The Book of Ancient Bastards (4 page)

The Last King of Babylon
and His Army of Gods

(REIGNED 556–539 B.C.)

The king is mad.
—The Nabonidus Cylinder

So imagine you’re the king of Babylon (a city-state in what is now Iraq), and three years into your reign, you decide to chuck it all and take off for a desert oasis where you join a cult devoted to worshipping the moon. Further imagine that you appoint your party-boy son prince-regent in your place. (After all, you’re crazy, not stupid, you don’t want to actually give up anything!)

Pretty wild story, right? Well, you know what they say: fact is stranger than fiction.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the king in question: Nabonidus; the last king of Babylon, and his frat-boy son, Belshazzar.

Nabonidus’s origins are shadowy; we know nothing about his father, but his mother was a priestess of the Babylonian moon god Sin (proper name, not to be confused with the English word for “religious transgression”). We do know that he came to the throne as a usurper, deposing and murdering the previous king, a child named Labashi-Marduk.

Presumably prompted by his mother’s vocation, Nabonidus eventually went off to worship the moon, while his son stayed on to rule the kingdom. The Persians took the opportunity to make a run for the money and sent an army to Babylon. Nabonidus returned in time to see his son doing little to protect the city from the Persians. Nabonidus himself took command of the Babylonian army and went out to meet the Persians before they crossed his frontier.

He lost in battle, fled, and was later taken prisoner by the Persians. What happened next is uncertain. According to some sources, Nabonidus was burned alive by his Persian captors. Most sources agree that his life was spared and he was allowed to return to worshipping Sin.

And Belshazzar, the guy about whom the Bible itself remarks, “You have been judged and found wanting”? No one is really sure what happened to the guy after his dad surrendered.

Mysterious bastard!

Bastard Pottery

When Nabonidus realized he had a full-scale military crisis on his hands, he left his oasis temple and returned to defend Babylon against the invading Persians. And he didn’t go alone. He took an “army of gods” with him. In his mind, literally. To the Babylonians and many other peoples in the ancient Middle East (a notable exception being the Hebrews), gods were thought to inhabit the statues created in their honor. So when Nabonidus took every idol he could lay hands on with him to Babylon, he and all of his subjects believed that the gods were actually physically with him. It did him no good. The Persians kicked his ass, took the idols, and according to many sources put them back where they belonged. The Persian king, Cyrus the Great, boasted: “As for the gods of Sumer and Akkad which Nabonidus, to the wrath of the lord of the gods, brought to Babylon, at the command of Marduk, the great lord, I [Cyrus] caused them to dwell in peace in their sanctuaries, (in) pleasing dwellings. May all the gods I brought (back) to their sanctuaries plead daily before Bel and Nabu for the lengthening of my days, may they intercede favorably on my behalf.”

Will the Real Usurper Please Stand Up?

(CA. 550–486 B.C.)

What is right I love, and what is not right I hate.
—Darius I

The lines quoted above are part of a lengthy inscription carved into the side of a mountain in western Iran during the height of the Persian Empire. At first glance, they appear to be the words of a religious leader, or perhaps those of a noble and inspiring king.

They are neither.

These are the words of Darius I, Great King of Persia from 522 to 486 B.C., a usurper who likely had a hand in murdering his king and definitely had one in murdering that king’s younger brother.

When the Persian king, Cambyses, set out on an expedition to conquer Egypt, Darius accompanied him, serving as a member of his personal guard. When Cambyses’s younger brother rebelled back home, Cambyses left Egypt to return to Persia, dying under suspicious circumstances along the way. Darius was crowned king of Persia soon afterward, and led the dead Cambyses’s army to Persia, where he dealt with Cambyses’s rebellious brother by having him murdered.

Once he’d taken the throne, Darius proved initially unpopular. Several of his subject peoples rebelled. Babylon rose up twice. It took him years to consolidate his power.

Once he had done so, Darius found his western frontier attacked by the forces of Croesus, a wealthy king of Lydia (in what is now western Turkey). But in this case wealth did not equal power, and Croesus lost in battle to the Persians, and Lydia became a Persian province.

