THE PERSIAN EMPIRE AND THE WEST

CHAPTER VII

THE REIGN OF DARIUS

I.

THE MAGIAN PRETENDER

WE have now to go back and follow the steps by which Darius had made himself king Cambyses had left Egypt three years after he entered it, not having returned to Persia in the interval. In his long absence disaffection developed and gathered around the name of the very brother whom he had had slain secretly before leaving home. A Magian, Gaumata by name, personating Bardes (Bardiya, Smerdis), the king’s brother, became king within the life-time of Cambyses. Darius on the Behistun inscription merely records the main facts:

 “When Cambyses slew Bardiya it was not known to the people that Bardiya was slain: afterwards Cambyses went to Egypt: when Cambyses had departed into Egypt the people became hostile... afterwards there was a certain man, a Magian, Gaumata by name... he lied to the people (saying) ‘I am Bardiya the son of Cyrus, brother of Cambyses’: afterwards all the peoples rose in revolt, and from Cambyses they went over to him, both Persia and Media, and the other provinces: he seized on the kingdom... afterwards Cambyses died”.

Where Cambyses died Darius does not record, nor precisely when, but only that the revolt broke out while Cambyses was in Egypt, and that Bardiya became king before Cambyses’ death. According to Herodotus, Cambyses died at Ecbatana in Syria some weeks after the heralds of Bardiya, on their way to Egypt to demand of the army its allegiance to Bardiya, had met him there, returning with his army. Other Greek accounts agree that Cambyses died on his way back from Egypt to Persia, but differ as to the place, one naming Babylon, another Damascus. Nor is it clear how much, if anything, Cambyses knew of the development of disaffection at home before he left Egypt, nor certain that, on learning how far the revolt had gone, he committed suicide: the phrase used by Darius permits but scarcely requires this interpretation, and the story of Herodotus ascribes his death to accident.

Cambyses died early in the eighth year of his reign, i.e. in the spring of 522 bc, seven years and five months (according to Herodotus) after his accession in the autumn of 529 bc. It is probable that the latest tablet of Cambyses’ reign is that dated the 23rd day of the first month (March-April) of his eighth year, and therefore that he died, or at least ceased to be regarded in Babylon as king, in the spring of that year.

Darius names as the place where the pretender raised the revolt Paishiyauvada, which cannot with any certainty be identified. Whether or not it lay in the very country from which the Achaemenidae sprang—it has even been identified by some with Pasargadae—it is certain that Persia no less than Media and the other provinces fell away from Cambyses; but in doing so the Persians did not intend to withdraw their support from the house of Cyrus. In accepting the claims of Bardiya they believed that they were transferring their allegiance from Cambyses, who had forfeited his claim to the affection with which they had regarded his father by his despotic government, to another son of Cyrus. And their belief has been shared by some modern scholars who have argued that the story of the murder of Bardiya by Cambyses rests only on the word of Darius, who is himself rather to be regarded as a pretender, and who to make good his claim constructed for himself a fictitious genealogy, tracing back his descent to Teispes, an ancestor of Cyrus as well as supposititiously of himself. Yet it is hardly probable that, if this was really the case, no suggestion of the truth should have maintained itself in circulation long enough to have found a place in the Greek stories about Darius; and it may be inferred that the Persians themselves gave up the belief that the man whom Darius calls Gaumata was the son of Cyrus, for not long after his death their credulity fastened on another person, and they accepted a Persian of the name of Vahyazdata as Bardiya, the son of Cyrus.

But while the Persians accepted this first pretender as a Persian, it does not follow that he actually was so; indeed Darius and the stories told by the Greek writers agree that he was a Magian, and therefore a Mede. Since he can scarcely have given himself out in Persia as a Persian, and in Media as a Mede, his claim to the throne cannot have been supported, as it would otherwise have been natural to suspect, by any wide Median national reaction against a Persian ruling family. At the same time, it is probable enough that Gaumata relied on a certain number of Median nobles, or perhaps rather of Median priests and Magi, who were privy to his secret, and sought by his means to recover the former supremacy of their nation or caste. Yet, at all events, within the space of his brief reign, Gaumata was probably unable to carry through any great substitution of Median for Persian holders of high office: it is known at least that, for example, Hystaspes, the kinsman of Cyrus and father of Darius, remained under him satrap of Parthia and Hyrcania.

Two measures of Gaumata, one recorded by Herodotus, the other by Darius on the Behistun inscription, indicate a wider and not merely a sectional policy. According to Herodotus, he signalized his accession to the throne by proclaiming to all peoples within his realm freedom for three years from military service and from tribute. The intention of this is sufficiently obvious: the pretender seeks to secure support by easing the burdens which the policy of conquest pursued by Cambyses had imposed. More difficult to elucidate fully is the religious policy of Gaumata. Darius asserts that Gaumata destroyed the sanctuaries or temples, and that Darius restored them. The one thing that is clear is that Gaumata and Darius pursued two contrary religious policies: what precisely the temples destroyed by the one and restored by the other were is uncertain, and consequently whether Gaumata or Darius was the greater innovator. Gaumata is so far an innovator that he destroys existing temples, but if these were the temples of a new faith, or the temples of peoples subject to the Persian empire restored by Darius out of regard to a new principle of toleration not native to the Persian mind, the de­stroyer rather than the restorer may have appealed more directly to deep-lying conservative feeling.

Gaumata deceived the Persians no less than other peoples of the empire; and he obtained from them the recognition of his right to rule, making in return certain concessions to Persian feeling. Yet, if a statement of Herodotus is to be accepted, ‘when he died’ (in Sikayauvatish, in the Median province of Nisaya, as Darius records), for the great benefits which he had done to all his subjects, ‘he was lamented by all in Asia except the Persians themselves’. Moreover, Darius himself acknowledges the extent of Gaumata’s hold on the people, though he ascribes it naturally to other reasons: ‘there was no man, Persian, or Median, or one of our family, who could deprive Gaumata of the kingdom: the people feared him for his tyranny... no one dared to say anything against Gaumata until I came.’ Certain it is that it was on the Persians, especially the Persian nobility, that Darius had to rely in making good his claim to the throne to which Cambyses, dying childless, had left no direct heir. Persians one and all, as Darius expressly states in each case, were the six men who were with him when he slew Gaumata; and the same six—Intaphrenes, Otanes, Gobryas, Hydarnes, Megabyxos, Ardumanish—assisted him in the struggles that followed; and for this their families are commended by Darius to the favour of his successors.

With the death of Gaumata in the autumn of 522, Darius acceded to the throne of Cyrus and Cambyses. Darius himself with all clearness admits that Gaumata had actually though illegitimately been king, and that his own accession took place only after Gaumata’s death: ‘I with few men slew Gaumata the Magian, and what foremost men were his allies in Media. I smote him; I took his kingdom from him; by the grace of Ahura-Mazda I am king; Ahura-Mazda gave me the kingdom; the kingdom which had been taken away from our family, this I put in its place’. Why Ahura-Mazda promoted the son rather than his father Hystaspes, whose connection with Cyrus was the nearer, Darius does not say; but it is easy to see that the greater skill and readier initiative of Darius gave him the crown: his father continued under him a loyal satrap of Parthia.

But Darius, even after overcoming and slaying Gaumata, ob­tained a kingdom which at once threatened to fall asunder. No successor to Gaumata ever claimed, as he had done, the whole empire; but simultaneously or in rapid succession men arose, some of them claiming to be members of former ruling families, and endeavoured to establish an independent sovereignty each in his own part of the empire. During the first year or two of his reign Darius was fully engaged in suppressing these sectional but formidable revolts, and so preventing his empire from falling to pieces. In his great inscription at Behistun he describes the several campaigns in which he, personally, or his generals were engaged. He accurately dates the main events by the day of the month, but in no case names a year; but it can be concluded that all the events fall in the five months of his accession year and the first year of his reign.

Darius was first of all, and, as he states, at the time when he slew Gaumata, faced by two revolts—one in Susiana, the seat of the earliest kingdom of Cyrus, and one in Babylon. In Susiana, Ashina (the Persian form is Atrina), the son of Upadaranma claimed, though on what grounds is not stated, to be king of the province, and was recognised as such by the Susians. But his reign was quite brief: Darius sent an army which suppressed the revolt and brought Ashina bound to Darius who slew him. Much more serious was the Babylonian revolt, and with this Darius dealt in person. The Babylonians had acknowledged the claims of the would-be Persian Gaumata, but on his death they made an effort to recover their independence, and accepted as king a Babylonian of the name of Nidintu-Bel, who reigned under the name of Nebuchadrezzar the son of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon before Cyrus.

Whether Nidintu-Bel actually deceived the Babylonians as Darius asserts, or whether one of themselves, chosen by the Babylonians, assumed as his kingly name the name of the last famous and successful king of Babylon, and by a legal fiction reigned as the son of Nabonidus, and therefore legitimate heir to the Babylonian throne, must be left undetermined: in either case he secured the allegiance of the entire Babylonian people. Some half-dozen tablets survive dated from the 17th day of the seventh month to the 21st day of the ninth month (Oct.-Dec. 522) of the year of his accession. In the latter month Darius set out with his army from Media, where he had tarried for some two months after slaying Gaumata, for Babylon. Nidintu-Bel proceeded from Babylon to the Tigris and attempted to dispute the passage of the river with Darius. But in vain: on the 26th day of the ninth month (Nov.-Dec.) Darius defeated Nidintu-Bel at the Tigris, and four days later at the Euphrates. Nidintu-Bel escaped with his cavalry to Babylon. The city made some resistance, though, in spite of Herodotus who speaks of a siege lasting nearly two years, it was probably not a long one; with the city Nidintu- Bel was captured and then slain and, as early as the eleventh month of his accession year (Jan.-Feb. 521), as Babylonian tablets testify, Darius was recognized in the city as king.

II

THE WINNING OF THE EMPIRE

For a few months Darius remained at Babylon, and during this period further widespread revolts occurred. Darius mentions first, though it is not clear that it actually broke out first, a second and apparently also brief revolt of Susiana. The rebel king on this occasion was Martiya, a resident in the Persian town of Kuganaka, who as king in Susiana assumed the name of Imanish. Darius set out for Susiana, but before he arrived the Susians themselves slew Martiya.

News of the far more serious revolt of Media must have reached Darius almost as soon as he reached Babylon, for the first battle against the rebels was fought within a month of Darius’s defeat of Nidintu-Bel at the Euphrates; and consequently the revolt itself must have broken out as soon as Darius, after slaying Gaumata, left Media for Babylon. The leader of this revolt, who for some time reigned as king in Media, was Fravartish (Phraortes). He assumed the name of Khshathrita, and claimed to be of the family of Cyaxares, that is, of the old Median royal family that had been displaced by Cyrus. Thus, unlike Gaumata, he was able to appeal to all the Medes as a Mede himself and a lawful and rightful ruler against the attempt of Persia to continue, under a new dynasty, its dominion over Media. And even beyond the bounds of Media Fravartish obtained recognition. Darius states that ‘Parthia and Hyrcania declared allegiance to Fravartish’. Possibly also Armenia did the same: Darius interweaves his account of the campaign in Armenia with that of his operations against Media, and gives no indication of any native or inde­pendent Armenian claimant to the throne. Alternatively it may be conjectured that in Armenia as in Media the revolt was entirely national in character, and that the two movements, though they synchronized, were not directed towards the same end. But this view is difficult to maintain unless the entire period of the revolts extended over more than seventeen months and ran on into at least the third year of Darius.

Of these operations against Media and Armenia, if rightly regarded as nearly synchronous, those against Armenia began first. After the defeat of Nidintu-Bel at the Euphrates, but before the capture of Babylon, Darius despatched an army under the Persian Vaumisa to Armenia. The rebels advanced south to meet the Persian army, and an engagement took place at Izzila in Assyria (January, 521). The Armenians were defeated and retreated to their own country; and four and a half months later (May, 521) they were again defeated by the same general at Autiyara in Armenia. But the Armenian resistance had been severe, and was not quashed by Vaumisa unaided. Some time, perhaps as much as two or three months after Vaumisa had set out, Darius de­patched another army to Armenia under Dzdarshi, an Armenian faithful to Darius; and in rapid succession this army fought three engagements in Armenia, at Zuzza, Tigra and Uyama respectively. Both generals then awaited in Armenia Darius’s arrival in Media. The operations thus extended over five months, if Vaumisa’s departure is correctly fixed before, though it is related after, that of Dadarshi. This however is not quite certain. It is possible that Vaumisa set out after Dadarshi, and in that case the resistance of the Armenians took more than twelve months to quell—from the beginning of the month of Thuravahara (May) in one year (521), at the earliest, to the end of the same month in the next year.

Within a few days of entering Babylon, and within a week or two of the departure of the first army to Armenia, Darius received news of the revolt in Media: the Persian and Median army still left with him was, as Darius expressly states, but small; yet from this he detached a force which he sent under the command of the Persian Hydarnes to Media. Hydarnes fought with the Medes at Marush, in, but not far within, Media in January, 521. The Persians claimed a victory, but it was apparently ineffective. Hydarnes was unable to push on to Ecbatana the capital, but awaited Darius’s arrival in the region of Kampada, well to the west.

At some time between May and September in the same year (521) Darius himself left Babylon for Media. Fravartish advanced to meet Darius, offered battle at Kundur, and was defeated. Fravartish with a few of his horsemen fled to Raga (Ragae) in eastern Media, pursued by Darius’s army. Darius himself appears to have captured Ecbatana and to have remained there till the pursuers captured Fravartish. The captive pretender was brought to Darius at Ecbatana, mutilated and slain.

With the fall and death of Fravartish the Median resistance was broken. Hyrcania and Parthia still called for settlement. Darius indeed claims that his father Hystaspes obtained a decisive victory over the rebels, shortly after they had declared for Fra­vartish, at Vishpauzatish in Parthia on the 22nd of Viyakhna (i.e. in March, 521). Hystaspes, it is true, appears to have main­tained his position in Parthia, yet only with difficulty, and the revolt was not really brought under till Darius months later was able to send him reinforcements. After Darius had secured the whole of Media up to Ragae in the extreme east, from that town he despatched an army to assist Hystaspes. Thus reinforced, Hystaspes decisively defeated the rebels at Patigrabana in Parthia (probably in April, 520).

Farther east in the Bactrian province of Margush (Margiana), an independent rebellion led by one Frada, a Margian, was sup­pressed by the Persian satrap of Bactria, Dadarshi, the decisive battle being fought in December, 521. No date is mentioned in connection with the revolt in Sagartia, where the Sagartian Citrantakhma claimed the throne of Sagartia as a member of the family of Cyaxares. He was captured, mutilated and at Arbela in Assyria put to death.

