Or so, at any rate, it pleased the Athenians to assume.
5
SINGEING THE KING OF
PERSIA’S BEARD
The Great Game
Artaphernes had been well rewarded by his royal brother for the blow that struck down Bardiya. Sardis was by any reckoning a great and fitting prize. The capital of the west, it ranked, in the opinion of the Persians, as one of the four corners of their dominion, a city so fabulously wealthy that even its rivers ran with gold. Croesus, when not bribing the Delphic oracle or being stung by the Alcmaeonids, had used the proceeds to mint the world’s first golden coinage, an innovation that had helped him become, if anything, even more obscenely rich than he had been before. Forty years on, and with Croesus long since dead, his Persian conquerors could still enjoy the fruits of his lavish spending.
Even those familiar with Babylon would have found it hard to sniff at Sardis. Showcase of the city was a magnificent temple to Cybele, a mother goddess as ancient as the hills, and capable of inspiring such extremes of devotion in her worshippers that they might end up dancing on a mountainside, writhing in orgies, or even, should the rituals be going with a particular swing, hacking off their testicles. Beyond the temple, rising in rings like those of Ecbatana, loomed the celebrated walls of Sardis. The innermost one, circling the acropolis, was so immense that Croesus had been led into the fatal error of assuming it impregnable. The acropolis itself, a red shard of mountain jagging up from the river plain, was even more intimidating, topped as it was along one of its spurs by what had once been the royal palace, and was now the brooding stronghold of Persian power. From there, gazing down at the sprawl of the lower town, or far westward over vast expanses of wheat and barley, and the road that led onward for three days to “the bitter sea,” Artaphernes might well have felt himself the equal of any king.
With one exception, of course. Master of the west he might be, but Artaphernes—“faithful Artaphernes”—knew better than to forget for even a moment that he was merely his brother’s vassal, his servant, his “bandaka.” Although, to instill in the locals a due sense of Persian majesty, he had modeled his court on Darius’ own, he ruled it not as a king himself but rather as the “Guardian of the King’s Power”—as a satrap.* Darius, having won his throne amid an inferno of rebellions, had no intention of permitting overmighty subjects ever again to endanger either his or Persia’s greatness. The merest command from his secretariat, then, and a satrap would be obliged to jump. For a provincial capital, the arrival of a royal letter was a major and often alarming event. Certain satraps, presented with a missive from the Great King, might go so far as to prostrate themselves before it and humbly kiss the floor.
Excess of zeal—or simple common sense? No one could ever tell who might be in the shadows, keeping watch, taking notes. Some claimed that the king appointed spies specifically to tour his empire, all-seeing officials known simply as his “eyes.” Others suspected an even more unsettling truth:
The king’s subjects, after all, would be put on their guard by any inspector whom they knew to be his “eye.” What really happens is quite the opposite—for the King will listen to anyone who claims to have seen or heard anything untoward. Hence the saying that he has a thousand eyes and a thousand ears.1
Here was paranoia on an almost global scale. No matter where within the inconceivable vastness of the empire his subjects might be, Darius could be imagined as always watching them, as overhearing all they said.
It was not enough for a servant, however, even one as favored as Artaphernes, to owe his duty simply to the king. Master accountant and insatiable for tribute though Darius was, yet he demanded from his satraps something more than revenue alone. “By the favour of Ahura Mazda,” he reminded those who served him, “I am the kind of man who is a friend to the right, who frowns upon the wrong, who has no wish to see the weak oppressed by the strong.”2 Darius spoke, as was his privilege, as the fount of law for all the world, but he was also closely reflecting how the Persians saw themselves. No people had a greater faith in their own virtue. So stern were the demands of justice, the Persians liked to believe, that they might outface even those of class and breeding. A peasant, his upright nature spotted by the unblinking eye of the Great King, might be promoted to the judicial bench; once installed there, he might find himself seated upon strips of drying skin, the hide of his corrupt predecessor, justly flayed alive. This was the kind of anecdote, both edifying and gruesome, that never failed to delight the Persians. Naturally—for it helped to confirm all their dearest preconceptions. There was no other people, they could reflect contentedly, with a sense of justice, an aptitude for rule that could remotely match their own. What good fortune for lesser nations, then, that they should all have ended up the slaves of the Persian king!
A justification for world conquest, of course, that the Persian King himself had already made his own. Upon Darius’ satraps, however, out on the empire’s fringes, far from the royal presence, it imposed particular demands. The obligation to provide justice for the same provincials whom they were simultaneously fleecing was not straightforward. Where it might easily lead could be discovered by a visit to the royal mint at Sardis, where coinage, just as it had been in Croesus’ day, continued to be struck, stamped now with the image of Darius as an archer, bending back the royal bow of power, the warrior champion of truth, of justice, of Arta. Then, chinking, glinting brightly, the gold would be crated and carted off to Susa.
Perhaps a certain brutal hypocrisy was merely the mark of any successful satrap. Nor did it necessarily make the trumpeting of the “pax Persica” a total sham. Even though he was sure to keep a regular supply of tribute wagons rumbling out of Sardis, Artaphernes did not look to bleed his province dry. That would have been to risk the goose that was laying the Great King his splendid golden eggs. As under Croesus, so under Artaphernes, Lydia continued to boast a class of native super-rich. One of these, a mine owner by the name of Pythius, was so successful in husbanding his assets that it was said only Darius lay ahead of him on the empire’s rich list. Lydians like Pythius, to whom Persian rule had opened up global horizons, had not the remotest interest in agitating for independence. Artaphernes, quite as subtle as his brother, encouraged such collaboration wherever and however he could—and not merely among the rich. Lydian functionaries still dutifully ran the province for their masters, just as they had done under Croesus. Their language, their customs, their gods, all were scrupulously tolerated. Only in temples particularly associated with Croesus and his dynasty might symbols of the old regime be pulled down or adapted into fire altars—and even then no attempt was made to force the worship of Ahura Mazda down unwilling Lydian throats. Indeed, if anything, it was the conquerors who adopted the natives’ customs. Perhaps the most startling evidence of this could be seen eight miles to the north of Sardis, a wonder visible from Artaphernes’ palace: eerie mounds of stone and turf looming over the cornfields like waves whipped up from a golden swell. Three of these were the graves of famous Lydian kings; but around them, filling the necropolis, rose newer, smaller tombs, the resting places of both wealthy natives and their Persian masters.3 Even in the dust and silence of a cemetery, then, Artaphernes’ Sardis was an unabashedly multicultural place.
Not that the Persians’ tolerance of foreigners and their peculiar habits in any way implied respect. Just as Cyrus, conquering Babylon, had felt free to claim the favor of a whole multitude of gods precisely because he believed in none of them, so too did Artaphernes, by appropriating the Lydians’ traditions and twisting them to his own ends, display his appreciation of a bleak and baneful truth: the traditions that define a people, that they cling to, that they love, can also, if cunningly exploited by a conqueror, serve to enslave them. This maxim, applied by the Persians across the vast range of all their many satrapies, was one that underpinned their whole philosophy of empire. No elite anywhere, they liked to think, but it might somehow be seduced into submission.