Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (4 page)

doubt as to which among these four great powers ranked as
primus inter

pares
. Over the wreckage of Assyrian power the kings of Babylon had

soon succeeded in raising their own far-spreading dominion. Upon their

lesser neighbors they had imposed “an iron yoke of servitude.”2 Typical

of the fate meted out to those who presumed to stand on their indepen-

dence had been the crushing, in 586, of the valiant but foolhardy little

kingdom of Judah. Two years after staging a revolt against Babylonian

rule, the Judaeans had been left to mourn their temerity amid the wreck-

age of al that had previously served to define them. Jerusalem and its

Temple had been reduced to a pile of blackened ruins, its king had been

obliged to watch the murder of his sons before himself being blinded,

and the Judaean elite had been hauled off into exile. There, weeping by

the rivers of Babylon, it had seemed to one of their number, a prophet

by the name of Ezekiel, that the shadows of Sheol were closing in on

the entire global order. Not a great power, but it had been dispatched to

the underworld by the king of Babylon: “al of them slain, fal en by the

sword, who spread terror in the land of the living.”3

But now Babylonian supremacy itself was a dead thing. The fall

of the great city appeared to contemporaries a veritable earthquake.

What rendered it all the more seismic, however, was the identity of its

conqueror: for if Babylon could lay claim to a history that stretched

back to the very beginnings of time, when the gods had first begun to

build cities from the world’s primal mud, then the Persians, by contrast,

12 Holland

appeared to have come almost from nowhere. Two decades earlier,

when Cyrus had ascended to the throne, his kingdom had been not

merely inconsequential but politically subordinate, for he had ranked

as the vassal of the king of Media. In a world dominated by four great

powers, there was little scope, it might have been thought, for any out-

sider to make his way. Cyrus, however, over the course of his reign

had demonstrated the very opposite. The muscle-bound character of

the global order confronting him had been turned dazzlingly to his

own advantage. Decapitate an empire, he had demonstrated, and all

its provinces might be seized as collateral. First to go had been his erst-

while overlord, the king of Media: toppled in 550. Four years later it

was the turn of Lydia. By 539, when Babylon too was added to Cyrus’s

bag of scalps, he was the master of a dominion that stretched from the

Aegean to the Hindu Kush, the largest agglomeration of territory the

world had ever seen. Well might Cyrus have described his own rule in

totalizing, indeed nakedly cosmic terms: he was the King of Kings, the

Great King, “the King of the Universe.”4

How had he pulled it off ? It goes without saying, of course, that the

building of an empire is rarely achieved without the spilling of a great

deal of blood. The Persians, as tough and unyielding as the mountains

of their homeland and raised from childhood to an awesome degree

of military proficiency, were formidable warriors. Just like the Assyr-

ians and the Babylonians before them, they had brought to the Near

East “the tearing down of walls, the tumult of cavalry charges and the

overthrow of cities.”5 During the invasion of Babylonia, for instance,

all the characteristics of Cyrus’s generalship had been on devastating

display: the ability to marshal “numbers as immeasurable as the waters

of a river,”6 to crush all those who thought to oppose him, and to move

with an utterly disconcerting speed. Certainly, the sword of such a con-

queror did not sleep easily in its scabbard. A decade after his trium-

phant entry into the capital of the world the by now aged Cyrus was

still in his saddle, leading his horsemen ever onward. Various stories

are told of his end, but most agree that he died in Central Asia, far

beyond the bounds of any previous Near Eastern empire. Even though

it is evident that his corpse was transported back with full honors to

Persia, for burial in a splendid tomb, numerous eerie stories gave a

From Persia with Love 13

different account. According to one of them, for instance, the queen

of the tribe that had killed Cyrus ordered his corpse to be decapitated,

then dropped the severed head into a blood-filled wineskin, so that his

thirst for slaughter might be glutted at last.7 Such a tale powerfully sug-

gests the terror that the great conqueror was capable of inspiring in his

adversaries, for vampires, demons hungry for human flesh, had long

haunted the nightmares of the peoples of the Near East.

Yet a very different tradition also served to keep alive the memory

of Cyrus the Great. He had not merely conquered his enemies, he had

assiduously wooed them as well. Brutal though he could certainly be in

the cause of securing an enemy’s speedy surrender, his preference, by

and large, had been to live up to the irenic claims of his own brilliantly

crafted propaganda. His mastery once established over the corpses of

shattered armies, further bloodshed had tended to be kept to the bar-

est minimum. If the Babylonians chose to attribute his conquest of

their city to the will of Marduk, then Cyrus was perfectly content to

play along. Invading Iraq, he had made sure to proclaim himself the

favorite of his enemies’ greatest divinity; toppling its native dynasty, he

had posed as the heir of its most venerable traditions. Not only in Baby-

lon but in cities and kingdoms across his vast empire he had presented

himself as a model of righteousness and his rule as payback from his

various subjects’ gods. The very peoples he had conquered had duly

scrabbled to take him at his own estimation and to hail him as their

own. With a brilliant and calculating subtlety, Cyrus had succeeded in

demonstrating to his heirs that mercilessness and repression, the key-

notes of all previous imperialisms in the region, might be blended with

a no less imperious show of graciousness, emancipation, and patron-

age. War on its own, Cyrus’s career appeared to imply, could take an

empire only so far. Guarantee peace and order to the dutifully submis-

sive, however, and the world itself might prove the limit.

