Or did he? No sooner had the assassins completed their bloody work than they themselves were promoting a quite different tale. The corpse of the murdered man may not have been exposed to public view, but a great deal else was now revealed, to universal amazement. The story told by the conspirators was staggering. The man they had slain, they claimed, was not Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, at all. That Bardiya was already long dead. Cambyses, jealous and savage, had ordered his execution years before. Had it not been for the acumen of Darius and his fellow patriots, who had stumbled upon the secret, and their courage in daring to expose it, the Persian people might never have learned of the monstrous scam.
All of which begged a rather obvious question. If the man assassinated at Sikyavautish had not been the son of Cyrus—and the rightful king—then who had he been? Here the revelations took an even more sinister turn. That an impostor had taken on the role of a prince of the royal blood was alarming enough, but that he had played it for years unsuspected even by his family and household could only be evidence of the blackest necromancy. Surely, then, a Magus, one who had been schooled in the mastery of the supernatural, was the likeliest suspect? Could it have been merely a coincidence that the impostor had been surprised in Nisaea, on the plain of the sacred horses, well known as a haunt of the Magi? It seemed not—for Bardiya’s doppelgänger, the conspirators hurriedly announced, had indeed been a Magus, “Gaumata by name.”47 An obscure and low-born villain he may have been, and yet so potent had his sorcery proved itself, and so audacious his plot, that he had almost won the empire by his fraud.
Sensationalist retellings would tease out the full implications of this scandal and adorn them further. For all his powers, it appeared that the Magus had forgotten to conceal one crucial detail: his ears, for some unspecified crime, had long before been cut off by Cyrus. A daughter of Otanes named Phaidime, a wife of Bardiya who had never suspected that he might have been killed and replaced by a double, had brushed the side of her husband’s head one evening while he slept, and uncovered the appalling truth. Telling her father of her discovery, she had thereby set in train the dramatic sequence of events which had culminated in the murder of the impostor. Such, at any rate, was the story which years later would be told across the empire. And there was nobody, by then, left to dispute it.
Even on the night of the assassination, if there had been anyone in Nisaea to query the conspirators’ self-justification, or to point out some of its more glaring implausibilities, or to ask why the corpse of the supposed impostor had been disposed of with such speed, he would have known better than to speak his mind. With blood still being washed from the fittings of Sikyavautish, it was hardly the time for quibbles. The conspirators were in no mood to tolerate dissent. The warning given by Darius could not have been more stentorian: “Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a follower of the Lie, him do thou punish well!”48 Here, from a master political strategist, was a dazzling sleight-of-hand. It would serve to place not the assassins but their accusers on the defensive. Skeptics were to be anathematized as the enemies of truth.
And this, for any Persian, was a feared and dreadful fate. It was an article of faith to Darius’ countrymen that they were the most honest people in the world. Three things were taught them, it was said: “to ride, to fire a bow and to tell the truth.”49Darius, by threatening those who might doubt his story of the Magus’ crimes, was not just shoring up a rickety case; his claims were altogether more soaring. Only a Persian could have made them—for only a Persian could understand what truth really meant. He knew, as more benighted peoples did not, that the universe without truth would be undone and lost to perpetual night. More than an abstraction, more even than an ideal, it formed instead the very fabric of existence.
This was why, in the beginning, when Ahura Mazda, greatest of the gods, had summoned time and creation into being, he had engendered Arta, who was Truth, to give order to the universe. Without Arta, it would have lacked form or beauty, and the great cycles of existence set in motion by Lord Mazda could not have brought life into the world. Even so, the work of Truth was never done. Just as fire, when it rises to the heavens, is accompanied by black smoke, so Arta, the Persians knew, was shadowed by Drauga, the Lie. Two orders—one of perfection, the other of falsehood, each the image of the other—were coiled in a conflict as ancient as time. What should mortals do, then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie, lest the universe itself should totter and fail? “The wretch who weaves deceit will bring death into his country”:50 so it had been anciently proclaimed. How much more deadly the peril, then, if a “wretch” had somehow seized his country’s throne. The Magus, by taking on the image of Bardiya, and impersonating the rightful king, had handed to Drauga the scepter of the world. Darius and his fellows, by riding to Sikyavautish, had toppled an evil infinitely more threatening than a mere impostor. Far from staging a squalid putsch, they had been engaged in nothing less than the redemption of the cosmos.
And now, with Gaumata justly toppled and dispatched, the throne which he had tainted stood empty. The insignia of royal power—a robe, a bow and a shield—waited in Sikyavautish for the rightful claimant. Who that might be, however, and how he was to be recognized, remained, on the evening of the assassination, a mystery. Only the most garbled account of what followed has survived. The conspirators, it was said, rode out by night into the open plain. At an agreed point, they reined in their horses and awaited the coming of dawn. When the sun’s first rays appeared above the rugged line of mountains to the east, it was Darius’ horse who neighed to them in greeting. At once, his companions slipped from their saddles and fell to their knees in homage. The Greeks, when they repeated this story, would claim that it had been agreed among the conspirators that “the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne”51—and they added, furthermore, that Darius had cheated. His groom, it was said, had dabbled his fingers inside a mare’s vulva beforehand, and then, just as the sun rose, placed them beside the nose of Darius’ horse. But this was scurrilous nonsense, and typical of the Greeks. How like them to distort the holy rites of Truth!
