Not that he lingered long to enjoy the acclaim. Urgent business awaited him. Taking up the reins of Darius’ command, Xerxes was soon leaving his still festive capital for Egypt. Descending on the rebels, he briskly demonstrated that he was indeed, just as his father had hoped he would prove to be, a chip off the old block: not only was the revolt summarily crushed, but Xerxes, showing that same eye for constructive nepotism that his father had always practiced to such advantage, installed there as satrap one of his numerous brothers. The Great King himself, even more militantly than Darius would have done, regarded this as a triumph not merely over mortal adversaries but over the far more sinister forces of cosmic evil. That countries where daivas were worshipped should be attacked and brought low; that their sanctuaries should be obliterated; that territories once given over to the Lie should be reconsecrated to the cause of Truth: this, throughout Xerxes’ reign, was to be the guiding manifesto of the Persian people. Just in case there should be any doubt, inscriptions set up at Persepolis proclaimed it sternly to the world, reminding Xerxes’ courtiers that there was no path of righteousness save for that set out by their king: “The man who respects the Law given by Ahura Mazda, who worships Ahura Mazda and Arta with the reverence that they are both due, he will find happiness in life, and become one with the blessed after death.”12 King of Kings though he was, “King of Persia, King of the Lands,” Xerxes never forgot that all his unexampled power had been entrusted to him for a holy and momentous purpose. The obligations laid upon his broad shoulders were hardly of the kind that might be shrugged off casually. Those who had chosen him to bear their heavy weight could not be disappointed. “Darius had other sons,” Xerxes freely confessed, “but Darius my father made me the greatest one after himself.” And this, in turn, had been done as the expression of an even higher purpose: “For all was done in accordance with the wishes of Ahura Mazda.”13
Certainly, once Egypt had been successfully pacified, there could be no question of neglecting the other great business left unfinished by Darius’ death. No sooner had Xerxes returned to Persia than any number of different interest groups, clamoring for the Great King’s attention, began urging him to set in motion a new expedition, to push deeper into Europe, to punish Athens, to conquer Greece. Most insistent of all in the royal ear was Xerxes’ cousin, Mardonius, long since recovered from the wound he had received in Thrace, and spoiling for a return to the Aegean, which he regarded as very much his personal sphere of expertise. Nor was he the only glory hunter: one brother might have been installed in the pharaoh’s palace, but there were any number of the Great King’s other relatives eager to prove their mettle, to revel in the glamour of high command. After all, conquering far-distant “anairya” was what being a Persian was all about.
Turning to his intelligence chiefs for information on the western front, Xerxes was gratified to be informed that all stood fair. Yes, Athens and Sparta remained implacably opposed to his ambitions, but the aristocracy in other areas of Greece—including, not least, the vital territory of Thessaly, just to the north of Boeotia and Thebes—would, so the intelligence chiefs reported, welcome any Persian invasion with open arms. Once Thessaly had fallen, Thebes herself and a host of other cities further south were bound to collaborate. Indeed, even Sparta and Athens might not be utterly lost causes—for Demaratus, comfortably ensconced at Susa, and the Pisistratids, now well into their third decade of life on the Persian payroll, could guarantee the support of a few clients still. The admirably proactive sons of Hippias, indeed, ventured to offer the Great King the support of the heavens themselves—“describing to Xerxes how it was fore-ordained that a native of Persia should bridge the Hellespont, and expounding in detail on the triumphs that were bound to follow.”14 Source of these confident assertions was none other than Onomacritus, that same charlatan who had once been an intimate of the tyrants back in Athens, until falling out with them over accusations that he had been doctoring prophecies. Perhaps he was not the most reliable source of information—but the Pisistratids had an exile’s desperation to see their homeland again and had returned desperately, pathetically, to trusting his every word.
It is doubtful that the Persian high command had quite the same level of confidence in Onomacritus, but that hardly mattered. Already, within months of Xerxes’ return from Egypt, the drive to war had become unstoppable. Those few doves opposed to the invasion found themselves powerless to halt it. If they did speak out, they were labeled cowards. Their warnings, however, despite impatient snorts from the war party, could not so easily be swept aside. That the Athenians, as they had proved at Marathon, were no pushover; that the provisioning of any task force was bound to prove onerous even for the Persians’ practiced bureaucrats; that the mountainous terrain of Greece was notoriously inhospitable: concerns such as these could hardly be dismissed as defeatist scaremongering. Yet even the perils of the venture, for all that they might inspire the occasional spasm of hesitation in Xerxes, served in the end only to stiffen the royal resolve. To have shrunk from risk, to have confessed that Persian power might be susceptible to overstretch, to have abandoned Athens and the continent beyond her forever to the Lie, such would have been an abject betrayal of Darius and, even more unforgivably, of the great Lord Mazda. Yes, the invasion was ripe with hazard—but then again, if it had not been, it would hardly have been a challenge worthy of the attentions of the King of Kings.
How best to meet it? Deep within the innermost sanctum of Persepolis—beyond the looming entrance halls carved in the form of colossal bulls with human heads and the wings of eagles, beyond the brightly painted courtyards manned by officious eunuchs, beyond even the thousand bodyguards stationed on perpetual duty outside their royal master’s door, their long robes gem-studded, the butts of their spears adorned with delicate apples of gold—Xerxes’ most trusted advisers assembled before the royal throne to offer their opinions. Although they were sequestered within the nerve center of Persian power, what was spoken there would in due course come to be shrewdly guessed at, thanks to rumor and to the progress of events.15 At issue, of course, once it had been resolved that the war should go ahead, was a single question: what kind of task force should be marshaled for the invasion and conquest of Greece?
It seems that Mardonius urged that only elite fighters—Persians themselves, Medes, Saka and East Iranians—be conscripted. Such a strike force, he argued, would be able to move like lightning, outpace any foe, descend upon the lumbering infantrymen of the enemy with the same murderous speed that had always proved so lethal to the Greeks of Ionia.16 Yet this strategy, although modeled on glorious precedent, did have a major, indeed, an insuperable drawback. Times had changed: how could an army drawn from so few satrapies possibly be considered sufficient for the dignity of the man who was to command it? What might have served Cyrus in the days of his mountain banditry was hardly adequate for his grandson, who ruled the world. Xerxes, when he conquered the West, would do so not merely as the King of Persia, but as king of all the dominions that lay beyond it, too. The people of even the obscurest frontier had a sacred duty to pay him the tribute of their sons. And in their obedience would be reflected the peerless glory of their master, the King of Kings.