After the outbreak of Media, but before Darius himself left Babylon to deal with it in person, Persia, or perhaps in particular the nomadic tribes of Persia, renounced allegiance to him and accepted as king Vahyazdata of Tarava in the Persian province of Yautiya (Ovrtoi), who, like Gaumata before him, claimed to be Bardiya son of Cyrus. Vahyazdata maintained his position in Persia for some months and attempted to establish his power also in the far eastern province of Arachosia on the borders of India. Dividing his forces so as to take part with him to Media, Darius despatched the rest under a Persian general, Artavardiya, to Persia. Here (in May, 521) he defeated the rebels at Rakha. Vahyazdata retreated to Paishiyauvada, where Gaumata had formerly raised the standard of revolt; and it was probably as late as in April, 520, that he was defeated again, captured and slain. In the interval the army sent by Vahyazdata into Arachosia was defeated by Vivana, the Persian satrap of the province in December, 521, and. seven weeks later it was again defeated, its leaders being put to death.

After Darius had left Babylon in the summer of 521, and while he was still engaged both with the Median and the Persian revolts, the Babylonians made a second attempt to regain their independence of Persia, though curiously enough on this occasion the king who reigned for a month or two was an Armenian. Like Nidintu-Bel before him, this Armenian, Arakha by name, took the style of Nebuchadrezzar son of Nabonidus, and indeed his reign was perhaps accounted a continuation of Nidintu-Bel’s tablets apparently dated from his reign exist for the sixth and seventh months of his first year, but none for this accession year. Darius detached a force under a Persian general Intaphrenes, who captured Arakha (probably in November) and put him to death.

Media, Armenia, Persia—these with Babylon were the countries that offered to Darius the most obstinate resistance: Persian disputed with Persian the succession to Cyrus and Cambyses; the Medes attempted to recover from their fellow-Iranians the supremacy of which Cyrus had deprived them; the more distantly related Armenians sided with the Medes or attempted independence on their own account. Babylon alone of the three non­Iranian empires which together with Media had been conquered and united with the Persian empire showed active opposition to Persia and efforts to re-establish a native dynasty. Lydia and Egypt showed no opposition to the Persian satraps that governed them; Phoenicia and Syria remained quiet. It was the eastern half of the empire that revolted, and for the suppression of the revolt Darius had to depend almost entirely on the Persian and Median army which he speaks of, in his inscription, as small. The necessity for dividing this small force to meet several simultaneous revolts was more than offset by the fact that the revolts though simultaneous were not co-ordinated. But it says much for the skill and energy of Darius that he was able in spite of this far-spread opposition to obtain recognition of his right by descent to rule, and to secure peace and quiet throughout his dominions within a year or two of Cambyses’ death.

At the end of the second year of Darius, in December, 520, the still recent political convulsions in the empire led the prophet Haggai (in Jerusalem to anticipate that ‘the throne of kingdoms’ would be overthrown, although his fellow-prophet Zechariah two months later recognizes that there is no indication of further disturbance within the empire: ‘the earth sitteth still, and is at rest.’

Yet something remained for Darius to do before he could rest satisfied that his empire was secured both within and without. Further conquests such as Cyrus left to Cambyses in Egypt he scarcely set before himself; and such extensions as the empire received under Darius are rather to be looked on as rectifications and a strengthening of its frontiers.

Within the empire Darius had to assert his authority in two important satrapies where, not the native population, but the Persian satraps appointed by Cyrus and Cambyses respectively, had shown signs of independence. Among the provinces which Darius names in the Susian version of the Behistun inscription— the corresponding places of the Persian and Babylonian texts are mutilated—as rebelling from him while he was in Babylon, is Egypt; but the inscription contains no account of the suppression of any Egyptian revolt, and it is probable that what is referred to is the failure of Aryandes the satrap of Egypt to lend Darius any active support. In any case, Darius had reasons for suspecting Aryandes, and as already related, when he came to Egypt, probably in 517 bc, relieved him of his office, and put him to death. The satrap of Sardes, Oroites, laid himself under similar suspicions and suffered, perhaps rather earlier, a similar fate. In the story told by Herodotus Oroites is charged with having done the Persians no service at the time of the Median revolt, with having slain Mitrobates, satrap of the neighbouring province, and his son Cranaspes, and with having disregarded Darius’s instructions, and even putting to death a messenger that carried them. Since this happened while Darius was still occupied with the revolts and had no army to send against him, he secured the death of Oroites by treachery, a sufficient measure since it was the satrap personally and not the province that was inclined to become independent of Darius. One of the achievements of Oroites had been to entrap and then put to death Polycrates of Samos. After Oroites’s death Darius despatched Otanes to take possession of the island and to leave Syloson, Polycrates’s brother, to govern it as a Persian vassal. Herodotus counts Samos as the earliest of Darius’s conquests. It was the prelude to the extension of his dominions westwards and northwards, into Thrace and Macedonia, and to his attempt to bring all Greece into his power.

A last attempt at revolt was made by Susiana: this is recorded by Darius in the fifth and later inscribed column of the Behistun inscription. The year in this instance was given, but the monu­ment is mutilated and cannot be deciphered with certainty; possibly the statement at the beginning of the column read: ‘This is what I did in the fourth and fifth years after I became king,’ i.e. in 518-16 bc. In this case the Susian revolt may be placed in the former year; the Scythian expedition, of which a brief account follows, in the latter. The unfavourable incidents in this expedition are naturally enough passed over. Darius claims that the province became his, and that he deposed the rebel chief, putting another in his place. The latter statement need not be questioned; the former is vague, though it suggests an over-favourable interpretation of what Darius actually achieved on his northern frontiers against the Scythians. The details of this expedition are related below, and all that need be noted here is that it may be regarded as part of the policy for securing his northern frontiers against the inroads of the nomads. Herodotus half perceived this when he asserts that ‘Darius formed the desire to take vengeance on the Scythians, because they had first invaded the Median land’; but Darius’s action was not determined merely by a Scythian peril that had been realized a century before, but was for the purpose of putting an end to a peril that had since continually threatened and was still threatening; it was directed by a right perception of the connection among these northern peoples, though its success was seriously qualified by insufficient knowledge of the vast extent and the difficult character of the steppe country over which they roamed. Cyrus had died fighting against one section of these northern nomads; and there is evidence suggesting—what might independently have been surmised—that the Sacae or Scythians had attacked the frontiers of Darius.

To the extreme east Darius made an extensive and what must in many respects be regarded as an important enlargement of his dominions. Among the countries enumerated by Darius on the Behistun inscription as having come to him with the crown are Gandara and Sattagydia, from which it may be inferred that Cyrus had already pushed the Persian conquests to the north­western frontier of India and even to the southern s’opes of the Hindu-kush. In the later inscriptions of Persepolis and Naksh-i-Rustum, Darius includes among the provinces brought into his possession by his Persian army and tributary to him, along with Gandara and Sattagydia, India. Herodotus refers allusively to Darius as having subdued the Indians; but neither the Persian nor the Greek sources define either the date of the conquest or, at least with any precision, its extent. The Persian province of India scarcely extended east of the Indus; but it paid in tribute far more than any of the other provinces, and is likely therefore to have included a very considerable tract of country between the mountains that separate Afghanistan from India. The conquest is to be placed relatively early in the reign of Darius, but it was not necessarily due to the activities of Darius’s satrap in Arachosia immediately after the suppression of the revolt in that country in 521.

Thus, within a few years Darius had secured his position as ruler of the wide empire that Cyrus and Cambyses had created, and in certain directions had even added to it. But his more peculiar task was not to be the fresh conquest of ancient empires. He did not and perhaps did not need to possess the military genius of Cyrus, though he showed discernment in the choice of generals when he was not taking the field in person, and a power of rapid and successful action when he commanded himself. He exhibited great skill, moreover, in the distribution of his relatively small forces over the various areas of conflict; and against his failure in Scythia may be set the circumstances in which Cyrus died. The widespread revolts that followed the death of Cambyses showed only too plainly how easily the empire might fall to pieces; and the peculiar genius of Darius is to be seen in the completion of the organization of the empire which his predecessors had created. Much of the organization must indeed go back to beginnings under Cyrus, but, on the whole, it is the stamp of Darius that is set on the forms of life and state which were maintained under his successors, and in some important respects long outlasted the overthrow of his house, and with it of the Persian dominion, by Alexander. It is at this point, therefore, that it is most convenient to take a survey of the constitution and institu­tions of the Persian state so far as they can be discovered.

III

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE

Not only in extent did the Persian empire far surpass any that had gone before, but in the organization to which it was subjected; it may indeed be regarded as the first attempt to bring a large number of different races and nationalities under a single government which assured to the whole the rights and privileges as well as the burdens and responsibilities of members of the state.

At the head of the state was the king, and the Persian monarchy was hereditary. As the ancestors of Cyrus had been for generations kings of the small kingdom of Anshan and the succession had regularly passed from father to son, so the empire which Cyrus created passed to his son Cambyses. The pretender, too, who later challenged the rule of Cambyses, appealed to the hereditary principle by claiming to be son of Cyrus; and the people in accepting his claims held fast by the principle that the house of Achaemenes had the right to rule. Darius recovered for the family ‘whose possession,’ as he expresses it, ‘it had been from long ago’ the kingdom of which Gaumata had wrongfully and by deception for a few months deprived it. From Darius it passed to his son Xerxes by Atossa the daughter of Cyrus, and to later descendants successively down to the time of Alexander.

The discussion as to the respective merits of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy attributed by Herodotus to Darius and his six companions after the death of Gaumata, interesting as it may be as an illustration of Greek political philosophy, is valueless for the Persian theory or practice of government. The kingdom of Cyrus did not fall to Darius, as in the story of Herodotus, accidentally as the result of a clever trick, nor merely by force, but in virtue of his being a member of the oldest surviving line of the hereditary royal family. A strict law of primogeniture, indeed, did not hold with the Persians, or his father Hystaspes and not Darius himself should have succeeded; and Darius in turn was succeeded not by his eldest son, but by Xerxes, his eldest son by Atossa the daughter of Cyrus, the son first born to him after he had succeeded to the throne. Thus, the reigning king had ap­parently the right of choosing his successor among his sons, and this right, according to Herodotus, he was expected, in accordance with Persian custom, to exercise before making a foreign expedition.

The hereditary principle enjoyed a religious sanction: ‘By the grace of Ahura-Mazda I am king; Ahura-Mazda gave me the kingdom,’ are the words of Darius in the Behistun inscription; and Xerxes and Artaxerxes in their inscriptions speak of Ahura-Mazda ‘who made Xerxes (Artaxerxes) king.’ As the empire grew and incorporated ancient empires of other faiths, the Persian kings sought and obtained the sanction of the religion of these countries for their sovereignty: Cyrus was called to the throne of Babylon by Marduk, and Cambyses and Darius in Egypt took names claiming relationship with the Egyptian god Re. The great variety of the nations subject to him, the universality of his dominion which united them, the unshared and undisputed supremacy exercised by him, are the claims which Darius, and after him Xerxes and Artaxerxes, make for themselves in their inscriptions: Darius is ‘one king of many, one lord of many; the great king, king of kings, king of the countries possessing all kinds of peoples, king of this great earth far and wide.’ The unity of rule was never weakened by any of these kings dividing the empire among two or more sons. In his lifetime Cyrus made Cambyses king of Babylon, but strictly in subordination to himself as ‘king of the lands,’ and even this experiment was not perpetuated. Cyrus throughout most of his reign used ‘king of Babylon’ as part of his own style, as did Cambyses, Darius, and at first Xerxes. Nominally, the kingdom of Babylon for a time continued, but the occupant of the Babylonian throne was the king of Persia. So in Egypt the native monarchy nominally con­tinued, but with the Persian king himself as monarch. Certain smaller countries and city-states which had submitted voluntarily to the Persians retained their monarchies in vassalage to Persia. The satraps of Cilicia drawn from the native royal house are termed ‘kings’ by Greek writers; and in Phoenician inscriptions of Byblus, of Sidon, and of Citium (in Cyprus), belonging to the Persian period, the native rulers term themselves kings. Yet the title ‘king of kings,’ which, so far as is known, was first used as a standing title by the supreme monarchs of the Persian empire, expresses less the relation of the Great King to these petty vassal monarchs than the uniqueness of his kingship: to the Greeks he was Basileus, the one and only real king in the world.

The monarchy was an absolute monarchy: the king’s will expressed in word was law. What that word was, however, was generally determined in consultation with the Persian nobles and officials (which custom required of the king), and by regard for the usages of the country concerned.

The ‘royal judges’ as Herodotus calls them, or ‘law-bearers’ as they were probably called in Persian advised the king what was law or custom: in such cases, for example, as whether it was lawful for a man to marry his sister, how many Egyptian nobles should die in retaliation for each Mitylenean slain at Memphis, what ought to be done to Queen Vashti ‘according to law’ for refusing to come to the king at his bidding: these three instances, though not all of them historically real, may serve to illustrate how, though ‘the king of the Persians might do whatsoever he desired,’ yet, in practice, he generally had regard to law and custom. In certain respects, also, he was practically limited by the privileges enjoyed by the Persian nobles, and among these pre-eminently, though not exclusively, the families of the six men who were associated with Darius in the overthrow of Gaumata. Only from these families might the king take his wives, and they enjoyed the right of unannounced access to him. They were endowed with great territories, and within them enjoyed princely positions. Of the house of Otanes, one of the six, Herodotus relates that ‘at the present time this house alone remains free... and submits to rule only so far as it wills to do so itself, not transgressing the laws of the Persians,’ thus making Otanes practically as absolute—within his own dominions —as the king himself. On the other hand, the power of the king over even the six is illustrated by the fate of Intaphrenes, who was put to death by Darius, though not, as Herodotus states, immediately after the suppression of Gaumata, for he appears with the others whose families are commended to the favour of future kings by Darius in the Behistun inscription.

In administration the king acted in consultation with his ministers, the heads of great departments of state, which must have existed in the capital, though of them little is directly known. Ezra, in the letter given to him by Artaxerxes, is described as sent to Judaea by ‘the king and his seven counsellors,’ and the seven counsellors are associated with the king in the gift to the Temple at Jerusalem.