So it was, for instance, that Cyrus, even as he flattered the Babylonians

with the attentions he paid to Marduk, had not ignored the yearnings of

the city’s deportees—exiles such as the Judaeans. The Persian high com-

mand had recognized in these homesick captives a resource of great po-

tential. Judaea was the pivot between the Fertile Crescent and the as yet

unconquered kingdom of Egypt; a land of such strategic significance

14 Holland

might certainly be considered worth a smal investment. Not only had

Cyrus permitted the Judaeans to return to the weed-covered rubble of

their homeland but funds had even been made available for the rebuild-

ing in Jerusalem of their obliterated Temple. The exiles themselves had

responded with undiluted enthusiasm and gratitude. Whereas Ezekiel

had portrayed Babylon as merely the agent of Yahweh, the Judaeans’

prickly and boastful god, the prophet who wrote under the name of Isa-

iah cast the Persian king in an altogether more bril iant light. “Thus says

the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped,

to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open

doors before him, that gates may not be closed: ‘I wil go before you and

level the mountains, I wil break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut

asunder the bars of iron, I wil give you the treasures of darkness and

the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the

god of Israel, who cal you by your name.’ ”8

Cyrus himself, had he ever been made aware of this extraordinary

brag, would surely have marked it down as what it so clearly was: a

signal triumph for his policy of governing through willing collabora-

tors. While the Persians’ tolerance of foreigners and their peculiar cus-

toms in no way implied respect, their genius as world conquerors was

to indulge the instinctive longing of any slave to believe himself the

favorite of his master, and to turn it to their own advantage. What

greater source of self-contentment for a peripheral and insignificant

subject people such as the Judaeans, after all, than to imagine them-

selves graced by a special relationship with the far-off King of Kings?

Cyrus and his successors had grasped a bleak yet strategically mo-

mentous truth: the traditions that define a community, that afford it a

sense of self-worth and a yearning for independence, can also, if sensi-

tively exploited by a conqueror, serve to reconcile that community to

its very subordination. This maxim, applied by the Persians across the

vast range of all their many provinces, was one that underpinned their

entire philosophy of empire. No ruling class anywhere, they liked to

think, could not somehow be seduced into submission.

True, this did presuppose that the ruling classes themselves could

all be trusted to stay in power. Fortunately, in regimes such as were to

be found across most of the Near East, with their priesthoods, their

From Persia with Love 15

bureaucracies, and their cadres of the superrich, it took more than a

change of overlord to upset the smooth functioning of the elites. Even

at the very limits of the empire, where the gravitational pull of the

center was naturally at its weakest, there might often be considerable

enthusiasm for the undoubted fruits of the Pax Persica. In Sardis, for

instance, the capital of Lydia, and so far distant from Persia that it was

only a few days’ journey from the “bitter sea,” as the Persians termed

the Aegean, initial teething problems had not prevented collaboration

from soon becoming an accepted way of life. Lydian functionaries still

dutifully ran the province for their masters, just as they had done un-

der their native kings. Their language, their customs, their gods—all

were scrupulously tolerated. Even their taxes, though certainly high,

were not set so high as to bleed them dry. Indeed, of one Lydian, a

mine owner by the name of Pythius, it would be claimed that only the

Great King outranked him on the empire’s rich list. Men such as this, to

whom Persian rule had opened up unprecedented opportunities, cer-

tainly had not the remotest interest in agitating for liberty.

Nevertheless, not everything was quiet on the western front. Beyond

Sardis, dotted along the Aegean coastline, were the gleaming cities of

a people known to the Persians as the Yauna. Originally from Greece,

the Ionians, as they called themselves, remained quite as determinedly

and defiantly Greek as any of their countrymen back in the mother-

land across the Aegean—which meant that, to their masters, they rep-

resented both an enigma and a challenge. All the Yauna ever did, it

seemed to the Persians, was quarrel. Even when the various cities were

not squabbling with one another they were likely to be embroiled in

civil strife. This interminable feuding, which had contributed enor-

mously to the initial ease of their conquest back in the time of Cyrus,

also made the Ionians a uniquely wearisome people to rule. Where

civilized peoples—the Babylonians, the Lydians, even the Judaeans—

had their functionaries and priests, the Greeks seemed to have only

treacherous and ever-splintering factions.

As a result, despite their genius for psychological profiling, the

Persians found it a chal enge to get a handle on their Ionian subjects.

Whereas in Babylon or Sardis they could raise their administration on

the bedrock provided by an efficient and dutiful bureaucracy, in Ionia

16 Holland

they had to base it instead on their own talent for intrigue and espionage.

The chal enge for any Persian governor was to pick winners among the

various Ionian power players, back them until they had outgrown their

usefulness, and then dispose of them with a minimum of fuss. Such a

policy, however, could hardly help but be a treacherous one. By favor-

ing one faction over another, the Persians were inevitably themselves

sucked into the swirl of backstabbing and class warfare that constituted

Ionian politics. A frustrating and disconcerting experience, and one that

appeared to lend credence to a theory much favored by certain Ioni-

ans, wise men known as “philosophers,” to whom it appeared simply

an observable fact of nature that everything in the universe was conflict

and tension and change. “Al things are constituted from fire,” as one of

them put it, “and al things wil melt back into fire.”9

Here, to the Ionians’ masters, was a truly shocking notion. Fire, in

the opinion of the Persians, was the manifestation not of a ceaseless

flux but rather of the very opposite, of the immanence of an unchang-