The First Clash

by Jim Lacey

  The Persians brought a vigorous leader and a population eager for the good things available in the settled areas of Mesopotamia—things that they could obtain only by war and conquest. These conquests began with Cyrus’s defeat of Croesus and the destruction of Lydian power, but many more were to follow.

  Chapter 2

  LOOKING TO THE WEST

  Lydia’s collapse brought the growing Persian Empire into contact with the Greek city-states of Ionia for the first time. Prior to his invasion of Lydia, Cyrus had sent messengers to each of these cities, asking them to support his cause by revolting against Lydian rule. But only the city of Miletus had seen which way the winds were blowing and revolted accordingly. The rest of Ionia had grown rich off the trading opportunities that flowed from being part of the Lydian Empire and from the leadership of the commercially enlightened Croesus. Reluctant to put their trading profits at risk, and sure that the powerful Lydian army would repulse the invaders, most of Ionia focused on business and did its best to ignore the war.

  Now that the Lydian Empire was in ruins, its former possessions passed into Cyrus’s hands. Frightened that Cyrus would interpret their neutrality as opposition, the Ionians hastened to send messengers to Sardis to plead for Cyrus to accept their subjugation on the same terms that Croesus had allowed them. Cyrus, still angry at their refusal to help him when he needed it most, refused their entreaties. Furthermore, although it is not mentioned in the contemporary records, one can assume that Cyrus’s encounter with the Greek heavy infantry in the Battle of Pteria must have left an impression on him. He may have considered it unwise to leave such a potentially powerful military force in his rear when he turned his army against Babylon. Informed that they would suffer Cyrus’s wrath, the Ionian cities began to fortify themselves and to prepare for war. As part of their preparations, they sent an envoy to plead for Spartan help. The Spartans, who were always reluctant to send their soldiers very far from home, refused to send an army to the Ionians’ aid but did send an emissary to meet with Cyrus.

  When the Spartan envoy was ushered in for an audience with Cyrus in Sardis, he reportedly told the Persian king that he should desist from attacking any of the Greek cities in Ionia. If Cyrus ignored their warning, he would incur Sparta’s displeasure. Incredulous, Cyrus turned to the Greeks in his service and asked, “Who were the Spartans, and how many of them were there?” Upon being given the answer, Cyrus dismissively told the Spartan envoy, “I have never yet feared any men who had a place in the center of the city set aside for meeting together, swearing false oaths, and cheating one another.” Continuing, Cyrus said that if he lived long enough, he would give Sparta more to concern itself with than the affairs of Ionia.1 This is the first example in history of the East–West cultural divide that in many ways still exists today, for Cyrus was demonstrating his contempt for the emerging democratic and market-oriented values of Western society. Although Cyrus may have been speaking out of ignorance, his response and the fact that there were Greek advisers at his court provide sufficient evidence that Cyrus was already interested in learning as much as possible about the Greeks. Moreover, his comments reveal that what he had learned about Greek politics and society so far had failed to impress him. In fact, he apparently held Athenian and Spartan methods in contempt. And so it was that the first attempt of European Greeks to involve themselves with affairs in Asia failed to make much of an impression.

  Whatever Cyrus’s intentions for the Ionian cities, he did not immediately move against them. In fact, he did the exact opposite. After spending a few months in Sardis, presumably consolidating his hold on the non-Ionian portions of the former Lydian Empire, Cyrus took the bulk of his army and returned to his capital, Ecbatana. Herodotus reports that he returned to the east in order to prepare for wars of conquest against Babylon, the Bactrians, the Saka, and the Egyptians. Nevertheless, it is just as likely that there were unresolved issues back in recently conquered Media that required his attention.

  Because Herodotus’s narrative takes Cyrus directly from his return to Ecbatana to his assault on Babylon, many histories of the period do the same thing. Unfortunately, existing sources are silent on Cyrus’s activities during the seven years between these events, leaving historians to make their own deductions. The Great King’s intent after defeating Croesus was to march directly on the Ionian cities, both to subdue them and to punish them for their insolence. That he instead marched east with the bulk of his army and left Lydia only partially consolidated, with a number of Greek cities still in open revolt, likely means that news of unrest in the east had reached him. Moreover, the fact that he did not personally command the force sent to crush a rebellion that broke out in Sardis after his departure is a further indication that a serious threat in the east demanded his full attention.

