely beautiful parks, a word transcribed by the Greeks as “paradeisos”—“paradise.”22 Entering one, walking beside the coolness of a crystal-watered stream, surveying natural wonders transplanted from every corner of the empire—rare beasts, rare trees, rare flowers—the Great King might indeed imagine himself in heaven. And yet, a paradise offered him more than merely a sanctuary, a refuge from all the miseries and banalities of mortal life. Everything that he could delight in, “the beauty of the trees, the perfect accuracy with which they had been planted, the straightness of the lines they formed, the regularity of their angles, the multitude of exquisite scents that mingled together and filled the air,”23 had been ordered according to his pleasure. Similarly, for he was the King of Kings with the whole world at his fingertips, might he command nature to be ordered anywhere.
For just as he could illustrate with a sweep of his hand to his gardeners how a line of cypresses should be planted, so also, by laying his finger on a map, might he redraw the sea and the land. Where the waters of the Hellespont flowed, brushwood and tightly packed soil, spread out over an immense pontoon, were to unite Asia and Europe; simultaneously, further west along the Aegean coast, a great canal, hacked out from the isthmus below Mount Athos, was to free the Persian fleet from having to round the treacherous peninsula from which the mountain rose. There, two years before Marathon, Mardonius had lost his fleet, a disaster rendered all the more horrific, so it was claimed, by strange prodigies of nature: for sea monsters, thrashing amid the boiling waves, were said to have gorged themselves on the drowning sailors, while white doves, born out of the spray, had risen and fluttered above the carnage, “this being the first time these birds had appeared in Greece, never before having been witnessed there.”24 No further such eruptions of the bizarre were to be permitted: as surely as a panther caged within a paradise was no danger to those who looked at it through the golden bars of its pen, so the sea monsters off Mount Athos, no matter how many Persian ships were to pass them on their way toward Athens, would be left to salivate in vain.
And all of Greece would quake. To build a canal wide enough to permit two warships to pass, deep enough so that their hulls would not scrape the bottom, and one and a half miles long, here was a commission beyond the scope of any mortal man—saving only one. As the labor gangs toiled, their hammer blows echoed far beyond Mount Athos, beating out a message of insistent and clamorous terror. All of Asia was stirring. The Great King was drawing near.