For it is evident, even from the unsatisfactory version that we have, that Darius’ accession was marked by potent and awful ritual. The conspirators gathered in the chill of that September night not because they wished to discover who the next king might be, but because they already knew. Otanes, Darius’ only conceivable rival, had already bowed to the inevitable and discounted himself as a candidate for the throne: the noblemen riding across the plain of Nisaea were celebrating a fait accompli. Blessed by the neighing of the sacred white horses, and by the mountain dawn, Darius could know himself doubly the champion of Arta. As the first rays illuminated the plain, so night, the order of Drauga, menacing and indistinct, began to fade before the brilliant light of the sun. “So can I recognize you as strong and holy, O Mazda, when by the hand in which you hold the twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man, and by the glow of your fire whose power is the Truth, the might of Good Thought shall come to me.”52 And now, that late September dawn, the might of Good Thought had indeed come to Nisaea, for the Liar was dead, and the Righteous Man was king.
Or so it pleased Darius to claim. Yet the imagery, although it would suffuse his propaganda, was not his own. If it bore witness to the reverence for Arta found among all the Aryans, then it drew as well on the teachings of a far more rigorous dualism. “The twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man”: not Darius’ words but those of that most fabled of visionaries, Zoroaster, the prophet of the Aryans, the man who had first revealed to a startled world that it was the battleground in a relentless war between good and evil. Here, in this war, was the great death struggle of things—for the Prophet, continuing with his novel doctrines, had taught that the cycles of the cosmos would not keep revolving forever, as had always been assumed, but move instead toward a mighty end, a universal apocalypse in which Truth would annihilate all falsehoods, and establish on their ruin an eternal reign of peace. Presiding over this final and decisive victory would be the Lord of Life, Wisdom and Light, Ahura Mazda himself—not, as other Iranians had always believed, one among a multitude of divinities, but the supreme, the all-powerful, the only uncreated god. From him, like fire leaping from beacon to beacon, all goodness proceeded: six great emanations of his own eternal light, the Amesha Spentas, holy and immortal;53 a broader pantheon of beneficent spirits; the world in its many beauties; plants and animals (and, in particular, because it spent its days preying upon insects, those swarming spawn of the dark side, the hedgehog); the faithful and ever-righteous dog; and finally, noblest of all creations, man himself. “Unblock your ears, then, to hear the Good News—gaze at the bright flames with clear-seeing thought!” the Prophet had proclaimed, alerting humanity to the great decision that confronted it. “You have the choice as to which faith you will follow, everyone, person by person, with that freedom all are granted in the mighty test of life.”54 Choose wrong, and the path of the Lie, and of chaos, would be opened; choose right, and the path of order, tranquillity and hope.
Was Darius the first usurper to appreciate just how amenable to his purposes this great religion of peace and justice might prove to be? We shall never know for sure. The early history of Zoroaster and his doctrines was a puzzle even to his own followers. That the Prophet had been the only baby to laugh, rather than cry, at his birth; that he had been granted his first vision of Ahura Mazda at the age of thirty, as he emerged from a river; that he had finally succumbed, aged seventy-seven, to an assassin’s knife: these few scraps of his biography had been preserved by the devout. But as to when he had lived, and where, wildly divergent opinions were held: some dated Zoroaster to the dawn of time, others only to the reign of King Astyages;55 some held that he had been raised in Bactria, others on the steppes. What everyone agreed, however, was that he had been neither a Mede nor a Persian—and that the knowledge of his teachings had first come to the Zagros from the East.56
But to what effect? The empire founded by Cyrus was certainly no theocracy; it was never, in any real sense, “Zoroastrian” at all. The Persians continued to worship their ancient gods, to honor mountains and flowing streams, and to sacrifice horses before the tombs of their kings. But if the Achaemenid court remained pagan in much of its practice, it was also, in its dominant sensibility, not entirely removed from Zoroaster’s teachings. As in the eastern kingdoms of Iran, where the monotheism of the Prophet had taken its strongest hold, so also in the west, Ahura Mazda had long been worshipped as supreme. Between the native paganism of the Persians and the teachings of Zoroaster there appears to have been, not rivalry, but rather synergy, and even fusion. Both were the expressions of a single religious impulse, one that had been evolving over centuries, and was still, as the Persians conquered the world, in a state of flux. In particular, between the Magi, who had long been adepts of the most occult and sacred knowledge, and the priests of Zoroaster, there were numerous correspondences. It was not even clear which order had first proclaimed eternal war against insects and reptiles, had first worn white robes as the mark of their status, or had first exposed the corpses of their fellows to be consumed by birds and dogs (a fate otherwise regarded among the Persians as so terrible that it was reserved for regicides). So too with the worship of the Good Lord, Ahura Mazda himself, influence had long been percolating both ways. Far from dividing the Medes and Persians from their cousins in the East, their “Mazdaism” appears to have served them as a source of unity.