Certain lines of policy characteristic of the Persian government seem clear. While supreme authority resided in the king, great regard was paid, so far as the supremacy of the central authority allowed, to the traditional life and custom of the many diverse peoples gathered into the vast empire. The Persian was a tolerant government. The supreme and absolute character of the king required the suppression of the existing dynasties in the greater states that had been conquered, and even the avoidance of creating in these countries native vassal kings. But the Persian kings were ready to continue the forms and the religious associations of these monarchies. In Babylon Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and—at first—Xerxes, all reigned as king of Babylon, and Cyrus proclaimed himself king as the chosen of Marduk. And similarly in Egypt: the earlier Persian kings ruled as successors of the pharaohs and adopted Egyptian names. Nothing similar is known in relation to the Median monarchy; that, however, was but a recent institution, and the religions of the Medes and Persians were closely akin.

As the sentiments of the people were considered in this continuation of the ancient forms, so at times were the persons of the conquered and deposed monarchs: not only was the life of Astyages spared by Cyrus, but he was treated with consideration; and Cambyses apparently treated or was prepared to treat Psammetichus similarly; and it was only, if we accept the story of Herodotus, after a breach of parole that Psammetichus was put to death, although, according to Ctesias, he was kept alive at Susa. Certainly Darius’s treatment of the kings who gained a brief recognition in various countries during the revolts was marked by the greatest severity and even barbarity: they were not merely put to death, but previously mutilated. But their case was different: they were, as pretenders claiming to be what they were not, servants of ‘the Lie,’ abhorrent to Darius’s own object of worship, Ahura-Mazda the True; they were not as still independent sove­reigns but as subjects of the Persians disputing the supremacy of the Persian king, and that was not to be tolerated. So, too, as, towards the end of the reign of Darius and in the reign of Xerxes, repeated efforts at a renewed national independence were made in Babylon and Egypt, the Persian kings ceased to use the style King of Babylon—in form as well as in reality the kingdom of Babylon came to an end—and Artaxerxes no longer takes as king of Egypt an Egyptian name of religious significance, as Cambyses and Darius had done.

Not only were the Persians prepared to be tolerant to the various religions within their empire; they went further and actively supported the temple-worship of the gods of their subjects, or contributed to the building of their temples, and conferred on priesthoods and religious institutions special privileges. Cyrus in his cylinder-inscription records ‘I gave daily care to his (Marduk’s) worship’; and Cyrus and Darius not merely permitted the rebuilding of the Jewish temple at Jerusalem, but laid the cost of it on the royal treasury; that is to say, they decreed that the cost should be defrayed from the taxes levied in the province by the king’s government. Darius and Artaxerxes also provided the cost of the sacrifices offered in the Jewish temple for the life of the king and his sons. Darius’s general Datis not only assured the fugitive Delians that he was bound by the king’s command to respect the sanctity of the island where Artemis and Apollo had been born, but also offered on the altar of the Greek gods three hundred talents weight of frankincense. Cambyses, at the request of the Egyptian priest Uzahor, had the temple of Neith at Sai’s freed from the foreigners who had taken up their quarters in it. Not only this, he ‘restored the temple of Neith in person. He testified in every good way his reverence for the great, exalted, holy goddess Neith the great mother, and for all the great gods in Sa'is as all the pious kings had done... the king bestowed all that was good on the temple of bfeith. He caused the libations to be offered to the Everlasting One in the house of Neith as all the kings of former times had done.’ Darius charged Uzahor to restore the number of the temple-scribes and ‘ordered that all favour should be shewn to them... the king did all this... in order to uphold the names of all the gods, their temples, their revenues and the ordinances of their feasts for ever.’ Darius also undertook the repair or building of temples to Egyptian gods, especially the building of the temple of Amon in the Great Oasis (el-Khargah). Definite instances of the exemp­tion of priests or sacred classes from taxation are the decree of Artaxerxes forbidding tribute, impost or toll to be levied on the priests and on the temple personnel at Jerusalem, and the requisition by Darius I that his officer Gadatas should cease exacting tribute from the gardeners of Apollo at a place which is probably Magnesia on the Maeander in Asia Minor. In the latter case Darius distinctly stated that the action of Gadatas had violated the intention of his predecessors with regard to the service of the Greek god.

As the king, sprung from the noble Persian house of Achaemenes, was the head of the state, so the Persians were the ruling race within it and next to them the Medes. While the rest of the empire, including even Media, was, from the time of Darius onwards, subject to regular taxation for its support, Persia proper was not. For geographical reasons the real administrative centre of the empire was indeed Susa outside the ancestral heme and country of the ruling family; but it was in Persia that the kings erected or carved in the rock their tombs and built their most magnificent palaces. At Mashad-i-Murghab on the Pulwar within the region inhabited by the Pasargadae, the clan from which the Achaemenidae sprang, still stands the marble-like limestone structure which, in spite of contending theories, is rightly regarded as the tomb of Cyrus; the ruins around it represent the city built by Cyrus and called Pasargadae after the name of his clan; on an artificial terrace in the neighbourhood of the tomb stand the scanty remains of a palace, amongst them door-posts and a pillar with a winged figure carved in relief which has often, but mistakenly, been regarded as a portrait of Cyrus. These bear the legend written in Persian, Susian, and Babylonian: “I [am] Cyrus the king, the Achaemenid”. The attempt to refer these inscriptions, the only surviving Persian inscriptions of Cyrus, to Cyrus the younger, who was never king, must be dismissed as unsuccessful, and they may be accepted as proof in support of the statements of Greek writers that Cyrus, like his successor, built on, and was buried in, Persian soil.

Of Cambyses’ buildings in Persia nothing certain is known; but in the neighbourhood of the modern Istakr, 30 miles to the south-west of Pasargadae (Murghab), inscriptions sufficiently and clearly attest the devotion of Darius and his successors to their home country. Here they built the city known to the Greeks as Persepolis, here on a great artificial platform they erected magnificent pillared palaces and sculptured staircases, which inscriptions directly attribute to Darius, Xerxes and his son Arta­xerxes. Here, too, they were buried. Carved in the rock immediately behind the platform at Persepolis, and there and in the rock at the neighbouring Naksh-i-Rustum, are four tombs, one of which bears an inscription of Darius. Pasargadae was moreover the Rheims or Westminster of the Achaemenidae; here they were externally invested with the kingship, putting on the robe of Cyrus and partaking of the simple meal consecrated by custom. In another way, too, the bond between Pasargadae and the Persian royal family is shown by the practice of the kings to present the women of Pasargadae with a gold piece whenever they visited the city. The very fact that the kings continued to lavish expense on their Persian city, in spite of the fact that reasons of state made their visits to it relatively rare and—in comparison with their periods of residence in Susa, Ecbatana and Babylon—brief, is proof of the continued hold of Persia on the monarchs of a now far vaster empire. Darius’s praise of Persia has already been re­ferred to and in part cited; in another inscription he regards the welfare of his own house as bound up with that of Persia: “If thus thou shalt think, ‘May I not fear an enemy’ protect this Persian people: if the Persian people shall be protected, welfare for a long time and undisturbed will thro’ Ahura descend upon this house”.’

The army, which was organized in divisions of 10,000 divided into ten battalions of a thousand each, and then again into hundreds and tens, each with their respective officers, was drawn in time of war from all the nations composing the empire, but the flower of it then, and the standing army in peace, consisted of Persians and Medes. It was with the Persian and Median army that Darius overcame Gaumata and suppressed the subsequent revolts; the soldiers before the throne of Darius sculptured on the staircases at Persepolis are alternately Persians and Medes. At the head of the list, in Herodotus, of national contingents to the army of Xerxes stand the Persians and Medes; the kernel of the army was the Persian foot—the ten thousand ‘immortals’— and the Persian cavalry. The command of the army was predominantly though not exclusively in the hands of Iranians, and especially of Persians. Thus, of eight generals mentioned by Darius in the Behistun inscription, six are called Persians, one a Mede, and one an Armenian; the non-Iranian as well as the Iranian elements in Xerxes’ army were commanded by Iranian leaders—e.g. the Assyrians by Otaspes the son of Artachaees, the Indians by Pharnazathres the son of Artabates, the Arabians and Ethiopians by Arsames the son of Darius.

The garrisons in various cities and at strategic points through­out the empire consisted mainly of Persian soldiers, and were commanded by Persian officers: Oroites at Sardes had a body­guard of 1000 Persian spearmen; the Persian garrison at Mem­phis, to judge from the amount of corn supplied to it, was much larger, though associated with the Persians were some foreign mercenaries. The garrison at Syene consisted in part of Jews, in part of Egyptians; but it was commanded towards the close of the fifth century by Persians, first by Waidrang, and then by his son Naphayan. The names of the officers after whom the various ‘companies’ of the military colony at Elephantine-Syene were called are chiefly Persian—Warizath, Haumadata, Ar tabanus, Artaphernes; but some are Babylonian—Iddin-Nabu and Nabu- kudurri.

Important alike for appointments to the army, to court offices, and to administrative posts in the provinces, was the existence of something like cadet schools. At the court of the king himself, or at the minor courts of the satraps, ‘all the boys of the foremost Persians,’ as Xenophon phrases it, were educated. The stress laid on old Persian habits of life and accomplishments—riding, shooting with the bow, plainness of diet, the chase—formed a counteractive to the luxury which tended to increase with the increase and increasing wealth of the empire; though Xenophon already complains of decadence and perversion: where virtue once, now vice too often is learnt. Instruction in history and religion, attendance at judicial proceedings, familiarity with the king’s methods of awarding or withholding favours, are other elements in this education on which the Greek writers who describe it lay stress.

Thus, as the mass of the Persian population formed the nucleus of the army, the chief Persian families supplied, not indeed exclusively, but very largely, the generals and officers of the army, the ministers of the central administration, and the satraps and governors of provinces and districts throughout the empire. So far afield had conquest and expansion dispersed the Persians from their home; though the story with which Herodotus closes his history may reflect an actual opposition of the government to any unnecessary permanent settlement of Persians away from Persia. The importance of maintaining a sufficient nucleus of hardy mountain peasants for the army, and of retaining in the education of the ruling classes a place for the virtues which had contributed to the original conquering vigour of the race, may have been consciously realized and come to form a principle of state action. In the conquest of the empire ‘the spear of the Persian had gone forth afar,’ and ‘the Persian had fought his foe far from Persia,’ in the words of Darius’s eulogy: in the maintenance of it, as often as was needed this must happen again, but it could only happen with effect if Persia resisted the temptation to migrate to richer lands opened to it by conquest, and retained a sufficient reserve of man-power in its rugged home.

Though Cyrus built and adorned Pasargadae, and Darius and his successors Persepolis, they could scarcely, even had they tried, have created in the valley of the Pulvar or elsewhere in Persia a suitable administrative centre of the empire. The very features that made that country a cradle of a hardy race of soldiers left it lacking a site for the centre of a far-extended empire; and whatever their desire to limit the emigration of their people, the Persian kings themselves found it necessary for the most part to reside beyond the borders of Persia, returning thither indeed to be buried, but in their lifetime only on brief infrequent visits. Susa, the ancient capital of Elam, perhaps even the capital of the kingdom of Anshan over which the ancestors of Cyrus had ruled, was from the time of Darius, if not of Cyrus, to the last Achaemenid king the capital of the empire: ‘the city where’, as Herodotus phrases it, ‘the Great King has his residence’ and where ‘the money is laid up in treasuries’. In the height of summer the king transferred his residence to the more northerly, high-lying and cooler Ecbatana, formerly the capital of the Median empire, and, at first at least, in the winter to Babylon—though Xenophon’s statement that Cyrus resided regularly for more than half the year in Babylon is very doubtful.

Susa, some 200 miles south of Ecbatana, 225 east of Babylon, and nearly 300 north-west of Persepolis, situated midway between the distant eastern and western extremities of the empire, less centrally in reference to the much less widely separated southern and northern borders, had the advantage of being so much the closer to Persia, the cradle of the royal house, and the great reservoir of its man-power. Whether it was the ancestral city of Cyrus as king of Anshan, as early Greek writers (Aeschylus and Herodotus) imply, or was first made the capital by Darius (as others have surmised), it certainly owed much to Darius. The building inscriptions of Susa record the activity of Darius and Artaxerxes II, the fame of Darius’s buildings at Susa lives in the classical writers, and modern excavation has revealed the chief features of these. The city, situated in a fertile plain at the foot of the Zagros mountains between two rivers, the Karun, at a few miles distance to the east, and the Kercha (Choaspes) to the west, occupied for a distance of several miles the area between the eastern banks of the latter river and the western banks of a third (the Shapur, Ulai) which separated it from the citadel and palace which was the work of Darius. Artaxerxes II, in the inscription recovered by excavation, says of the apadana or throne-room: ‘this apadana Darius (I) my ancestor made: later under Artaxerxes (I) my grandfather it was burnt: by the grace of Ahura-Mazda, Anahita and Mithra I built this apadana’. This great hall, some 250 feet square, had roof-beams of cedar supported on 36 pillars of fluted limestone, and topped with elaborately carved capitals, in front were colonnades with friezes of enamelled bricks depicting processions of lions and of royal life-guards. It was the audience-chamber of the empire whither, along the roads that con­verged upon Susa, came from all parts those who sought the king, and whence, along the same roads, went the administrators or messengers who carried letters containing the word of the king which was law, and the troops who enforced it, and inspectors who reported to the king how his will was carried out.

The development of older lines of communication into the Persian road-system, which in some degree achieved the completeness and excellence of the communications of the later empire of Rome, may have been initiated by Cyrus, and owed much to Darius: Herodotus speaks of it as something long and well-established. In detail he describes only one of the roads, viz. that which connected Ephesus and Sardes with Susa at 90 days’ distance; Ctesias in the lost close of his Persian history gave similar details for the road to Bactria and India, and incidental information is found in other writers. These roads were accurately measured by parasangs; at intervals of, on an average, about four parasangs there were posting-stations and inns, which Herodotus describes as excellent; and at certain strategical points there were garrisons: of these Herodotus mentions four between Sardes and Susa—one at the Halys, two on the borders of Cilicia, and one in Armenia. The larger rivers which were not bridged were crossed by ferries. At posting-stations along the routes messengers mounted on swift horses stood always in readiness to carry forward the king’s letters and despatches, so that these passed as fast as a horse could travel without delay by night or day from Susa to the farthest limits of the roads; and whereas travellers normally took nearly three months from Sardes to Susa, the king’s correspondence may have passed over the same road in less than a week. These roads of course served not only for the royal despatches and the movement of the royal troops, but also for trade, which would naturally be stimulated by the great improvement in transport and communication, and for the private movements of the king’s subjects. At the same time, the adminis­tration of the roads served to keep the government informed about their subjects: private correspondence passing along the roads was carefully examined by the king’s officers, and private persons could only hope to escape the vigilance of these and maintain the privacy of their communications with one another by resorting to ruses such as that described by Herodotus.