  Whether it was halting another invasion of the steppe tribes or the need to further consolidate his rule of the newly acquired Median kingdom has to be left to speculation. What is known is that a large amount of territory in the east that was never controlled by the Medes was under Persian rule by the time Cyrus’s successor, Darius, assumed the throne, approximately a decade after Cyrus’s death.2 As it is unlikely that Darius or his predecessor, Cyrus’s son and immediate successor, Cambyses II, had time to undertake operations in the east, it must have been Cyrus who won these new conquests.3

  While Cyrus dealt with the east, his general, Mazares, after crushing a revolt in Sardis, marched south to conquer the Ionian cities. He first laid waste to the region around the Maender River and after capturing Priene had the inhabitants carried off as slaves.

  Soon after this campaign, Mazares died and Harpagos assumed command of the Persian army. Harpagos, the former commander of Astyages’ Median army, was a professional soldier well versed in siege warfare, with which the Greeks had little familiarity. As the Ionian Greeks proved unable to coordinate their activities and were reluctant to meet the Persians in open battle, they made the mistake of electing to hide behind their walls, secure in the knowledge that their fleets could keep them supplied with necessities. As city walls had always proven impregnable to Greek hoplites, who never trained or equipped themselves for siege warfare, and as the Persians did not yet possess a navy, this must have seemed a sound strategy. However, against a general, and an army, that had learned the mechanics of siege warfare from the masters of the trade, the Assyrians, it was a disastrous course.

  As Herodotus relates:

  Now that Cyrus had appointed him general, Harpagos went to Ionia, where he captured the cities there by investing them with earthworks. For whenever he had forced the people of a city to shut themselves up within their walls, he would then pile mounds of earth up against the walls as he laid siege to the city.4

  The first city Harpagos besieged was Phocaea, the populace of which reacted to their inevitable defeat by loading the entire population onto ships and sailing away. Unfortunately, the rest of their tale was not a happy one. The refugees were expelled from Chios, the first island where they attempted to settle. They then determined to sail to Corsica and establish a new city there. However, before departing the eastern Mediterranean, they sailed back to Phocaea and massacred the Persian garrison that Harpagos had left in the vacated city. To escape Persian retribution, they then sailed to the western Mediterranean, where they managed to antagonize Carthage, the growing power of the region. Carthage wasted no time in declaring war and soon defeated the Phocaeans in a naval battle off Corsica. Afterward, the Phocaean survivors were taken ashore and stoned to death by the Carthaginians.

  The population of Teos also picked up stakes and sailed away, but the remainder of the Ionian cities either surrendered or were quickly subdued by Harpagos. According to Herodotus:

  All of the Ionians who stayed behind faced the challenge of resisting Harpagos. These men fought courageously for their country. But they suffered defeat and conquest and then stayed in their cities, submitting to Persian rule.5

  Given his Greek audience, Hero
dotus could not say plainly that the Ionians cravenly surrendered on the approach of the Persian army. But given the pace of the Persian conquest—Ionia apparently fell in one campaigning season—it does not appear that the Persians conducted any great number of prolonged sieges. Herodotus states that Harpagos now marched south, into Caria and Lycia, with Ionian soldiers as part of his army. It would thus appear that whatever hostilities had occurred between Ionia and Persia had not led to prolonged animosity.

  The Carians did no better than the Ionians, and with thinly veiled disgust, Herodotus relates:

  Now, the Carians did not distinguish themselves in opposing Harpagos; indeed they submitted to him without performing any glorious deeds, and the same can be said, too, of all the Hellenes who lived in that region of Asia.6

  It was left to the Lycians to give the Persians a taste of what a war between civilizations might be like. The Phocaeans, by sailing back to their home city to murder the Persian garrison, gave the Persians a preview of how bitter Greek resistance to their rule might become, but it was the Lycians’ commitment to victory or death that should have awakened the Persians to the fact that there were some peoples who would never submit to their rule. As Harpagos and his polyglot army marched into Lycia, he was attacked on the Plain of Xanthos. After a long, hard fight, the Lycians were defeated and retreated behind their city walls. Herodotus relates:

  Once trapped in their city, they gathered together their women, children, possessions, and servants on the acropolis and set fire to it, burning up everything. Then, having sworn powerful oaths, the men went forth again to do battle against Harpagos. They all died fighting.

  The city of Caunus followed the Lycian example, leaving Harpagos with nothing but a wasteland to occupy in southern Asia (modern southwestern Turkey).

  Greek had met Persian in the field, and the Persians had conquered. From this encounter, the Persians learned a number of lessons. First, it was apparently impossible for the Greeks to overcome their petty rivalries and coordinate their resistance. From this, the Persians came to believe that the best policy against the Greeks was to divide and conquer. Furthermore, a policy that combined threats of overwhelming military force with bribes was often sufficient to get most Greek cities to do their bidding. Finally, while the heavily armored Greek infantryman (hoplite) was individually a formidable soldier, the Ionian Greeks did not train for concerted action on the battlefield. Unfortunately for the prospects of further Persian conquests, this last lesson did not apply to the Greek mainland, where hoplites trained exclusively for concerted battlefield action.

