Authors: Jim Lacey
The First Clash (10 page)
The decisive all-fronts offensive began in May 521 BC. On the eighth day of that month, Darius’s army met the Median host at Kundar. As Darius’s
account states, “Then we joined battle. Ahuramazda brought me help; by the grace of Ahuramazda did my army utterly overthrow that rebel host.”
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Darius commemorated this great victory by later having the Behistun inscription carved into the craggy rocks that overlooked the battlefield. Defeated, the Median commander, Fravartish, retreated toward Ragae, hotly pursued by Darius’s cavalry.
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After he was run to ground, Darius demonstrated that some of Assyria’s tradition of brutality still remained popular among its formerly subject peoples. For as Darius proudly boasted:
I cut off his nose, his ears, and his tongue, and I put out one eye, and he was kept in chains at my palace entrance, and all the people beheld him. Then did I impale him in Ecbatana; and the men who were his foremost followers, those at Ecbatana within the fortress, I flayed and hung out their hides, stuffed with straw.
With Fravartish defeated, Darius sent assistance to his father in Parthia, while he advanced with the bulk of his army into Armenia. At his approach, the dispirited Armenians, who had already suffered severely at the hands of Darius’s generals, put aside their weapons and returned to the Persian fold. Darius, believing that there was only some mopping up left to do, began his march back to the heart of the empire. He reached Arbela in late July 521 BC. Here he rested his army, as messengers arrived to announce that everywhere his loyal satraps were victorious over the remaining rebel forces.
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Inexplicably, Babylon, unable to accept that Darius was everywhere victorious, revolted one more time. This time the people followed an Armenian named Arakha, who also styled himself as a new Nebuchadnezzar. As there was still much work to be done after the grim fighting throughout the northern provinces of his empire, Darius could not immediately march on Babylon. Instead he sent Intaphrenes, one of his co-conspirators in seizing the throne, against Babylon. Intaphrenes led a Persian army south and captured the city without much fighting on November 27, 521 BC. As usual, Darius ordered Arakha and all of his chief followers mutilated and impaled.
The main fighting was now over. It had been a brutal year, but at its end Darius reigned supreme. As he inscribed for future generations, he had fought nineteen battles and overthrown nine kings.
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But still the fighting was not over. The Scythians, who were always looking for weakness within the empire to launch further devastating raids, had intervened on the side
of Darius’s enemies during the main fighting and were now restless. Like Cyrus before him, Darius could not leave the northern portions of his empire, already weakened by over a year of vicious fighting, at the mercy of these pitiless hordes. He therefore led his veterans north into modern Turkistan. In a novel maneuver, Darius boarded a large portion of his army on ships gathered along the Caspian Sea and launched an amphibious assault in the rear of the Scythians. Taken by surprise, the bulk of the Scythian army was either destroyed or captured. For the first time in generations the northern frontier of the empire was secure, while the Persians added the province of Saka to the empire. With this addition, the Saka cavalry, the finest light and heavy cavalry in the world, was now at Darius’s disposal. This cavalry was later to play a major but mostly unrecognized role at the Battle of Marathon.
There was just one more matter to settle before Darius felt himself secure on the throne. The satrap controlling Lydia and Ionia, Oroites, remained neutral during Darius’s time of troubles. In fact, he took advantage of the turmoil to add to the territory under his control and had executed several high-ranking Persians, even murdering one of Darius’s personal messengers. While he was fighting the rebels, Darius could do nothing to avenge such slights. Furthermore, even after he was victorious on all fronts, Darius remained reluctant to march directly on Oroites, who Herodotus states “possessed great political and military strength, including 1,000 elite Persian troops.”
It was on these Persian troops that Darius placed his hopes for a quick resolution. According to Herodotus, Darius sent a royal messenger to Oroites’ court to deliver a series of proclamations. The Great King ordered his messenger to watch the reaction of the guards to each proclamation and determine whether their loyalty was to Oroites or Darius. When the messenger noted that the Persian soldiers were reacting to each royal pronouncement with respect verging on awe, he dared to have read aloud one of two final messages: “Persians, King Darius forbids you to serve as guards to Oroites.” Upon hearing this, the guards immediately stood easy and let down their spears. Emboldened by the guards’ reaction, the messenger handed over one last proclamation for reading: “King Darius instructs the Persians in Sardis to kill Oroites.” After this dispatch was read aloud, the guards drew their daggers and slew Oroites.
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By 518 BC, almost three decades before the Battle of Marathon, Darius was the undisputed master of the Persian Empire. But it still remained an empire in name only, consisting mostly of a hodgepodge of nations held
together by fear of Persian arms. Cyrus had begun the job of emplacing an administrative infrastructure, but it remained incomplete at his death. Moreover, his son Cambyses paid little attention to administrative matters, as he was more interested in expanding the empire and proving he was as worthy a warrior and conqueror as his father. It therefore fell to Darius to complete the consolidation and organization of the empire. He did this so thoroughly that his Achaemenid family line stayed on the throne for almost two hundred years of internal peace.
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THE MIGHT OF PERSIAA
lmost two years of civil war had shown Darius how easily his empire could disintegrate. To forestall a recurrence, he turned his attention to creating the governmental and financial structure required to meld his fragile empire into a single, indivisible unit. It was in this regard that he displayed a particular brilliance. For if Darius was a first-class general, then he was also that rare breed of warrior who possessed a genius for administration.