IV

THE SATRAPIES

Under Darius, after his conquest of India but probably from an early period of his reign, the empire was divided into twenty satrapies, or provinces, under satraps or governors appointed by the king; and within these large provinces there were again smaller districts under subordinate governors to whom however, at least often, the same term satrap was applied. The appointment of satraps and the organization of provinces goes back to Cyrus and Cambyses, not to speak of similar organizations in the Assyrian, Median and Babylonian empires that preceded the Persian; what Darius did was to complete the organization: to modify the limits of some of the satrapies and the functions of the satraps.

The Persian term satrap, meaning protector of the realm, is applied to two Persian officials in the Behistun inscription, Dadarshi, who is described as ‘satrap in Bactria’, and Vivana, ‘satrap in Arachosia’ in the early months of the reign of Darius when the revolts broke out. There is no suggestion that these appointments had been made by Darius himself: they dated rather from one of the previous reigns. The same is true of Darius’s father Hystaspes, who is represented in the same inscription as occupying a corresponding function in Parthia and Hyrcania, though the title of satrap does not happen to be applied to him in the inscription. In a passage of Xenophon, which may rest on good information, Cyrus is said to have appointed satraps over (1) Arabia, (2) Cappadocia, (3) Great Phrygia, (4) Lydia and Ionia, (5) Caria, (6) Hellespontine Phrygia and Aeolis; but to have appointed no Persian satraps over Cilicia, Cyprus or Paphlagonia. Herodotus attributes to Cyrus the appointment of Oroites to be satrap of Sardes, i.e. of Lydia, implying that he filled the office continuously into the reign of Darius, and to Cambyses the appointment of Aryandes to be satrap of Egypt. He also mentions Mitrobates as satrap of Dascylium before the time of Darius. As the empire was extended by Cyrus and Cambyses, other provinces were no doubt set up and placed under similar government, though no suffi­cient data exist for determining the limits of several of these provinces before the reign of Darius. Two things, however, are clear in regard to this earlier as also to the later periods: (1) the satraps were appointed for indefinite terms, often retaining their position over a long period of years and through more than one reign, and (2) from the first the Persian provinces were large in comparison with those of earlier empires. Indeed, it is probable that the satrapy of Egypt, in comprising the whole of a conquered empire, was an exception, and that the empires of Babylon and Media were from the first, as they were under Darius, divided into more than one satrapy; yet, even so, the satrapies were extensive and in many cases included several different nations or peoples, and in some several formerly sovereign states.

Of the twenty satrapies into which the empire of Darius was divided, Asia Minor contained the first four in the list of Herodotus: (1) the first, including the Ionians, Aeolians, Carians, Pamphylians and others, and (2) the second, including the Lydians and others, covered the west; (3) known as the province of Dascylium, was in area much the largest and included the centre stretching from the northern to the southern coast; and (4) consisting of Cilicia on the south-east. The fifth satrapy (5) known as Abar-Nahara, i.e. Beyond-the-River, consisted of Syria, Phoe­nicia, Palestine and Cyprus; (6) Egypt together with Libya and Cyrenaica. The seventh satrapy in the list lies to the far east, between India the twentieth and Bactria the twelfth, and included (7) the Sattagydae, the Gandarii, Dadicae, and Aparytae. Then follow (8) Susiana, (9) Assyria, which included Babylonia; (10) Media and (11) the district north of Media and west of the Caspian Sea inhabited by the Caspians, Pausicians, Pantimathi and Dareitae; (12) Bactria, (13) Armenia; (14) the vast district east of Persia inhabited by the Sagartians, Sarangians, Utians and others; (15) the district to the north-east inhabited by the Sacae (Scyths); (16) the area westwards from Bactria to the south-east corner of the Caspian through the country of the Areians, Sogdians and Parthians, including the outlying oasis inhabited by the Chorasmians just south of the Aral Sea; (17) covered much of the area of the modern Baluchistan, and was inhabited by the Paricanians and ‘Ethiopians.’ The eighteenth satrapy (18) was the country of the Matieni, Saspeires and Alarodians, with the Urmia Lake more or less in its centre; the next (19) lay along and behind the south-eastern shores of the Black Sea, having amongst its inhabitants the Moschi and Tibareni, and the twentieth (20) consisted of the latest won territory—India, i.e. the Indus water-basin west of the Indus.

A comparison of the satrapies under Cyrus as given by Xeno­phon and under Darius reveals a number of differences: Arabia under Darius no longer forms either the whole or part of a satrapy; if Cyrus actually appointed a satrap of Arabia, his successors found it expedient to withdraw him; they were content with maintaining a good understanding with the Arabs, which was essential for the safety of their communications with Egypt, without persisting in the attempt to subject them to more direct Persian government. There are in both cases four satrapies in Asia Minor, but differently constituted: for example, Lydia and Ionia are combined in one case, and in the other belong to different satrapies; Caria, which under Darius is merely part of the first satrapy, appears in Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia as an independent satrapy under Cyrus; this it certainly became, whether for the first time or not, from 404 bc onwards. Modifications in the satrapies subsequent to Darius may be illustrated not only by the case of Caria just mentioned, but also by the division of the ninth satrapy of Darius: Assyria, perhaps about or soon after 478 bc, was detached from Babylonia (which henceforward was a separate satrapy) and was attached to the fifth satrapy of Darius. In Xenophon’s list of provincial rulers Belesus is ruler of Syria and Assyria, Roparas of Babylonia. Again, Areia, part of the sixteenth satrapy, is, under Darius III, a separate satrapy. At times the same governor was placed in charge of two or more complete satrapies: for example, Ushtanni, as a Babylonian contract-tablet attests, was in the third year of Darius -pakhatu (the Babylonian translation of ‘satrap’) of Beyond-the-River and Babylon, i.e. of the satrapies 5 and 9, and under Darius III, Mazaeus (Mazdai) governed Beyond-the-River and Cilicia, as the legends on his coins attest.

The satraps were men of high birth, such as Hystaspes, Artaphrenes, Cyrus the younger, in some cases members of the royal family by birth or marriage, appointed for indefinite periods and actually remaining in office for many years if not for life, administering provinces great in area and frequently including several nations, and extending the policy recommended, according to Xenophon, by Cyrus to the satraps ‘to imitate him’ to the pomp of their courts. They enjoyed a state that, in the history of the western Asiatic empires, was apparently something new. In some provinces, too, at some periods the office became in practice hereditary, though in theory terminable at the will of the king. Cilicia is the one instance in which, thanks to the timely recognition by its native ruler of the expediency of being on the side of the Persians, a previously existing kingdom became a satrapy with the native ruling house still providing the satrap from generation to generation. This lasted throughout the fifth century: in the next, probably as a result of unsuccessful accommodation of the Cilician ruler to the conflict between Artaxerxes II and Cyrus the younger, the satraps are no longer Cilicians but Persians. In the neighbouring satrapy of Dascylium, the office continued to be filled by members of the house of the Persian noble Artabazus who was appointed satrap of this province by Xerxes in 476 bc. Caria in the fourth century became a satrapy under successive members of the house of Hecatomnus.

The functions and powers of the satrap were of the widest in civil administration, and were wide also in military matters. It was his duty to maintain security of communication within his province not only for the king’s interests, but also for those of all well-disposed subjects. He was the highest judicial authority within the province, which in Aramaic was termed medinah, judicial district. He received envoys from neighbouring states, and determined action with regard to them, though larger matters of policy were normally referred to Susa, as for example by Artaphrenes, when he referred the question of an expedition against Naxos for the approval of Darius before undertaking it. He had to maintain good relations within his own province, and here again questions often arose which required reference to the king, such as was made by Tattenai (? Ushtanni), the satrap of Beyond-the-River, in the matter of the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple which had been associated with disputes between the Jews and Samaritans. Within certain satrapies, older or local forms of government were in a measure and with modifications perpetuated, such as the Phoenician city-kingdoms, and the Jews under high-priestly government and the law-book of Ezra (to which was given the force of state-law for the Jews by Artaxerxes, in the satrapy of Beyond-the-River) and many of the Greek cities in the satrapies of Asia Minor, though even so their represen­tatives were subject to the satraps.

These powerful administrators, as early as the reign of Darius, showed a tendency to independence, and later the satrapic system facilitated the break-up of the empire. The experience of Darius with Oroites in Lydia and Aryandes in Egypt may have drawn his attention to these dangers, and to him may be attributed the creation or perfecting of measures for a due control of the satraps. Important was rapidity of communication, for this at all events diminished the need for the satrap to undertake independent action without prior reference to Susa. Along the greatly improved roads and by means of the rapid government post, communications passed in great numbers and with frequency to and from the satraps, to each of whom a royal secretary was attached who attended to the receipt and despatch of the correspondence between the king and the satrap. Periodical inspections of the satrapies and of the way in which the governors discharged their duties were made by a person specially appointed by the king—his brother, for instance, or his son, or that high official who bore the significant title ‘ the King’s Eye ’—who travelled accompanied by a military force supplied from the king’s Persian army.

A further check on the satrap could be exercised by the commander of the Persian troops in the garrisons within his province. The satrap, indeed, was himself the military as well as the civil head of his province: he secured the requisite levy for the army from the Persians resident in his province and the native inhabitants: the subordinate officers of these troops were natives, but the satrap himself in war took the general command of them, or, in cases where the troops of a province fell under more than one command, of the principal part of them. Thus in the Behistun inscription Vivana and Hystaspes clearly appear as commanding the troops of the provinces which they governed; and the naval force furnished by Egypt for Xerxes’ expedition against Greece was commanded by Achaemenes, his brother, the satrap of Egypt, similarly the Cilician fleet by the Syennesis of Cilicia. So, at the end of the Achaemenid period under Darius III, the Bactrians, for example, were under the command of the satrap of Bactria, the Areians of the satrap of Areia, the Arachosians of the satrap of Arachosia. The garrisons of citadels like those of Sardes, Celaenae, Ecbatana, Memphis, and of the fortified places along the royal roads were provided from the Persian army under the direct central authority of the king: the commanders of them, also directly appointed by the king, were independent of the satrap, and satrap and garrison-commanders exercised a mutual control over one another.

An important function of the satrap, and one which, in association with his administrative and military supremacy, contributed greatly to his power and facilitated later the tendency on the part of satraps to independence, was the control of finance. As there were satraps and satrapies before Darius, so also the conquered countries must have contributed tribute or taxes to the state, and indeed Gaumata had sought popularity by promising to remit the charges for some years. But the regular and equitable distribution of taxation based on an exact measurement of the empire for the purpose and with reference to the varying fertility of different lands was one of the principal achievements of Darius, and he placed on the satraps the duty of raising the specified amount from their respective provinces. According to the list given by Herodotus, the total amount raised annually from the twenty provinces (including the Indian contribution paid in gold-dust) by this regular taxation was 14,560 Euboic talents, or in round numbers about three and a half million pounds sterling. The heaviest contribution was the gold-dust of India valued at 4680 talents; after this the largest contribution was made by the province of Assyria and Babylon (1000 talents); the next largest by Egypt and the other African dominions (700 talents); the four satrapies of Asia Minor together paid 1760 talents; the fifth satrapy (Phoenicia, Syria, Cyprus) 350 talents; Bactria 360, Susiana 300. Some of the larger but much less thickly populated provinces paid considerably less than these sums: the seventh satrapy with its contribution of 170 talents paying the least. The proceeds of this taxation were forwarded annually by the satraps to Susa, where the surplus that remained, after defraying the annual outgoings, accumulated in the king’s treasury as a reserve fund. After this fund had been largely drawn upon by Darius III for the war with Alexander the Great, and after he had carried off with him 8000 talents in his flight, there remained a rich spoil for Alexander: he is said to have obtained from Susa, Persepolis and Pasargadae metal coined and uncoined to the value of 180,000 talents, of which far the greater amount was in uncoined metal: of this from Susa he obtained 40,000 silver talents, as against darics to the value of 9000 silver talents only.

The income of the government from the provinces was not limited to this fixed taxation in money. Much was paid in kind; and there may have been other occasional payments such as tolls. Passages in Ezra distinguish three kinds of charges, one of which must have been the fixed annual land-tax, another may cover contributions in kind, and the third, on one view of the etymology of the term, may refer to way-tolls. Of the contributions in kind there is more information: they were made especially for the support of the army and of the households of the king, the satraps and even sub-satraps. The Great King and his army for four months in the year, according to Herodotus, ‘had their support from Babylon, and for the remaining eight months from the whole of the rest of Asia’: here as in the matter of the money tax Babylon is most heavily charged. On the march in warfare the army was maintained by the country through which it was marching or quartered for the time being. The household of each satrap was provided for by his own province, and that of each sub-satrap by the district under his charge: the governor even of a small district like the Persian sub-satrapy of Judah dined at his table 150 officers daily and, at all events in the poorer communities, the cost of such entertainment was felt to be burdensome. Other contributions in kind were 1500 horses, 50,000 sheep, 2000 mules exacted yearly from Cappadocia, and nearly double this number from Media, also 360 white horses from Cilicia; 1000 talents of incense from Arabia, ebony and ivory from Ethiopia. The sculptures of Xerxes and Artaxerxes at Persepo’is depict various types of tribute brought to the king, including camels and zebras.

The extent and value of these contributions in kind and other charges cannot be accurately estimated: they may possibly have amounted to two or three times as much as the fixed money tax. Still less is it possible to compare at all precisely the burdens imposed on their subjects by the Persian and earlier empires, or the value received in return for them in the form of peace, security, good administration and public works, though in general it is sufficiently clear that the subjects of Persia were far more favour­ably placed than those of Assyria, and it is possible to specify some of the public utilities of the Persian government. After the period of conquest was over, i.e. from the early years of Darius onwards, in spite of certain border warfare and with the exception of the struggle with Greece, the Persian proved a peaceful government. The great road-system, though constructed primarily for military and government purposes, must have served also the interests of trade and commerce; and the same may be said of another of the great works of Darius—the completion of the canal connecting the Nile with the Red Sea: ‘I commanded,’ he says in an inscription, ‘to dig this canal from the Nile... to the sea which goes from Persia; afterwards this canal [was dug] thus as I commanded, and [ships] passed from Egypt by this canal to Persia as was my [will].’ The interests of commerce were also served, and may have been directly considered by Darius, in sending out the expedition of Scylax: this Carian traveller sailed down the Indus, and then, after exploring the Indian Ocean, seems to have found his way into the Red Sea and finally to have arrived in the neighbourhood of Suez; there­after water-communication between India and Persia, as well as between Egypt—and by means of the Nile canal, the Mediter­ranean—and Persia, was for a time maintained. A later expedition under Sataspes, commanded by Xerxes to circumnavigate Africa, by sailing down the west coast, after proceeding not very far beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) gave up its task and returned by the same way that it had set out. Under the later kings, when Egypt in the fourth century had regained its independence, the use of the canal by the Persian empire was lost, and the canal itself allowed by the Egyptians to fall into disuse and decay; and in other respects the commercial results of the organization and policy of Darius may have gradually diminished under the later Achaemenid rulers.

