It was true that there lay still further lands beyond the Indus, as yet independent of Persian rule; but even these, though not formally constituted into a province, might still be blessed by the favor of the king. All that petitioners had to do was to deliver to him a tribute of earth and water, and then, in return, they might be warmed by the light of his attention. Solemn and awe-inspiring ritual accompanied the presentation of these gifts. Supplicants, swearing their oath of loyalty to Persia, would have to do so prostrate on the scattered soil of their own land. In this way the Great King symbolized that the works of nature, as well as man, had been absorbed into his order—the better for everyone. The supplicants themselves, withdrawing from the dreadful presence of the king, could have no possible doubts as to the significance of the gesture they had performed. They had taken a step from which there could be no retreat. They had become a part, however humble, of the empire of the world.
It did not take the armies of the Great King, then, to expand the limits of Persian power. Westward as well as eastward they continued their advance; over sea as well as land. Around the time of the conquest of the Punjab, Otanes, Darius’ one-time rival for the throne, had been cruising the eastern waters of the Aegean. The island of Samos had been formally absorbed into the empire; neighboring islands, as they looked to forestall the Persian fleet, began to contemplate making gifts of earth and water to the ambassadors of the King. Here, for Darius, was a development of much promise. With the rich plains of the Indus pacified, his attentions could now be turned to the opposite end of his dominion. Two continents had already submitted to his supremacy—why should not a third?
The gaze of the Great King, inexorably, began to fix itself on the West.
3
SPARTA
“Who Are the Spartans?”
Back in the early years of the Persian rise to greatness, while Cyrus was still in Lydia, he had found himself unexpectedly visited by a delegation from across the Aegean Sea. The ambassadors were Greek, but quite different from the Greeks of Asia, whose cities, prosperous and tempting, Cyrus was plotting at that very moment to crush and make his own. The strangers wore their hair long; they sported distinctive red cloaks; they spoke not with the subtlety and sense of propriety that conventionally marked an ambassador’s language, but brusquely, bluntly, rudely. The message they gave the greatest king on earth was simple: Cyrus should leave the cities of the Ionians well alone; if he did not, then he would have to answer to those who had sent them—the Spartans. Evidently, the strangers felt that the mere mention of this name was sufficient to chill the blood, for they added nothing more. Cyrus, turning from them, was obliged to summon a nearby Ionian attendant. “Tell me,” he demanded, all bemusement, “who are the Spartans?”1
A startling question for any Greek to have to answer. How could an Asiatic not have heard of the Spartans? Nothing could better have illustrated the remote and alien quality of the Persians than the fact that they were ignorant of history’s most notorious woman. Helen of Sparta, hundreds of years before, had brought ruin to Asia as well as Greece. Her abduction from the home of her husband, King Menelaus, to the fabled city of Troy had made all the world bleed. For ten long years, the heroes of East and West had butchered each other in the dust of the Trojan plain. Only with the annihilation of what, in the opinion of the Greeks, had been Asia’s greatest city, the slaughter of its men and the enslavement of its women, had the terrible war at last been brought to an end. To the descendants of the victors, there had been, in the sheer scale of the destruction, something sobering and fearfuclass="underline" after all, “an immense expeditionary force had been assembled, Asia invaded and Trojan power wiped out, merely for the sake of a single Spartan woman.”2 No wonder that many Greeks, and particularly those who actually lived on the margins of Asia, imagined the whole vastness of the East to be sullen still with resentment, brooding on ancient wrongs. Perched precariously as they were on the edge of the great continent, the Ionians had good cause to fear the vengeful shadows of the Trojan dead.
To the Spartans themselves, however, the memory of their city’s most famous daughter was precious. Menelaus, it was said, searching for Helen amid the final massacre of the Trojans, had been planning to add her to the piles of corpses, a fitting punishment for all the slaughter she had caused—but when at last he had found his wife, rather than kill her, he had instead dropped his sword, struck dumb by the perfection of her naked breasts, and swept her up into his arms. Both had returned to Sparta, and their tomb could still be seen on a promontory south of the city, its immense stone blocks raised on earth as red as Menelaus’ hair. Helen herself, “that radiance of women,”3 had been altogether more aureate than her husband: not only had she been a blonde, but even her spindle had been fashioned out of gold. Had Cyrus known that the Spartans worshipped at the shrine of such a woman, sensual and pleasure-loving, he would no doubt have been confirmed in his contempt for their ridiculous pretensions. Certainly, their ambassadors, long-haired and scarlet-cloaked as they were, would have appeared apt devotees of Helen; for Cyrus would have had sufficient opportunity to learn that the wearing of long hair, among the Greeks, was generally regarded as evidence of effeminacy, and the use of expensive vermilion as a mark of wild extravagance. The Persians, unsurprisingly, chose to scorn the Spartan threats. Surely they could have little to fear from such a luxury-loving race?
Appearances, of course, could be deceptive; but it was true that once, in the earliest years of their history, the Spartans had indeed been notorious for their materialism and greed. “Acquisitiveness will be their ruin” had been a common prediction.4 Sparta, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, had served as a model of everything that other Greeks hoped to avoid: her elite was brutal and rapacious; its land-hunger was obscene; the impoverishment of the average citizen, leeched of his patrimony and often even of his freedom, was something shocking. Appalled foreign analysts, observing the toxic quality of Sparta’s class hatreds, had no hesitation in judging her “the worst-governed state in Greece.”5 And this at a time when competition was hardly lacking; for everywhere in the Greek world, by the seventh century BC, the gap between rich and poor, the few and the many, had begun to widen alarmingly, so that the ideal of good governance, “eunomia” as it was called, seemed a distant dream, and all was instability.
Social convulsions were not unknown elsewhere in the world, as the clan chiefs of Media or Persia could have vouched. Among the Greeks, however, the yearning for eunomia had a peculiar urgency. In their search for it, they were, in a sense, alone. There was certainly no equivalent in their poor and backward land of the millennia-old traditions of the monarchies of the East. Unlike the clansmen of the Zagros, they were far removed from the wellsprings of civilization. With no ready models of bureaucracy or centralization to hand, the Greek world had early on fragmented into a multitude of competing city-states, each with its distinctive brand of constitutional crisis. Racked by chronic social tensions though they were, however, the Greeks were not entirely oblivious to the freedom that provincialism gave them: to experiment, innovate and forge their own distinctive paths. “Better a small city perched on a rock,” it could be argued, “so long as it is well governed, than all the splendors of idiotic Nineveh.”6 Certainly, compared to the rugged landscape across which Greek cities were dotted, the bland alluvium of Mesopotamia might indeed appear just a little effete. In Greece, the mountains which hemmed in the lowlands, cutting many a state off from state, to say nothing of the reach of the broader world beyond, afforded a rough-hewn autonomy as well as isolation.