Access to it was ferociously restricted. No one could set foot upon the king’s roads without a pass, a “viyataka.” Since every travel document was issued either directly from Persepolis or by a satrap’s office, mere possession of one spelt prestige. Indeed, it was in the “viyataka” that those twin manias of Persian imperialism, for shuffling forms and for rigid social stratification, most perfectly met and fused. There was no better way for an official to discover his precise place in the imperial pecking order than to arrive at a posting station for the night, hand over his viyataka to the manager, and count out the rations that it brought him in return. If he were one of the greatest men of the kingdom—one of Darius’ six coconspirators, say—then he and his retinue might receive up to a hundred quarts of wine. If he ranked at the bottom of the food chain, then he might find himself, humiliatingly, on a lower wine ration than a particularly favored horse. So satisfying did the Persians find the viyataka as a basis for ordering the world that not only officials and soldiers but women and children, and even birds, found themselves definitively fixed within the imperial scheme of things by ration chits. A duck, for instance, if it were being fattened for the royal table, could look forward to downing a quart of wine every day. A young girl, by comparison, might have to get by on one a week.
Men, women, children, horses, waterfowclass="underline" none could elude the meticulous prescriptions of Darius’ bureaucrats. It was not only within the satrapal courts that the Great King had his “eyes,” forever watching, scanning, tracking. Every transaction carried out within a posting station required a form to be stamped by both manager and recipient, and then forwarded to a central archive in Persepolis. So tightly controlled were the itineraries of travelers on the royal roads that those who dawdled on the way and failed to arrive at a given destination on an allotted date could expect to forfeit their rations for the night. Those who traveled on the roads without a viyataka at all would not merely go hungry but very quickly be hunted down and killed. Even mail, if it were sent without royal or satrapal approval, would be destroyed. Only the most cunning could hope to evade the vigilance of the highway patrols. Histiaeus, for instance, back in 499 BC, desperate to communicate with his nephew in far-off Miletus about his plans for revolt, had shaved the head of his most trustworthy slave, tattooed a message on the gleaming scalp, and patiently waited for the hair to grow back. “Then, once the slave had a full head again, Histiaeus sent him to Miletus with orders to do nothing except tell Aristagoras to shave him, and inspect what stood revealed.”28 Such was the inventiveness required of those without a viyataka.
How, then, were enemies of the Great King ever to compete with all Darius’ prodigious resources of intelligence? Not very well, was the answer. The Ionian rebels, for instance, pinned on the outermost rim of Asia, had only ever had the haziest notions of Persian troop movements and intentions—a failure set into stark relief by the startling ability of Darius, 1500 miles from the theater of war, to track events almost as though he were on the spot. It was he, for instance, in the early weeks of 494 BC, who had personally drawn up plans for the final offensive that a few months later would result in the great Persian victory at Lade and the sacking of Miletus. Darius’ information on that occasion had been particularly precise and detailed, for his leading military specialist on Greek affairs, a general by the name of Datis, had traveled directly by express service from Ionia to keep him abreast of the latest news from the front. Nothing could better have indicated the supreme importance attached to intelligence by the Great King than that a man of Datis’ stature should have made the long journey to Persepolis in person. Datis—like Harpagus, the original conqueror of Ionia—was a Mede; but he was also, in the competitive world of ration chits and security passes, quite as weighty a player as any Persian grandee. His daily wine ration was seventy quarts: a drinking allowance at which a sister of the King would not have turned up her nose. Due reward for an exceptional military ability and record.
True, the Persian intelligence services did not always have things their own way; nor was Darius’ eye for talent necessarily infallible. One of the worst debacles had occurred a couple of years before Datis’ arrival in Persepolis, when the Great King, in a startling display of misjudgment, had sent Histiaeus back to Sardis as his personal agent. Appalled at having to welcome the slippery Milesian to his headquarters but reluctant to offend his brother, Artaphernes had pointedly revealed to Histiaeus the full scale of his suspicions, hoping thereby to intimidate his unwelcome guest into openly going over to the enemy. “‘Let’s not beat about the bush,’” the satrap had menaced. “‘Aristagoras may have worn the shoe, but you were the one who made it.’”29 Histiaeus, turning pale, had got the message, but flight from Sardis that very night had hardly ended his capacity for mischief. Fishing in the murky waters of espionage circles with consummate skill, revealing himself first to one side then to the other as a double agent, he had sought to turn Artaphernes’ more underhand methods back against their perpetrator, daring even to foment rebellion within the satrapal court itself. Greeks, it appeared, were not the only people who could be set against one another: the crisis briefly appeared so threatening that Artaphernes, struggling frantically to maintain his authority, had been forced into a wholesale purge of his countrymen. Such ruthlessness, fortunately for the satrap, had been just sufficient to prevent a disintegration of the Persian provincial command—and, of course, from that moment on, Histiaeus had been a marked man. No episode in the entire quashing of the Ionians’ revolt can have given Artaphernes greater pleasure than the capture, a year after the victory at Lade, of his brother’s treacherous former favorite. Hauled to Sardis in chains, the irrepressible Histiaeus had coolly insisted that he be returned to the Great King—a demand which Artaphernes had duly met by impaling him, and then sending his severed head, pickled and packed in salt, by express post to Susa.
The execution of Histiaeus, and the parallel escape of Miltiades to Athens, had marked the effective end of Ionian resistance. Not of Artaphernes’ labors, however. Having won the war, it was now his equally arduous task to win the peace. Ionia had been trampled underfoot by six summers of savage warfare. Fields lay uncultivated, ships rotted idly in stagnant harbors, roads had vanished beneath grass, villages and whole cities stood abandoned in blackened ruin. As the Ionians starved, so, inevitably, they began to scrap desperately over the few fields not lost to nettles and brambles; and, bled of nearly all their energy and manpower though they were, they reached for their weapons again. Artaphernes, having none of it, stepped in at once. Representatives of the various Ionian states were summoned to Sardis and briskly ordered to swear an oath of perpetual amity. Henceforward, all border disputes were to be settled not by the armed squabbling that was traditional among the Greeks but by arbitration, backed up directly by the sanction of Persian force. As even the Ionians themselves acknowledged, this was a development “not entirely to their disadvantage.”30 To protect his subjects from their own worst instincts, to promote stability, to facilitate a regular flow of tribute: this, as it had always been, remained the satrap’s default policy. Terror having served its purpose, Artaphernes could now return with a sigh of relief to the winning of his subjects’ hearts and minds. Having been made all too aware of the Ionians’ distaste for tyranny, he was even prepared to indulge in certain circumstances their preference for democracies. After all, just as long as the king’s peace was kept, it scarcely mattered how the Greeks chose to rule themselves.