V

THE ARTS

Two sides of Persian life and achievement remain to be considered—art and religion. Persia proper, before the rapid rise of the Persian empire, was the home of a simple hardy race which had found no opportunity for the development of great art; the extension of dominion beyond Persia proper under the ancestors of Cyrus had already brought the Persians closer to Babylon, one of the centres of ancient art, and, if this extension included Susa, had put them in possession of a city which must have contained great artistic monuments. The conquests of Cyrus, besides making Persia heir to all that Media had already developed through its contact with the civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates valley and of Asia Minor, gave the Persians possession of Babylon and other Asiatic centres, and brought them into close contact with Greece. The conquests of Cambyses added the other great home of ancient art—Egypt. In general, Persia did not owe its art to a native development, but borrowed and skilfully adapted to its own par­ticular purposes the arts of other peoples. Having no deep native roots, and serving essentially imperial ends, it passed, as it arose, with the empire.

The art of writing was borrowed from Babylon. Cuneiform signs were used for expressing the Persian language on monuments, but the innumerable variations employed by the Babylonians and Assyrians were reduced to forty-three, and these with fixed and substantially alphabetic values. That this method of writing was the invention of Darius, as some have inferred from an obscure passage in the Behistun inscription, is improbable in view of the brief inscription of Cyrus—who cannot well be Cyrus the younger—at Murghab (Pasargadae); it must rather go back to Cyrus, unless, of which indeed there is no proof, it should be traced to his ancestors in Anshan or to the Medes. No instance of the use of Persian cuneiform later than the fall of the Achaemenid Empire is known. Utilized by Darius in the greatest of rock­inscriptions at Behistun, by him and his successors on their buildings and tombs, it died with the overthrow of his empire and house, and exercised no abiding influence on future developments of writing. Of greater moment for the future was the adoption by the Persian kings of the Aramaic language and the Aramaic alphabet for communications with their subjects in the west. Though this language and alphabet were already used alongside of cuneiform in Babylonia and Assyria before the rise of Persia, the Persian empire promoted the extension of its use. Whether or not the Achaemenidae and their subjects employed the Aramaic alphabet for writing Persian otherwise than monumentally there is at present no evidence to determine; but subse­quently the Aramaic alphabet was so used, and from it the Pehlevi alphabet is derived. Under the Persian empire Aramaic was used in India: a recent discovery at Taxila of an inscription in the Aramaic alphabet and language proves what had formerly been surmised; and as it became in Persia the source of the Pehlevi, so did it in India of the Kharoshthi alphabet.

The greatest examples of Achaemenian art are architectural and sculptural. In these, too, the influence of Babylon is obvious; and at the same time we see that power of adaptation, as distinct from mere servile borrowing, that gives to the great buildings and sculpture of the Persian kings a character of their own. In them ancient western Asiatic art culminates and also expires; even the Arsacids and Sassanids drew their inspiration for their works of art from elsewhere, and not from the earlier Persian monuments.

Borrowed from Babylon is obviously the plan followed alike at Pasargadae, Susa and Persepolis, of erecting the royal buildings on large artificial terraces or platforms. In these platforms, however, as well as in the buildings, the Persians, instead of using bricks, as the Babylonians (and largely the Assyrians also) had been forced to do by the nature of their country, took advantage, especially at Pasargadae and Persepolis, of the excellent marble­like limestone which was to be found close at hand merely waiting to be quarried.

The buildings themselves differ strikingly from the royal buildings of Babylon and Assyria: whereas these had consisted of many chambers opening on to an interior court and presenting an uninteresting and forbidding exterior, the most characteristic Persian buildings are the single-chambered audience halls whose columnar construction lent beauty and dignity to interior and exterior alike. Particularly in its use of the column did Persian architecture differ from that of the Tigris-Euphrates valleys, where it had been most sparingly employed. Whether, as some have suggested, the Persian architectural column should be traced back to timber-columns similar to those of modern village houses in the province of Mazandaran on the southern shores of the Caspian, or to those of Median palaces—Polybius refers to columns supporting porticoes in the palaces at Ecbatana—or whether it derives rather from Egypt, and whatever may have been the influence of Greece on some of its features, it underwent developments in its structure and use that account for much of the distinctive character of Persian architecture.

The Persian columns are more slender than the Egyptian and placed at greater intervals from one another: the ratio of the height to the diameter, which in Egypt rarely exceeds 6 : 1, is in the hall of Xerxes at Persepolis 12 : 1, a ratio which is not quite reached by the slenderest of the Athenian columns. The intervals between the columns, which in Egypt is one or two diameters, and in Greece varies from rather over one to something under three, ranges in the different Persian buildings between three and a half and six or even seven diameters. Distinctive of the Persian columns are also the fluting, and both the bases and the capital. The fluted is in Persian more frequent than the unfluted column, which appears only at Pasargadae and in the rock-tombs; the flutings are much more numerous than in Egypt where they are mainly confined to the earlier buildings, and about twice as numerous as those which are found in the Greek orders. The bases—though at Pasargadae a plain round disc appears—have more frequently a very characteristic bell-shape with rich drooping leaf-ornament, and as a whole they present an effect not to be traced previously elsewhere. In the elaborate and equally distinctive capitals, the use of the two fore-quarters of two beasts (generally horse or bull), with knees and heads forming a strongly marked projection and directly supporting the architrave, is perhaps the most striking but not the only peculiar element.

In sculpture which is used so profusely at Persepolis, and in the enamelled bricks which were used for the friezes at Susa, as they had previously been used with great effect in Babylon, the influence of Babylon or Assyria is obvious enough in the choice and treatment of subjects. The colossal winged-bulls with human faces which adorn the Persian entrances unmistakably recall, in spite of certain refinements, the similar colossi of Nineveh; and the depiction of the king in conflict with monsters has a similar origin, as also has the treatment of the king enthroned and of the processional subjects. Further, the one religious symbol that appears in these Persian sculptures—Ahura-Mazda in a winged disc—closely resembles the Nineveh representation of the god Ashur, which again, in virtue of the use of the winged disc, appears to betray Egyptian influence; and alike at Nineveh and Persepolis the divine symbol is depicted above the head of the king. In the greater refinement of the sculptures—for example, in the draperies of the human figure and in the human figure itself—may perhaps be detected the influence of Greece: Gieek craftsmen and artists in some way and for one reason or another found their way to the Persian court, and it is likely enough that specimens of Greek art from rifled temples, and elsewhere, were by no means unknown in Persia. To what extent the work was actually carried out by foreign or by native workmen cannot be determined; in either case the workmen were maintained by the court and for court purposes and, as already remarked, on the fall of the empire they and with them the art they had practised ceased to be employed.

In addition to their palaces and state buildings, the Persian kings constructed massive architectural tombs. In these, if the buildings at Pasargadae and Naksh-i-Rustum—which have by some been judged to be fire-temples—are actually tombs, two influences exercised at different periods are to be discerned: the square detached buildings of Pasargadae, Naksh-i-Rustum and Naubandajan, a few miles south-east of Faza, recall the Lycian tombs, and the ‘tomb of Cyrus’ at Murghab presents features in which Ionian treatment has been suspected. These, if they are tombs, are remains of the earliest reigns—of Cyrus and Cambyses. With Darius a new influence comes in: the effect of closer acquaintance with Egypt after the conquest by Cambyses is telling; and Darius, as the inscription above his tomb makes clear, and his successors cut their tombs in the sides of the rock and provided them with an architectural facade and a sculptured frieze.

Ancient Persia has left nothing corresponding to the temples of Egypt, Babylon, Greece; and, in general, Persian art found little in religion to serve or to represent. The representation of Ahura-Mazda has been already mentioned; apart from that, sculpture is entirely secular in subject. The Persian religion afforded no scope for great religious buildings. Fire-altars were required and were constructed, but hardly fire-temples, though, as we have seen, some would regard as temples the buildings at Naksh-i- Rustum and elsewhere. The character of the houses of the gods, possibly not intended for Persian worship, which Gaumata de­stroyed and Darius restored, remains uncertain.

VI

RELIGION

If the art of the Persian Empire was neither deeply rooted in the earlier Persian life, nor destined to outlast it or exercise any marked influence on the future, the same cannot be said of Persian religion. It is true that neither the greatest figure nor the most notable development in the religion commonly designated as Persian was Persian in the stricter sense of being connected with the particular district whence the Achaemenidae sprang; but Iranian they were, and if not the origin, yet important stages in the history of the religion fall within the period of the Persian empire, and are intimately connected with it. The religion itself survived the empire and exercised a larger and wider influence after it had fallen than while it stood. The origins and history and character of this religion present many still keenly-disputed problems—which cannot be fully discussed, and indeed can be little more than mentioned, if even that, in the brief sketch which alone is possible here—of the Persian religion in relation to the history and abiding influence of the first Persian empire.

Herodotus has recorded his information or impressions as to the Persian religion in the latter half of the fifth century bc. They count it unlawful, he relates, to set up images and shrines and altars, ‘but their custom is to ascend the highest peaks of the mountains, and offer sacrifices to Zeus, calling the whole vault of sky Zeus, and they sacrifice also to Sun, Moon, Earth, Fire, Water, and Winds. To these alone they have sacrificed from the beginning; but they have learned from the Assyrians and Arabians to sacrifice also to Urania... The Persians call Aphrodite Mitra’. Herodotus goes on to describe the manner of sacrifice, the spreading out of the flesh on a carpet of herbage, while a Magian, without whom it is not lawful to sacrifice, ‘stands by and chants a theogony... Other things are talked of as secrets and not openly, with regard to the dead—how the corpse of a Persian is not buried before it has been torn by bird or dog. Now I know the Magi do this, for they do it without concealment; but the Persians cover the corpse with wax and bury it in the earth.’ The Magi, Herodotus concludes, differ from Egyptian priests in ‘slaying with their own hands all animals except a dog and a man, and they make this an object of rivalry, slaying alike ants and snakes and other reptiles and birds.’

These statements are remarkable alike for what they contain and for what they do not contain. Judged by its objects of worship—great natural phenomena—the Persian religion in the time of Herodotus retained much of the character of the earliest Aryan religion; but it had already had a history; it had introduced from without the worship of Urania; it had also developed, out of or alongside of the natural phenomena, a personal deity, Mithra—a name which Herodotus mistakenly attributes to a female deity. The priestly caste of the Magi are prominent, and are distinguished from the Persians by their greater or exclusive devotion to certain practices, viz. the exposure of the corpse prior to, if not instead of, burial, and the slaying of certain animals, which in later stages of the religion become obligatory on all its adherents.

But while Herodotus is aware that the religion has had a history, he has nothing to say of Zoroaster. Obviously Zoro­aster occupied no such position in the Persian world of his day as Mohammed occupied in the Arabian empire from the time of the earliest caliphs onwards; not only does the Greek traveller not mention the name of the Iranian prophet, but he describes as Persian a religion that differs markedly from that of the earliest Zoroastrian literature—the Gathas. Is this due to the fact that an earlier prevalence of the purer Zoroastrian faith, having contributed more or less powerfully to the establishment of the Achaemenian empire under Cyrus or its recreation by Darius, had been affected by a reaction which had reintroduced much that was pre-Zoroastrian, or by other influences that had brought about beliefs or customs alien to Zoroaster’s teaching? or had that teaching never yet, at least widely, affected the Persian world? In either case, was it mainly the teaching of Zoroaster himself, or was it other religious beliefs and customs, that affected the political development of the empire, or through that empire gained wider influence?

The answers to these questions are affected by many uncer­tainties: the age in which Zoroaster lived, the region where he lived and taught, the religious significance of the inscriptions of the Persian kings, and the criticism and interpretation of the various sacred writings of the Persians. The attempt to treat Zoroaster as a purely mythological figure having no place in actual history may be said to have failed, yet though his age and country remain disputed, one thing seems certain: he neither was born nor worked in Persia proper, the home of the Achaemenidae—in a word, the greatest figure in Persian religion and the family of the Persian monarchs did not spring from the same country.

The highest antiquity claimed for Zoroaster is that assigned by certain Greek writers of the fourth century bc, and Xanthus the Lydian of the fifth century, also by Diogenes Laertius (flourished c. 300 ad). According to them, he lived 5000 or 6000 years before their time. Their curious statements can be explained as due to misunderstanding; but the misunderstanding could scarcely have arisen in regard to a prophet whose lifetime was actually quite recent. Persian tradition as given in the Bundahish which, whatever its exact date, is not earlier than the seventh century ad, assigns to him a date some 300 years before Alexander, and, more precisely, according to one inter­pretation, indicates 660—583 bc as his lifetime. Various considerations would point to an earlier date rather than a later such as would be suggested, if not demanded, were the identification of Hystaspes the father of Darius with Hystaspes (Vishtaspa), the royal patron of Zoroaster, accepted; but in spite of the coincidence of names, so late a date for Zoroaster, though defended by many scholars, seems to the present writer to involve grave difficulties and he would prefer to place the prophet about 1000 bc.

The scene of Zoroaster’s activity was not Persia proper: it was Media, according to one theory, Bactria according to another; or it may have included both regions.

In the Persian scriptures, the Avesta, the only parts that have gained any general recognition as the work of Zoroaster himself or his age are the Gathas—metrical hymns in a distinct dialect. The Yashts, other metrical parts of the Avesta, are later, but may fall within the Achaemenian period; they show a greater affinity with the religion of the Persians as described by Herodotus than do the Gathas. Later still as literature is the prose Vendidad, a ritual work dealing with defilement from the dead and the correct treatment of corpses, though much of the custom is, or is intimately connected with, practices of great antiquity.

Zoroaster is best regarded as a reformer who, over against such a nature-worship as Herodotus describes, recognized no independent objects of worship in Sun, Moon, Stars and so forth, but rather, in a series of questions, implied that Ahura-Mazda (? the Wise Lord, often in the Gathas in the reverse order Mazda Ahura, or simply Ahura, or Mazda) determined the path of the stars, upheld the earth and the firmament, caused the moon to wax and wane, yoked swiftness to winds and clouds, created light and darkness, sleep and waking, morning, noon, and night. No other deity is by name or implication associated in the Gathas with Ahura-Mazda; his companions are certain qualities or attri­butes of his nature—Good Thought, Right, Dominion, Piety, Welfare, Immortality, as the terms may be more or less adequately rendered. So far there is nothing that precludes the application of the term monotheistic to the religion of Zoroaster in the Gathas. But from the beginning, and so far as the present world and age is concerned, Ahura-Mazda is in conflict with an evil spirit. There is nothing in common between him and the enemy —angro, the first element in the later Angromainya, Ahriman (which does not itself occur in the Gathas), as the evil spirit is once described. ‘Neither thought nor teachings nor wills nor beliefs nor words nor deeds nor selves nor souls of us twain agree.’ The ‘two primal spirits’ are ‘the Better and the Bad in thought and word and action’.