Having conquered Lydia, Darius inherited not just Croesus’s considerable wealth, he also inherited a conflict with the Greek cities of Ionia (a region in Asia Minor, now western Turkey). When the Persians conquered these Greeks, the Greeks bided their time for a bit, then eventually rose in revolt, killing their governor and driving the Persians out in 499 B.C.

Assisting these Greeks were their cousins across the Aegean Sea in the city-state of Athens. A furious King Darius ordered that one of his servants step up to remind him three times at every meal to “remember the Athenians.” The king began plotting revenge on the impudent foreigners who had dared attempt to thwart his will.

Nursing his grudge for the several years it took to put down the Ionian Revolt, Darius massed the largest army the world had ever seen (the Greek historian Herodotus claimed that it numbered 250,000 men, but that’s probably an exaggeration), loaded them onto boats captained and crewed by some of his Phoenician subjects, and set sail for Athens.

The famous result of all this grudge-holding came in 490 B.C. with the climactic battle of Marathon, where an army of Athenian heavy infantry, supported by soldiers from allied neighboring cities, smashed once and for all the myth of Persian military invincibility. And it was a fight almost completely of Darius the usurper’s making.

Bastard Spin-Doctor

After Cambyses’s death, Darius claimed that Cambyses had gone crazy in Egypt and died of natural causes on his way home to deal with his brother’s rebellion. Darius then went on to claim that the man who rose in revolt against Cambyses was an imposter—not his younger brother at all. Some trick that, fooling his own mother and the wives in his harem!

Never Arm Your Enemies

(REIGNED ca. 538–522 B.C.)

Without the knowledge of the Samians, Polycrates sent an envoy to Cambyses the son of Cyrus (who was gathering an army to attack Egypt) and asked him to send a messenger to him in Samos to ask for an armed force. When Cambyses heard this, he sent an envoy to the Samians and requested a naval force to join him in the war against Egypt. So Polycrates selected those of the citizens whom he most suspected of desiring to rise against him, and sent them away in 40 warships, charging Cambyses not to send them back.
—Herodotus, The Histories

In modern parlance, the word “tyrant” carries a negative connotation—it describes someone who rules in a cruel and arbitrary manner. But to the ancient Greeks who coined the word, it simply stood for someone who had seized power (usually by military force) and ruled alone, without necessarily being evil.

One of the ancient Greek tyrants who helped give the word its negative connotation was Polycrates, tyrant of the Greek island of Samos. While today he might be called an “enlightened despot” with a taste for literature, the arts, and great feats of engineering, Polycrates did terrible things to both his immediate family members and his subjects during his sixteen-year rule.

Seizing power along with his two brothers in 538 B.C., Polycrates initially split the island of Samos with the two of them. Within weeks, he had murdered one brother and exiled the other, taking total control for himself.

He enforced his rule with an army of Greek mercenaries. In order to pay this army, Polycrates levied a tax on any ship that passed within a few miles of Samos, which boasted a central location on the Aegean. Merchant ships either paid up to the captains of his fleet of triremes or had their cargoes seized.

Unlike many Greeks on the mainland, Polycrates maintained friendly relations with the Persian governors of the provinces that bordered his island. So when the Persian king Cambyses requested ships to support his invasion of Egypt, Polycrates sent him the ones mentioned in the quote that opens this chapter.

Once those sent by him to their certain deaths began to suspect they’d been betrayed, they turned around and tried to take Samos by force. When that didn’t work, they set about preying on Samos’s sea lanes as pirates.

As for Polycrates, his story doesn’t end well. Believing that Polycrates had made a secret deal with the Egyptians, the Persian governor at Sardis had him seized and crucified.

Gruesome end for a gruesome bastard.

Engineering Bastard

Fascinated with how things worked, Polycrates harnessed the resources of his island home of Samos to produce the first trireme—a warship with three decks of oars, which allowed it to travel faster than standard biremes (which had only two rowing decks) and which made the ram it sported on its prow a whole lot more effective and devastating as a weapon. After the success of the first trireme, he had an entire fleet of them built. He also oversaw the construction of a great underground tunnel that acted as a pipeline, bringing a reliable supply of fresh water to the island from the mainland.