A bond certainly appreciated by Cyrus. Looking to dramatize his unprecedented dominion over the various Iranian peoples, he had consciously adopted certain customs from their ancient heartlands. In the nursery of his own tribe, at Pasargadae, far distant from Bactria or Sogdiana, he had ordered the building of three startling new structures: fire-holders made of stone, their tops hollowed out into deep, wide bowls, in which white-hot ashes could be kept forever burning.57 Fire had long been sacred to all the Iranians, but to no one more than to Zoroaster himself, who had taught that its flames were the very symbol of righteousness and truth. Daily prayer before fire had been laid upon his followers as a sacred duty, and Cyrus, in the course of his eastern conquests, would surely have witnessed the spectacle of such worship for himself. There can be no doubt that it was from Zoroaster that the Persians “derived the rule against burning dead bodies or defiling fire in any way,” for a Lydian scholar, in the earliest reference to the Prophet recorded by an anairya, commented as much.58 The fire-holders built by Cyrus, their flames rising into the azure of the Persian sky, would certainly have blazed out the new doctrine high and clear—but they would also have served to broadcast a very different lesson. Cyrus had hit upon the perfect image of his power. How better to represent royal greatness than to associate it with fire? Even those otherwise ignorant of the customs of the Iranians might readily appreciate such a notion. Soon enough, throughout the empire, similar sanctuaries began to appear, their flames guarded by the Magi, only ever to be extinguished on the death of the reigning monarch, symbols both of Arta and of the rule of Persia’s king.
And now Darius, his hands wet with royal blood, was moving to make this identification of the two orders, celestial and mortal, even more explicit. As he would never cease to acknowledge, everything he was, everything he had achieved, was due to the favor of Ahura Mazda: “He bore me aid, the other gods too, because I was not faithless, I was not a follower of the Lie, I was not false in my actions.”59 Darius was surely protesting too much. But as a regicide and usurper, he had little choice. With his claim to the throne so tenuous, he could hardly rely on it to justify his coup. Other legitimization had to be concocted—and fast. This was why, far more than Cyrus or his sons had ever felt the need to do, Darius insisted on his role as the chosen one of God.
Who precisely God might be, however, whether the Ahura Mazda of his ancestors’ pantheon, or the one supreme being proclaimed by Zoroaster, the new king was content to leave unclear. Ambiguity had its uses. Above all, it was essential that Darius show his respect for the traditions of his own people—and it so happened that his situation on the Nisaean plain provided the perfect stage. Some fifteen miles north of Sikyavautish, rising high and somber from the midst of a level plain, loomed the twin peaks of Bisitun, “the place of the gods,” the most sacred mountain in the whole Zagros range.60 Here, near the scene of his ambushing of Bardiya, Darius could offer sacrifice just as the Persians and the Medes had always done, in the sanctity of the pure and open air. Yet the murder itself, the stern and epic quality of its execution, and the configuration of the assassins, would have conjured up associations for the followers of Zoroaster just as ripe with potential for Darius’ propaganda. Six, according to the teachings of the Prophet, were the Amesha Spentas, the Beneficent Immortals who proceeded from Ahura Mazda—and six were the accomplices of Darius in his war against the Lie. That men might ponder this coincidence—or symmetry—could serve only to buttress the new king’s cause. Darius might not have been the son of Cyrus, but he could pose as something infinitely more impressive: the proxy of the Good Lord, Ahura Mazda himself.
This seamless identification of his own power with that of a universal god was a development full of moment for the future. Usurpers had been claiming divine sanction for their actions since time immemorial, but never such as Ahura Mazda could provide. Already, with the daring and creativity that were the trademarks of his style, Darius was moving with deadly speed to take advantage of this fact. Out of murder and usurpation, he would manufacture a rare legitimacy for himself. Out of weakness, he would forge a strength such as no monarch had ever possessed before.
Dizzying as this startling ambition was, however, so too was the yawning of a waiting abyss. The chosen one of Ahura Mazda could not afford to stumble: just one slip, and Darius would have failed. Already, as he and the other conspirators nursed their strength in Media, disturbing news was coming through to them of the empire’s reaction to their coup. In Elam, an ancient kingdom on the borders of Persia, open revolt had broken out. In Babylon,*5 the great metropolis which was the largest and wealthiest city in the world, a pretender was reported to have emerged to claim its long-vacant throne. Suddenly, it seemed that the empire of the Persians, rather than bringing the universal peace of Arta to mankind, might dissolve, lost to chaos and the reach of a lengthening shadow. For Darius, the self-proclaimed champion of light, the ultimate test was looming. Not only his own future but that of the whole Near East was at stake.
Ahead of him waited the road to Babylon.