The demons—the daevas—the (nature) gods of the older religion, which Zoroaster set out to reform, attached themselves to the evil spirit and ‘infected the world of men.’ In the conflict in the spiritual world mankind is involved: men are free to choose, but choose they must, whether they will be followers of the Right (or Ahura-Mazda), or of the Lie (or the evil spirit). The issue of the conflict is not uncertain: victory will rest with Ahura-Mazda: the Lie is ultimately to be vanquished, to be delivered into the hands of Right. Then, too, the human adherents of Ahura-Mazda and the Lie will receive their respective requitals—cruel torment for the liar, blessing, delight for the righteous: ‘in immortality shall the soul of the righteous be joyful, in perpetuity shall be the torment of the liars.’ Thus, sharp as is the conflict, absolute as is the antithesis between the two spirits, in view of the ultimate victory of the Good Spirit, the monotheistic may be said to prevail over the dualistic element in Zoroaster’s conception of God. The strongly ethical character of the religion is obvious; and its activism stands in sharp contrast to the passivism of Aryan religion as it developed in the great religions of India.

How widely or how thoroughly this teaching of Zoroaster made way is difficult to determine: the prophet’s aim was, by presenting the two destinies, ‘to convert all living men’. His out­look was wide: to the one Good Spirit all men irrespective of nationality might, if they would, adhere, and in him find salvation. But of the actual extent of Zoroaster’s converts the Gathas tell little: among them the king, or as the Gathas call him, kavi, Vishtaspa; but unless this Vishtaspa be identical with the father of Darius, which is improbable, his age and region are uncertain like those of Zoroaster himself.

Later ages numbered Zoroaster among the Magi, who were already in the time of Herodotus the indispensable priests of the religion. But the Gathas fail to confirm this; and it may be that the later religion is due to a fusion of two originally distinct streams—the Zoroastrian, and the Magian with its insistence on the exposure of corpses, on next-of-kin marriage, on ritual, and, generally, with its intimate and more detailed application to life of a dualistic principle. Be this as it may, the various elements —old Aryan nature-worship, Gathic religion, and Magianism— fused in various ways or confused, maintained various degrees of vitality through the Achaemenid period: Herodotus vouches for the prevalence of the first and the power of the third, the mere fact of the survival of the Gathas for the second.

Which of these three elements of the religion affected the de­velopment of the empire and in what way? What religious forces were liberated during the period, to affect the future? It has been suggested, on the one hand, that the rise of Zoroaster within the Median empire had the result that it was so weakened by religious divisions as to fall a ready prey to the energy and vigour of Cyrus and the Persians; and, on the other, that it was the acceptance of the religion of Zoroaster by the Achaemenidae that supplied to them much of the power that made their conquests possible. These and other speculations must remain unsubstantiated till the time and place of origin and the progress of Zoroaster’s teaching can be more closely and certainly determined. The records of the Achaemenid kings themselves in reference to their religion are in many respects incomplete and ambiguous. One point is clear: the tombs of the kings show that Cyrus and his successors did not conform to the Magian practice of exposing the dead; but that for this reason they also acted contrary to the teaching of Zoroaster cannot be proved: the Gathas nowhere require this treatment of the dead, and possibly in a single passage imply without disapprobation burial as the existing custom.

In another respect the kings fall short of what the Gathas allow us to attribute to Zoroaster—a belief in Ahura-Mazda unqualified by the recognition of other gods: the difference, so far as the recognition by the kings in their dealings with other nations of Egyptian, Babylonian and other gods is concerned, might indeed be attri­buted to policy. But Darius even in his own home in Persepolis speaks of Ahura-Mazda as ‘the greatest of the gods’—a phrase which may indeed occur as a survival of polytheism in a mono­theistic faith—and prays that Ahura-Mazda may bear him aid ‘with the royal,’ or ‘the clan’, or ‘all the gods’ as the phrase is variously rendered, and at Behistun records that ‘Ahura-Mazda and the other gods which are bore me aid.’ Yet in spite of these qualifications Ahura-Mazda dominates the inscriptions of Darius scarcely less than the Gathas: no god is named beside him, nor referred to except in the phrase just mentioned. To Darius— and Xerxes and Artaxerxes later repeat the faith—Ahura-Mazda is he ‘who created this earth, who created yonder heaven, who created man, who created welfare for man,’ who gave the kingdom to his house and defends his empire from evil.

Over against Ahura-Mazda stands, not indeed, in the actual terminology of the inscriptions, a primal spirit of evil, but, as often in the Gathas, the Lie: the Lie made the provinces rebel against Darius whom Ahura-Mazda had made king and assisted, because he was not an enemy nor a liar nor a deceiver nor a wrong-doer. With certain differences which have been indicated, there appears to be too considerable agreement between the religion of the prophet as revealed in the Gathas and that of the statesman in the inscriptions for the latter to be independent of the former. At a distance in time and place, not at present to be exactly determined, and by ways which cannot be closely traced, Zoroaster had powerfully affected Darius and perhaps with him in particular the Persian nobles as distinct from the people in general, who were more closely held by the kind of worship indicated in Herodotus. Whether Darius is the first of the Achaemenidae to have come under the influence of Zoroaster’s teaching cannot be either asserted or denied with certainty: of the predecessors of Darius no inscription exists in Persian, except the five words of Cyrus at Pasargadae; and there is consequently no means of judging what expression of religious belief they would have made in their own country. On the other hand, the evidence, from inscriptions and other sources, that Cyrus and Cambyses recognized in countries not their own the gods of those countries, is in itself no proof that they were less affected by Zoroaster than Darius; for Darius made the same recognition.

In the successors of Darius it is possible to observe an important change which would appear to indicate that they were led further away from the religion of Zoroaster, partly by the pressure of the still-surviving pre-Zoroastrian religion, partly by the influence of the religions of peoples incorporated into the Persian empire. Whereas Darius, as we have seen, invokes no god but Ahura-Mazda by name, Artaxerxes II prays ‘may Ahura-Mazda, Anahita and Mithra protect me,’ the same king, according to Berosus, ‘first taught the Persians the worship of the gods in human form, and set up the image of Aphrodite-Anaitis at Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, Damascus and Sardes’. Mithra, a divine figure of the Aryan past, regarded perhaps by Zoroaster as a daeva or demon, had maintained his position even under the earlier Achaemenidae, as proper-names compounded with Mithra attest; the worship of Anahita, the goddess of fertility, is to be traced mainly to Semitic (Babylonian) influence. The direct influence of these cults was for long wider and deeper than the teaching of Zoroaster.

Thus, (1) the belief in a conflict between two opposite and opposed spiritual principles—a good spirit, with whom at last will lie the victory, and an evil spirit—in the division of mankind into adherents by free choice of one or other of these spiritual powers, and the different destiny that awaited them at the End, (2) the worship of Mithra the unconquerable Sun and maintainer of compacts, or (3) of Anahita the mother-goddess, are some of the religious factors that entered into the life of the Persian empire, and gained the power which enabled its religion to spread beyond it and survive it.

But it lies beyond the scope of the present chapter to trace in detail the working of these ideas and the modification of the Persian or Zoroastrian religion in the obscure Arsacid period, and during the striking revival with its keen propaganda that marked the rule of the Sassanids; or to examine the extent to which indirectly the Persians affected the religion of Islam forced upon them by their Mohammedan conquerors; or to compare with the ancient religion that of the still surviving followers of Zoroaster—some 10,000 in Persia, some 90,000 in India (Parsis). Nor is this the place to trace the march and growth of Mithraism through the late pre-Christian and early post-Christian centuries, or to determine precisely how far the religion of Persia actually introduced fresh ideas into, or forced the growth of ideas latent but previously undeveloped in, Judaism, and so affected the conditions under which the Christian religion came to birth; or again what heretical ideas that gained currency in the earlier centuries of the Christian Church proceeded from Persia. Merely to refer to these movements must suffice to indicate the general fact that the influence of Persian religion which in various ways affected and was affected by the empire of the Achaemenidae extended far, lasted long, and is not really exhausted even today.

VII

THE SCYTHIAN EXPEDITION

Shortly after his re-organization of the Persian empire, in or about 516 bc, Darius delivered the first historic attack of Asia upon Europe. Like the Ottoman Sultans of the fourteenth century, he did not in the first instance direct his march upon Greece but upon the Balkan hinterland.

This ‘Scythian expedition’ of Darius, as it is commonly called, can only be described in skeleton outline, for Herodotus, who is practically our sole informant on it, has drawn most of his detail from the realm of fable.

Since Darius took command of the expedition in person, the forces engaged in it must have been considerable. But the traditional estimate of 600 ships and 700,000—800,000 men is a gross exaggeration. The fleet, being drawn exclusively from Darius’ Greek subjects, cannot have numbered more than 200— 300 sail; from the nature of the work in hand we may conclude that the army did not exceed one-tenth of the traditional total. Darius crossed over to Europe by a bridge with which a Greek engineer, Mandrocles of Samos, had spanned the Bosphorus. Proceeding in a northward direction he traversed Thrace to the Danube, and effected the speedy submission of the natives, most of whom were overawed into an unwontedly tame surrender. But instead of pausing on the Danube to consolidate his gains he pushed on at once into Scythia.

The purpose of Darius’ plunge into the trans-Danubian wilderness is not at all clear. Was he reconnoitring for a suitable frontier, or in quest of new sources of wealth, or bent upon adventure? Perhaps he aimed vaguely at all these objects. In that case his Scythian foray may be compared with Caesar’s excursions into Germany and Britain.

The Persian force effected the passage of the Danube by means of a bridge of boats which his fleet had built for him at a distance of two days’ sail from the river mouth, near Galatz or Braila. Its subsequent line of advance cannot be traced with any certainty. According to Herodotus, it followed the easterly bend of the Black Sea towards the Don steppes and eventually reached a river Oarus, presumably the Volga, on whose banks eight ruined ‘forts of Darius’ were exhibited in later times. But these ‘forts’ were probably ordinary Scythian kurgans or burial mounds: they can no more be used to define Darius’ route than can the ‘Caesar’s camps’ in Britain to trace Caesar’s line of march. Had Darius’ objective really been the east Russian steppe, assuredly he would not have approached it by a toilsome overland march across the Dniester, Bug, and Dnieper, but by the commodious water-way up the Azov Sea and the Don. Moreover Herodotus tacitly corrects himself in mentioning that the tribes attacked by Darius retreated upon the land of the Agathyrsi, i.e. towards the Car­pathians. From this we may infer that Darius marched north or north-west through the Moldavian plain.

But whatever the direction of his march, Darius now found himself in a steppe land similar to the Bactrian prairie which had baffled Cyrus, in his last campaign, and he encountered like difficulties. The Scythians, not daring to face him in battle, drove off their herds and left their primitive timber shacks to be fired by the invader, and by this elusive strategy they won the campaign. After a protracted but ineffectual pursuit Darius was forced to turn back by the failure of his supplies; and as the Scythians doubled back upon him he had to race for the Danube, abandoning his transport and sick.

Meanwhile the Greeks whom Darius had left in sole charge of the Danube passage were being incited by Miltiades, tyrant of the Thracian Chersonese, to unmoor their ships and sail home. But a fellow-tyrant, Histiaeus of Miletus, pointed out that a Persian catastrophe in Scythia would be followed by domestic revolutions in the Greek cities, in which the rule of the despots would be swept away. This warning, which subsequent events proved true, was not lost upon the Greek commanders, for most of them were tyrants. Consequently the bridge was preserved until Darius had recrossed it, and a Persian disaster was averted. But while the Greeks in the field safeguarded the Persian line of communications at its most vital point, their compatriots at the base, misled perhaps by exaggerated reports of Darius’ mis­adventure, rose in revolt and broke down the Bosphorus bridge. Thus Darius was compelled to prolong his retreat through Thrace and to seek a new return road to Asia. Having found a crossing­point at Sestos he retired to Sardes and took no further personal part in European warfare.

The king’s ‘1812 campaign’ ended far differently from Napoleon’s, and the retreat across the Danube was attended with no such disaster as the passage of the Beresina. Yet his failure sufficed to deter him from further adventures in the interior of Europe. After Darius’ departure operations in Thrace were resumed under his lieutenant Megabazus. This officer reduced the coast­land from the sea of Marmora to the Strymon. In order to secure the passage of this river he deported to Asia some of the native tribes which bordered upon it, and he induced Darius to revoke a gift of land under Mt Pangaeus which had been bestowed upon Histiaeus in recompense for his loyalty. In asking for this territory Histiaeus probably had no other object than to develop the adjacent mining fields. But the Persian was less impressed by its wealth than by its strategic position on the narrow strip between Lake Prasias and the sea. We may also count among Megabazus’ victims Histiaeus’ former antagonist Miltiades. According to Herodotus, Miltiades was expelled from his dominions by the Scythians. But even if they did ever make a raid to the Dardanelles, Miltiades could safely have defied them behind his fortifications on the Bulair isthmus, so in all probability it was Megabazus who expelled him. On the other hand, Megabazus failed to reduce Macedonia. The envoys whom he sent to demand its submission were murdered by the Crown Prince Alexander, and this affront remained unpunished.

Megabazus was eventually relieved by an officer named Otanes, who recaptured Byzantium and Chalcedon, and with a Greek flotilla subdued Lemnos and Imbros. With these operations, which secured the whole border strip between the two continents and brought Persia’s frontiers within easy distance of the Greek homeland, Darius’ European campaigns ended for the time being.

VIII

THE IONIAN REVOLT

With the fifth century, however, began a conflict of nations which probably went further than any other ancient war to deter­mine the world’s history.