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Foremost among Darius’s priorities was the shoring up of his dynastic rights to the throne. Although he was an Achaemenid, he came from a branch of the family that was not particularly close to that of Cyrus. Furthermore, if strict laws of primogeniture were adhered to, Darius’s father and not Darius himself had the stronger claim to the throne. For the time being, however, the army’s unquestioned loyalty was sufficient for Darius to hold power. But that might not be the case if a dynastic struggle erupted at a later date. So to solidify his rule, Darius turned to the first ladies of the empire. As the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, encouraged polygamy and even marrying sisters, Darius was free to marry all of them.
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Sometime in the first year of his reign, he also married Cyrus’s two daughters, Atossa and Artystone.
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Atossa bore him four sons:
• Xerxes in 520 BC, who became the next Achaemenid king.
• Masistes, who was one of the senior commanders in Xerxes’ doomed campaign to conquer Greece a decade after the Battle of Marathon, and satrap of the key province of Bactria.
• Achaemenes, who became the satrap of Egypt and commanded
the navy during Xerxes’ campaign against Greece in 480 BC. He was killed in 459 BC by Egyptian rebels.
• Hystaspes, commander of the elite Bactria and Saka troops during Xerxes’ invasion of Greece.
Darius also married Parmys, the daughter of the true Smerdis (son of Cyrus and brother of Cambyses), along with the daughter of Otanes. This last marriage was necessary to keep Otanes’ family close to the regime, as he was one of the seven who had overthrown the false Smerdis and had initially been favored by some of the others to become king. He had moved aside voluntarily so that Darius could assume the crown, and in reward Darius declared that he and his house would be subject to no man. This meant that Otanes’ family obeyed the king’s will only as they saw fit, a condition that still persisted when Herodotus wrote his history. It was therefore important to lock in the noble Otanes’ family as closely as possible to the Achaemenids and thereby ensure its loyalty and continuing support.
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With the legitimacy of his house ensured through dynastic marriages, Darius next turned his attention to consolidating the empire.
After years of neglect and war, there was much to be done. The administrative system that linked the satrapies (provinces) to the central government was destroyed. Communications routes, on which the economy rested, were in shambles and unsafe for traders to travel. Moreover, the empire’s finances were wrecked, and there was no cash in the treasury to pay for the maintenance of the realm. Worse, although Darius had defeated his internal enemies, by doing so he had wrecked the provincial forces that had formed the backbone of the rebel armies. This left his relatively small field army as the only defenders of an empire whose expanse had no previous equal. The pressing need was to rebuild frontier fortresses and provincial forces so that they could resist the scourge of raiders from outside the empire’s borders. Accomplishing such a task demanded that Darius find large of amounts of ready cash.
Darius did not have the luxury of dealing with each of these problems in turn, as they were all urgent and required his immediate attention. So he turned from war and became one of the great administrators of the ancient world.
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When he was done, Darius had built such solid supports under the empire that it lasted for two hundred years without any substantial changes to its structure. While some historians have complained that this structure became ossified over time and was unable to adapt to changing circumstances, it still compares well with those of any of the
other great empires known to history. For instance, the Persians did not rely on terror, as had the Assyrians, to hold subject peoples in line, nor did the empire tear itself apart in civil wars at the death of its leader, as did that of Alexander the Great. The administrative structure established by Darius was by no means perfect, but when compared with the institutions of other ancient empires, the results are consistently favorable.
In undertaking this task, Darius acted counter to his upbringing as a warrior and forced his Persian and Median subjects to do the same. As Herodotus relates, this was not a popular direction:
The Persians say that Darius was a retailer, Cambyses a master of slaves, and Cyrus a father. Darius tended to conduct all of his affairs as a shopkeeper, Cambyses was harsh and scornful, but Cyrus was gentle and saw to it that all things good would be theirs.
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Although Darius built a great palace complex at Persepolis within the traditional borders of Persia, the location was not suitable as the administrative center of the empire. Darius therefore confirmed Cambyses’ selection of Susa as the empire’s capital. During the summer months, the royal court (and presumably most of the empire’s administrative infrastructure) moved two hundred miles north to the cooler Median capital of Ecbatana, which had also been the administrative center of Cyrus’s empire.
Susa was as close to a perfectly placed city for administrative purposes as could be imagined. It sat almost equidistant from the farthest edges of the empire from east to west and was also centrally placed on the north–south axis. Moreover, it rested upon the key ancient trade routes, was situated on a fertile plain between two protecting rivers, and most important was on the edge of traditional Persian lands, the source of the empire’s strength and elite military manpower.
Darius began by reorganizing his provinces into twenty satrapies and immediately assessed a tax on each.
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According to Herodotus, Darius received 14,560 talents in taxes from the empire on an annual basis, although this was not likely to be his only source of revenue (for instance, neither tribute from nearby nations nor imperial customs duties were included). To put this in perspective, during Darius’s reign a single talent could pay the wages for a trireme’s two-hundred-man crew for two months or the wages of three laborers for twenty years.
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As trained soldiers tended to receive a higher rate of pay than day laborers, a talent
would pay the salary for a single soldier for twenty years.
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In other words, if the empire had no other expenses to pay, which was far from the case, it could pay a full-time professional force of over a quarter of a million men out of annual revenues. Two generations after Persia’s defeat at Marathon, Athens began the Peloponnesian War with 6,500 silver talents in its treasury, and annual revenues were about 1,000 talents (400 internal and 600 from tribute from other members of the empire).
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So even at the height of Athens’s power, annual revenues were approximately a fifteenth of Persia’s. It needs to be remembered that Athens did not have an empire at the time of the Battle of Marathon, nor had it yet exploited the richest veins of the Laurion silver mines. An estimate of annual Athenian revenues in the years preceding Marathon should therefore be placed at under 250 talents, with only a percentage of that available for war. This was approximately a
fiftieth
of Persia’s revenues.