Of the two antagonists in this struggle, the Greeks were ill-organized and unready, whereas the Persians possessed the most formidable war machine which the world had yet seen. This machine, moreover, was seldom allowed to rest. The king of Persia, as Herodotus truly fabled, was driven on by a ‘daimon’. Though he might doubt the wisdom of war piled on war, the traditions of the Persian people and its powerful nobility and the need of distracting the realm from the internal dissensions which had shaken it closed every career to him save that of conquest. The direction in which his next blow would fall was plainly indicated. On its northern, eastern and southern sides the Persian empire had reached the limits of profitable advance; but the Greek lands on its western frontier, though deficient in material wealth, lay within easy reach of a Persian attack, and their inhabitants were known to the Persian king as the most restless of neighbours and the most useful of subjects. Besides, though so energetic a king required no prompting, Darius was spurred on by numerous Greek renegades who aspired to re-enter their country in the baggage-train of a Persian army. That the alleged grievances of these refugees might become a pretext for aggression against Greece had been shown in the case of the ex­tyrant Hippias, whose suit was taken up by Darius’ brother Artaphrenes as a means of opening a quarrel with Athens. But, as Herodotus has aptly pointed out, the chief danger to Greece lay in the impression of divided strength which these émigrés produced. Like the Macedonian, the Roman and the Turkish conquerors of later times, the Persian invaders were solicited by the Greeks themselves and could reckon on internal feuds within the Greek nation.

About 500 bc, therefore, a Persian attack upon Greece appeared imminent. In point of fact, Persians and Greeks came to blows at this very time. But in this round the Greeks were the aggressors, and for the first time in their history made an Anabasis into Asia.

The Ionian Revolt, as this passage of arms is called, is the first war in Greek history of which we have a detailed account. The Persika of Charon and of Dionysius, who lived at the time of the Revolt or soon after, and included the history of it in their works, have not come down to us. But we still possess the account of Herodotus, and the Ionian Revolt marks the very point at which he begins to attempt a continuous narrative. Unfortunately this chapter of his story reveals Herodotus almost at his worst. It forms a string of more or less incoherent episodes, of which the sequence and causal connection are often hard to establish. As there are no means of supplementing Herodotus’ account from other sources, the task of reconstructing the story of the Revolt is like the reassembling of a mosaic whose pattern is lost. Herodotus’ story also suffers from a strong bias against his own countrymen. Nowhere else is the ‘malignity’ for which Plutarch rated him more manifest. The reason of Herodotus’ prejudice may partly be sought in the antipathy of a Dorian from Hali­carnassus against the Ionian cities which took the leading part in the Revolt. But where Herodotus judges unfairly, the cause usually resides less in him than in his informants. These were principally drawn from the island of Samos, which played a most equivocal part in the Revolt. By way of apologizing for the uncertain support which the Samians gave to this movement, Herodotus’ authorities were set on depreciating the rebellion as a headstrong piece of mischief-making, of which men of sense could but seek to wash their hands. By faithfully mirroring a distorted presentation of events, Herodotus reduced his picture to a caricature. Thus not only the proper grouping of events but also the discovery of their true causes offers great difficulties to the modern historian of the struggle.

In seeking the causes of the Revolt, we have to remember that when the Greeks were first conquered by the Persians they surrendered their independence without any serious struggle, and that they had since borne the Persian yoke with apparent resignation. A few years before the Revolt, the Greek contingents which accompanied Darius on the Scythian Expedition had deliberately thrown away a good chance of marooning the Persian army in the wilderness and thus regaining their freedom at one blow. The uprising of the Greeks against the Persians at first sight appears like an attack upon a wolf by a sheep.

In Herodotus’ eyes the Ionian Revolt was indeed a mere im­pulsive fling, and its cause lay no deeper than the sudden inspiration of two Greek adventurers bent on fishing in troubled waters. Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, so his story runs, was solicited by political refugees from Naxos to reinstate them in that island. With the ulterior purpose of winning Naxos for himself, he pressed their claim before Artaphrenes, the governor of Lydia, on the ground that the conquest of the Cyclades would provide Persia with a row of convenient stepping-stones for an ultimate invasion of Greece itself. Artaphrenes was so impressed with this argument that he invoked his brother Darius’ consent to an expedition and proceeded to raise from the seaboard of his province a fleet of 200 sail, double the size suggested by Aristagoras. In 499 bc the expedition set out under a cousin of Darius named Megabates, with Aristagoras second in command. To such an armament Naxos should have fallen an easy prey. But on the journey a quarrel broke out between the two leaders over a question of discipline, and Megabates, having got the worse of it, took his revenge by giving the Naxians notice of the coming attack. Thus forewarned, the islanders prepared for a siege and held out successfully. At the end of four months Aristagoras raised the blockade for lack of funds and sailed home. Having thus damaged Persian prestige and squandered Persian money, Aristagoras became apprehensive of punishment at Darius’ hands, and his thoughts turned to rebellion as the only means of saving his face.

At this juncture the Milesian tyrant received a message from his father-in-law Histiaeus, who was chafing in honourable detention at Darius’ court and had set his hopes on an Ionian insurrection as the readiest means of procuring his return to Ionia. To evade detection, the message was tattooed on the skull of a slave who presented himself to Aristagoras with the bald request, ‘please to shave my head.’ Aristagoras, having removed the covering of new-grown hair, read a summons to rebellion. He was now emboldened to sound his political confidants. The most distinguished of these, the geographer Hecataeus, could speak from his own experience of the vastness of Persia’s resources and so discountenanced all rebellion as hopeless. But his voice was lost in a general chorus of approval. Thereupon Aristagoras played his master-stroke. First setting a good example by restoring a free constitution in Miletus and exchanging his tyranny for an elective office, he conducted a campaign against the despots of the other Greek cities. This campaign was facilitated by the arrest of those tyrants who had served in the Naxian expedition and had not yet been demobilized. A general dégringolade of despots was the result. But this series of revolutions was also a series of declarations of war against Darius, for the tyrants were his agents and enjoyed his support. The whole of Ionia and the island of Lesbos were thus involved in rebellion.

In analyzing this story we may begin by pruning away some improbable and unessential details. Aristagoras’ failure to surprise Naxos should rather be ascribed to the bad discipline which he abetted against Megabates than to treason on the latter’s part. That a keen and competent commander, and a Persian nobleman, should have turned traitor out of pure spite is incredible. Again, however much we may cherish the anecdote of Histiaeus’ cryptogram as a classical example of evading the censor, we must admit that it is ben trovato and nothing more. The exile of Susa could not possibly foresee that his message would find Aristagoras already half inclined to revolt, and without such foreknowledge the sending of the message ceases to be plausible, for Histiaeus could not have been so naive as to imagine that Aristagoras and all Ionia to boot would mobilize at a mere gesture of impatience on his part.

When these excrescences have been trimmed away, Herodotus’ tale may be accepted as substantially true. An expedition to the Cyclades was obviously in Persia’s interest, and it promised to be even more profitable to its originator, for Aristagoras could reasonably hope to be rewarded with the lordship of the isles. His failure to reduce Naxos is no more surprising than Miltiades’ similar failure at Paros ten years later. But Herodotus recounts only the immediate antecedents of the Revolt without indicating its ulterior causes. Though he explains satisfactorily why Aristagoras in person was driven to rebellion, he fails to solve the key problem in his own story, why the Ionian cities followed suit.

Two reasons for this apparent mystery may be suggested. The system of government by tyrants, which the Persians maintained in the Greek cities as they had found it at the time of the conquest, had outlived its usefulness and had come to be resented as a burden and a humiliation. At the time of the Scythian Expedition Histiaeus had predicted that the removal of Persia’s protecting hand would be followed by a general revolution in Asiatic Greece. In 499 bc Aristagoras proved by his own abdication that he considered the revolution to be imminent in Miletus; and the success of his campaign against tyranny in the other Greek cities shows that the feeling against tyrants had become general.

Secondly, at the end of the sixth century the Asiatic Greeks were going through an economic crisis which was bound to react on their politics. Though many of the minor cities of Asiatic Greece were self-contained agricultural states, the leading communities such as Miletus, Samos and Chios were largely dependent on an industry and commerce which in the sixth century showed signs of decline. At the great Egyptian mart of Naucratis Ionian pottery was being displaced by the superior products of Corinth, and in the Black Sea it was losing ground to the still better black­figure ware of Athens. Worse still, some of Ionia’s best markets had eventually been lost outright in consequence of various political catastrophes. The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses had ruined the prosperity of Naucratis and indirectly dealt a blow to the Asiatic Greek cities which had the principal share in Naucratic trade. In 510 bc the destruction of the Italian city of Sybaris threw Miletus into mourning, and not without reason, for the commercial connection between the two cities had been close. The opening of the western Mediterranean by the Pho-caeans had been checked by the combined opposition of Carthage and Etruria, and Histiaeus’ attempt to exploit the Eldorado of Myrcinus in Thrace had been frustrated on political and military grounds by King Darius. It is only fair to add that these reverses, as we have already seen, were due to different causes; and there is little evidence that the Persian kings ever injured Greek trade of set purpose, or gave preferential treatment to the rival commerce of Phoenicia. Yet part at least of Ionia’s losses was plainly the result of Persian interference, and when the Greeks felt the shoe pinching it was but natural that they should throw the entire blame on Persia as being the most obvious cause of the pressure. But whatever the precise causes of the Revolt may have been they were certainly more deep-seated than Herodotus suggests; only a widespread sense of grievance could have created an insurrection on such a scale.

In the winter of 499—498 bc the rebels were left unmolested by the Persians, who had evidently been taken by surprise. During this respite they set to work, though without any great success, to organize their existing forces and to recruit fresh ones. The confederacy of Ionian cities, which had played a vigorous part in the politics of the seventh century but had since relapsed into inactivity, was now resuscitated as a war parliament. It was probably at this time too that the rebel states entered on a monetary convention which bound them to issue a uniform coinage according to a common weight-standard derived from Miletus. The extant specimens of this mintage prove definitely that Chios, Samos, Clazomenae, Cyme, Priene, and eventually also Lampsacus, Abydos and Dardanus joined the convention, and it is not unlikely that other insurgents took part in it. By this arrangement the various communities not only facilitated commercial intercourse but provided a suitable money for paying the federal forces. But apparently no steps were taken to establish unity of command in the field, and each contingent served under its own general.

The task of extending the area of revolt does not seem to have been pursued at first with much energy, for nothing is heard at this stage of missionary propaganda among the neighbours of the Ionians. But in the winter of 499—498 bc Aristagoras in person undertook a tour in the Greek homeland with a view to obtaining support for the movement. Had this support been granted in any generous measure, the combined Greek forces should have had a good chance of fighting the Persians to a standstill, and the European Greeks need not have had to repel a Persian invasion of their own soil.

Aristagoras first had recourse to Sparta. If we are to believe a Spartan tradition reproduced by Herodotus, he brought with him a map of the world (based, no doubt, on a treatise of Hecataeus, the so-called ‘Tour round the World’), and with the help of this pictorial argument explained to King Cleomenes how easy and lucrative a Greek Anabasis into the heart of Asia would be. This tradition further declares that Aristagoras reinforced his arguments with bribes and had raised his own bid to the colossal sum of fifty talents, when Cleomenes’ little daughter Gorgo, who had overheard these proceedings, broke in with wisdom from a babe’s mouth and bade her father break off the interview. In this story the parts assigned to Aristagoras and Cleomenes are not merely knavish but downright silly, and no words need be wasted in refuting it. Aristagoras could readily have offered some cogent reasons in favour of Spartan intervention, such as the nearness of Persian peril to Sparta itself, and we need not doubt that he used some such plea. But whatever his arguments were, his suit was rejected. Although Cleomenes was subsequently to show that he appreciated the danger from Persia more fully than most of his countrymen, for the time being the memory of Sparta’s past failures in overseas ventures, and the prospect of imminent conflicts in Peloponnesus itself, committed him to a policy of inactivity.

There is no record of Aristagoras having visited any other Peloponnesian city. A famous Delphic oracle which was delivered about this time to the Argives and prophesied the destruction of Miletus for its ill deeds, suggests that Aristagoras made an appeal for help to Argos, for unless the Argive consultants had sounded Apollo on the subject of their relations to Miletus his allusion to the fate of that city would appear quite gratuitous. But whether the Argives were approached by Aristagoras or not, they kept their head within their shell, as in every pan-Hellenic crisis.

Of the two old-standing allies of Miletus in the Greek home­land, Aegina and Eretria, Aristagoras appears to have visited the latter only. In this city he obtained promises of support, and he achieved a similar success in Athens. The participation of Athens in the Ionian Revolt was hardly due to commercial considerations, for she was a competitor rather than a trade ally of the Ionians, and the claim which these could make upon her as their reputed mother-city had no binding force. But, as we have seen, the Athenians had a grievance against Artaphrenes for befriending their ex-tyrant Hippias and had reason to believe that the Persians intended to pick a quarrel with them. Therefore it does not require Herodotus’ caustic comment, ‘that it is easier to fool thirty thousand men than one,’ to explain why the Athenian Ecclesia rushed in where Cleomenes feared to tread.

The isolated and delusive successes of Aristagoras at Athens and Eretria did not, however, suffice to redeem his mission from failure. To all intents and purposes the Asiatic Greeks were left to fight out their quarrel with Persia unaided. In spite of these disappointments the rebels opened the campaign of 498 bc with a daring offensive stroke. With the temporary assistance of twenty ships from Athens and five from Eretria, they advanced upon Artaphrenes’ headquarters at Sardes, captured most of the town and penned up the Persian commander in the citadel. The bold­ness of this onset and its complete initial success raise two questions: with what object did the Greeks attack Sardes, and why were the Persians caught defenceless?

In considering these problems we must remember that the Greeks had apparently no reason for engaging in operations by land, and every reason for putting their trust in their fleet. For a people whose communications were mainly maritime a powerful navy was the surest shield against attack. And it was also their strongest offensive weapon, for their best hopes of propagating the revolt lay among the remaining Greek towns of the Asiatic seaboard. Moreover, in case these plain truths should have escaped the insurgent leaders, Hecataeus had warned them at the outset that they must obtain command of the seas at all costs, and, if necessary, must impound the treasure in the temple at Branchidae for the upkeep of the fleet. By all the tokens therefore the Greeks were committed to a Periclean strategy of making the seas safe and eschewing adventure by land. Again, it cannot be supposed that in 498 bc Artaphrenes’ province was entirely denuded of troops. Though the reinforcements despatched from up-country had not yet reached him, the Persian commander certainly was no worse off for men than in 499 bc, and in that year he had been able to draft a considerable force of land troops for service on the Naxian Expedition. In the ensuing year Arta­phrenes must have had sufficient troops under his command to contest the Greek advance.

A satisfactory answer to both problems has been furnished by an otherwise unknown Greek author, Lysanias of Mallus, whom Plutarch fortunately quoted on this particular point. According to Lysanias, the march upon Sardes was the Greek reply to a Persian attack upon Miletus. This explanation fits all the known facts of the case excellently. From the Persian point of view, a swift blow against the rebel headquarters was clearly indicated as the best means of paralyzing the move­ment of revolt, and Artaphrenes lacked neither the men nor the energy to carry out such a stroke. Conversely, though Miletus was probably not in serious danger at this stage, the insurgents were bound to do all that they could to protect their capital, and an active defence promised not only to be as effective as a passive one, but also to have a good influence on Greek morale. In view of these facts, we need not be deterred by the obscurity of Lysanias and the silence of Herodotus from accepting the former’s account. The Greeks, we conclude, were first put into check by the Persians, but they relieved the pressure by offering check to the Persians in turn, and as Artaphrenes had thrown his pieces too far forward they caught him at a disadvantage.

Viewed in this light, the Greek offensive fully accomplished its main purpose, for the pressure upon Miletus was completely relieved; and the eventual consequences, as we shall shortly see, were considerable. Not that the Greeks could hope to hold Sardes permanently. Persian reinforcements from all western Asia Minor were closing in and the Lydians were converted from onlookers into enemies by an accidental conflagration which wrought much havoc in the town and destroyed the national sanctuary of Cybele. Indeed the invaders retired none too soon, for on their retreat they were roughly handled. And this misfortune gave rise to another, for the Athenian forces, and no doubt also the Eretrian contingent, which had lost its leader, now returned home, and in spite of fresh appeals for help no further assistance was sent to the lonians from the Greek homeland. But these losses were more than counterbalanced by the rapid spread of the revolt among the Asiatic Greeks which followed upon the capture of Sardes. Towards the end of 498 bc a federal fleet which was sent co cruise along the Asiatic seaboard as far as the Bosporus roused to revolt all the Greek cities on its passage, and doubling back to the south it won over not only the maritime communities of Caria, which had been associated with the Greeks in the Naxian Expedition, but a large portion of the Carian hinterland. Among the adjacent Dorian cities the insurgents do not appear to have made any recruits, except perhaps at Lindus on the island of Rhodes, which subsequently figured on the Greek side. But the insurgents were presented with an important success by the spon­taneous accession of the Greek communities of Cyprus at the instigation of Onesilus, the ruler of Salamis. At the end of 498 bc the rebellion had become general among the Asiatic Greeks, and its high-water mark was now attained.

It was probably at this stage that Darius accepted an offer by Histiaeus to pacify the lonians. Though Herodotus represents Histiaeus as boastfully undertaking to deliver Aristagoras to Darius and to make Sardinia, ‘the biggest of all islands,’ tributary to Persia, in all likelihood Histiaeus merely promised a diplomatic mediation, which indeed was all that he could hope to accomplish. The acceptance of this offer shows that Darius saw no present prospect of crushing the rebellion. But before Histiaeus could accomplish anything the tide of war had turned against the Greeks. In 497 bc, a new Persian force which had assembled in Gilicia was sent to recapture Cyprus. On this island Onesilus had invested the Phoenician town of Amathus which had remained loyal to Persia, but as his fleet was unequal to the Phoeni­cian squadron which escorted the Persian reinforcements he was unable to oppose their landing. The Cypriote Greeks were now thrown on the defensive and had to appeal to the Ionians for help. The rebel war council lost no time in sending out a strong fleet. In the first set battle between the two chief seafaring people of the Levant the Greeks gained the upper hand, and as nothing further is heard of the Phoenician fleet for three years, its defeat was probably complete enough to cripple it. But the Persian land force, which had now no base except the Phoenician towns of Amathus and Citium on Cyprus itself, retrieved its own fortunes and decided the fate of the whole island in a no less decisive land battle. In this action, which was fought on the plains of the Cyprian Salamis with a medley of foot, horse and chariots, the Greeks were their own worst enemies, for during the engagement the contingent of Curium went over to the Persians, and the chariot corps of Salamis followed suit. In the ensuing rout Onesilus, who had fought gallantly, was killed, and as the Ionian fleet now sailed home from an apparently hopeless venture the insurgents were left without a leader. The example of Salamis, which capitulated promptly, was not followed by the other Greek cities; but none of these, except Soli, which held out for five months, was able to stand a prolonged siege. Towards the end of 497 bc all Cyprus had fallen back into Persian hands.

On the mainland the Persian reconquest proceeded at a less even rate. In the spring of 497 bc Artaphrenes attacked the Greeks at three different points. One Persian force began a lightning campaign on the Hellespont, where it carried five towns, including the key positions of Abydos and Lampsacus, in as many days. This army was eventually told off for a more arduous service in Caria, and its place was taken by a force which had previously operated with indifferent success on the Propontis and now proceeded to recapture the numerous little agrarian settlements in the Troad. The third Persian army, which had been directed against the western seaboard, recovered Clazomenae and Cyme, but failed to take any of the larger cities. Thus the cam­paign of 497 on the mainland brought the Persians many minor successes; but all the principal towns, such as Miletus, Ephesus, Cyzicus and Byzantium, and all the islands, still held out. Moreover the Persian victories against the Greeks were balanced by a disaster in Caria which brought the Persian offensive to a standstill along the whole line.

The revolt of Caria, which had deprived the Persians of their communications along the Maeander valley and of access by land to Miletus, was a more serious blow to them than the poverty and the remoteness of the country would indicate. Therefore as soon as Artaphrenes could spare his first army from the Hellespont he despatched it to the Maeander front. The Carian levies allowed the Persians to cross the Maeander at a point near its confluence with the Marsyas, with a view to driving the invaders into the river; but their force was inadequate even for purposes of defence, and the Persians pushed the Carians back upon Mt Latmus. The defeated army, which had begun to talk of surrender, was here rallied by a Milesian force; but in a second battle it was dislodged from the heights and driven down into the plain of Mylasa. The road to Miletus now lay open to the Persians, but their commander, hoping to keep the Carians on the run, pursued them towards Pedasa. The capture of this stronghold would probably have ended the Carian revolt; but at the eleventh hour the Carians turned the tables on their pursuers by means of a night surprise in which the whole Persian force, generals and all, was destroyed. The Carian campaign, which probably did not extend over more than a few weeks, paralyzed the Persian offen­sive for several years.

In 496 and 495 the Greeks enjoyed a respite by land and sea, but lack of leadership prevented them from putting their leisure to any good use. At the time of the Persian advance into Caria the Milesian leaders lost their nerve and contemplated the evacuation of their city. Hecataeus proposed a temporary retreat to the adjacent islet of Leros, and Aristagoras actually led an .exodus of faint hearts to Myrcinus. It is idle to speculate whether he could have secured himself here against a Persian pursuit; before the year 497 was out he and all his company had been massacred by the Thracians.

A double opportunity was also lost to the Greeks through Histiaeus’ successive failures as a mediator and as a general. The journey of Histiaeus to Sardes appears to have occupied him until 496. On his arrival there he made an attempt to win over some of Artaphrenes’ staff to a policy of conciliation. But the satrap himself, who could not but resent Histiaeus’ officious interference, took good care that his diplomatic mission should miscarry. Roundly accusing Histiaeus of ‘having stitched the shoe which Aristagoras put on’, he frightened his rival away from Sardes. Having stolen across the Persian lines to the coast, Histiaeus made his way to Chios. From this refuge he made a futile attempt to resume negotiations with his accomplices at Sardes; but at the same time he trained himself to play up to the part which Artaphrenes had imputed to him by giving himself out as the real author of the revolt, and he eventually persuaded the Chians to escort him to the insurgent headquarters at Miletus. It would have been fortunate for the Greek cause if Histiaeus had been received back by the Milesians, for here was a leader who knew the enemy’s position from the inside and could be trusted to fight with the desperate determination of a renegade. But the Milesians would have none of him, and the Chians, who had distrusted his intentions from the first, refused to give him any support. Unable to escape from the false position into which his adventures had thrust him, Histiaeus now took to privateering. With a small squadron which the Lesbians had entrusted to him he took up his station at Byzantium and detained the Greek merchantmen from the Black Sea. Though the other Greeks did not think it worth while to send a fleet against him, the effect of this blockade upon them must have been considerable, for the larger Ionian towns at all times drew much of their raw materials from the Black Sea, and it is probable that during the revolt they looked to that quarter for a great part of their food supply. Thus Histiaeus, instead of rescuing the Greeks, became a thorn in their side.

The history of the campaigns of 496 and 495 is almost a blank. The defeat of their fleet at Cyprus and of their army in Caria compelled the Persians to mark time; the disunion of the Greeks prevented these from making a counter-attack. By 494 however, the Persians had prepared for a new offensive. A new Phoenician fleet, reinforced by contingents from Egypt and Cilicia, and even from Cyprus, set out in that year for Greek waters. At the entrance of the Aegean Sea this armada was checked by the resistance of Lindus, and the timely intervention of a fleet from Ionia might have brought the Persian advance to a definite standstill. But the Greeks were unprepared to seize this chance and left Lindus to arrange a favourable capitulation with the Persian admiral. Having thus secured an entry into Ionian waters, the Persian fleet made its way to Miletus. Simultaneously Artaphrenes, who had won a passage through Caria by promising part of the Milesian territory to the neighbouring community of Pedasus, sent a force to invest Miletus by land. At this critical moment the Greeks were again caught unprepared, and only eight of the Ionian states (Miletus, Priene, Myus, Samos, Teos, Erythrae, Chios and Phocaea), together with the cities of Lesbos, took any common measures of defence. But this small group by an eleventh-hour effort raised a fleet such as had never yet met in Greek waters. The lesser mainland states, handicapped by the abstention of Ephesus, only contributed forty-three ships; but Chios equipped ioo galleys, Lesbos 70, and Samos 60, and Miletus spared from the defence of its own walls a force sufficient to man 80 vessels. The standard ships of this fleet were probably not triremes but some lighter type of vessel. But ship for ship, the Greeks were a match for their antagonists, and although Herodotus relates that the Persian fleet was 600 strong, the subsequent course of events indicates that in reality it was barely superior to the Greek navy. Instead of proceeding at once to battle, the Persians first endeavoured to break the Greek front by underhand negotiations with the several communities.

These intrigues had their effect before long; but at first the insurgents, as Herodotus says ungenerously, ‘refused to see reason’. Nay more, by an unwonted effort of self-denial they consented to confer the unified command of their whole force upon their ablest captain, Dionysius of Phocaea, and to exercise their fleet in united action. But these good resolves only lasted some seven days. The story of Herodotus, that the Ionians refused any longer to expose their delicate complexions to the sun, reads like a gratuitous libel on an active and seamanlike people; but there is no denying the jealousy of city against city which prompted the Samians to parley with their former tyrant in the Persian camp, and the whole fleet to disobey their generalissimo.

The Persians now waited no longer, but forced an action off Miletus, hard by the islet of Lade. This battle showed that the Greeks could have repeated their victory off the Cypriote coast, if they had but held together. The Chians in particular fought superbly, and though Herodotus is probably wrong in saying that they rowed clean through the enemy’s lines—for this purpose their vessels probably lacked sufficient oarage and carried too many marines—they more than held their own. But the decisive part in the engagement fell to the Samians and Lesbians. The former by a deliberate act of treason hoisted their sails and bolted out of the fighting-line; the latter, on finding their flank exposed by this desertion, fled in similar fashion. Thus Greek disunion and disloyalty presented the Persians with a crushing victory. A hundred years later, at the battle of Cnidus, the same causes gave the Persians their only other great triumph over a Greek fleet.

The rest of the story is soon told. Dionysius escaped from Aegean waters and turned buccaneer in the western Mediterranean. Miletus was hemmed in by land and sea and was shortly after carried by storm; and in the same year the rebellion was ended in Caria. In 494 and 493, the Phoenician fleet re­ceived the surrender of the remaining Greek insurgents in the Aegean and Propontis. Miltiades the Athenian, who had been governor of the Thracian Chersonese under Hippias but, unlike that ex-tyrant, had risen against the Persians, raced back to his native town and so saved himself for another trial of strength with the Persians. Histiaeus returned to Aegean waters after the battle of Lade and for a brief hour became the champion of a forlorn hope. With his Lesbian squadron he carried the island of Chios and made it a rallying-point of the leaderless Greek rout. But the campaign which he waged against his Phoenician pursuers was nothing more than the distracted dodging and doubling of the quarry before the hounds. He was finally run down on a foraging expedition in Aeolis and delivered to Artaphrenes. The Persian satrap, fearing no doubt that if his captive could gain the ear of Darius he might excuse his treason by throwing the blame for it upon Artaphrenes himself, put Histiaeus to death at once.

In the first flush of victory the Persians committed some un­wonted acts of frightfulness. The population of Miletus was partly transplanted to farthest Mesopotamia; the seaboard quarter of the town was razed so effectively that the later Milesians never rebuilt it, and the temple of Branchidae was burnt down. A similar treatment was meted out to the other cities, and though Samos received immunity from reprisals as a reward for its treason, the victors undertook a systematic man-hunt in the other islands. But the reign of terror did not last long. King Darius, as usual, was more bent on reconstruction than revenge and imposed a saner policy upon his subordinates. In the Lydian satrapy Arta­phrenes not only maintained in general the old moderate rates of tribute, but he secured a better distribution of the burden by means of a new land-measurement and assessment. In addition, he compelled the Greek towns under his charge to set up courts for the settlement of claims between their citizens and interdicted forcible reprisals. In 492 bc Mardonius, a son-in-law of Darius, was sent on a special commission to the Ionian and Hellespontine towns and astonished these by ridding them of their returned tyrants and setting up democracies in every community except Chios and Lampsacus. The wounds caused by the six years’ war were thus healed up, and in 481 King Xerxes was not afraid to levy contingents from the Asiatic Greeks for service against their European compatriots.

But although Asiatic Greece was pacified, it failed to recover its ancient prosperity. The economic decline which had preceded and partly caused the revolt was merely hastened by the strain of an unsuccessful war; and it was henceforth accompanied by a decline in general culture. Ionia, which in the seventh and sixth centuries had led Greece in commerce and industry, in literature, art and science, fell into the background for two centuries, and not until the new Anabasis of Alexander did Asiatic Greece re­gain its pre-eminence.

Such was the tragic ending of a war which the Ionians entered on, not light-heartedly, but with a genuine sense of grievance, and waged without proper cohesion, yet not without dash and courage. But if the Ionians sacrificed themselves in the revolt, they helped to save the Greeks of the homeland. Far from hastening on the invasion of European Greece, the Ionian Revolt tended to delay it. The respite thus gained, and the lessons which the revolt conveyed, were precious. They enabled the European Greeks to realize and secure the two conditions of success, control of the seas and unity of command. In liberating the Asiatic Greeks after the Great Persian Wars the Athenians but made amends for their previous desertion of them, and repaid service rendered by them to the Greek homeland.

CHAPTER VIII

MARATHON