  During almost two generations of Lydian sovereignty, the martial ardor and capabilities of the Ionian cities had atrophied. For the warlike Persians, the rapid and complete collapse of Ionian resistance demonstrated that the Greeks were a feeble race when it came to war. It was left to a later generation of battle-hardened Spartan and Athenian hoplites to prove otherwise.

  Chapter 3

  EMPIRE AT LAST

  With Lydia overthrown, the Ionians subdued, and his eastern borders temporarily secure, Cyrus turned his full attention toward mighty Babylon.1 This was the great prize, the strongest and wealthiest city in Mesopotamia, the glory of which even in Cyrus’s time reached back deep into the mists of distant ages. After the fall of the Assyrian Empire, Babylon’s rulers, Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, had launched their armies in an almost unending series of wars designed to re-create the Babylonian Empire on a scale greater than that of Hammurabi. It was during these wars that Jerusalem was conquered and a significant portion of the Jewish population was shipped east in what has become known to us as the “Babylonian Captivity.”

  This transshipment of large portions of a conquered people was a favorite tactic of the Assyrians, who used it not only as an instrument of terror, but also to break the national will of newly conquered peoples. Babylon apparently adopted the policy from their previous overlords for the same reason. Unfortunately for their rulers it was to have tragic consequences, as these transported populations constituted an angry fifth column, which Cyrus was to use to his advantage.

  Even as Babylon’s kings sent their armies to conquer lands lost during Assyria’s ascendancy, they remained wary of the restless power of the Medes. To counter that threat, they spared no expense in building the Median Wall. This ancient Maginot Line stretched across the entire expanse between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and secured the empire’s northern frontier. Unfortunately, the wall likely fed an artificial feeling of security that allowed Babylon’s king, Nabonidus, to neglect the rising danger of the combined Median-Persian force, led by an avaricious military genius.

  While Cyrus was securing his eastern frontier, Nabonidus spent much of his reign away from Babylon, in Tayma. The excuse has been offered that this oasis was a key nexus of the major Arabian trade routes and as such was the locus of Babylonian economic power. However, this is still the kind of responsibility best handled by a trusted garrison commander coupled with a few customs agents. In reality, Nabonidus was busy reconstructing on a magnificent scale the Temple of Harran, where his mother was a priestess. This temple was dedicated to the moon god, Sin, and it is clear that Nabonidus placed this god far above the traditional Babylonian gods, particularly Marduk. By placing Sin, formerly a relatively minor deity, at the head of the Babylonian pantheon of gods, Nabonidus was running a great political risk, as he was deeply angering Babylon’s powerful priestly caste. These priests regarded the king’s continuing absences from Marduk’s great new year festival (Akitu) as a direct insult to themselves and to their god. As they believed the king’s participation in this festival was the surest guarantee of good harvests and continued prosperity, his absence made a deep impression on the Babylonian people. When these resentments were coupled with the rising dissatisfaction among the merchant classes, weary of tax exactions used to pay for unceasing conflicts and the cost of the Harranian temple, Babylon began to seethe with discontent.

  Cyrus was aware of these difficulties and used them to his advantage. Although the evidence is fragmentary, it appears that he began active operations along the Babylonian frontier as early as 541 BC. These attacks may have represented probing for weak points or raids designed to test the effectiveness and loyalty of the Babylonian army. However, it is more likely that they formed part of a coordinated propaganda campaign, which Cyrus began a full year before he was actually prepared to wage all-out war. Each attack provided further proof to the inhabitants of the frontier provinces that Nabonidus was either powerless to protect them or uninterested in doing so. Simultaneously, Cyrus’s agents began reaching out to the discontented groups within Babylon. The Book of Isaiah captures the effectiveness of these activities:

  Thus saith the Lord unto Cyrus, my anointed, whose right hand I have grasped, that the nations shall obey him, and I will break the Strength of Kings: I will open gates before thee, and cities shall not be shut. I will go before thee and level mountains; I will shatter gates of bronze, and smash bars of iron, and will give the hidden treasures of darkness.… 2

  In fact, the Old Testament mentions Cyrus twenty-three times, always with lavish praise. Undoubtedly, Cyrus’s propaganda was equally successful with other transplanted populations and discontented groups. What we do know is that the commander of Babylon’s northern army and Gutium province, Gobryas (also referred to in many histories as Ugbaru), saw which way the tide was running and transferred his loyalty to Cyrus.

  By 539 BC all was ready, and Cyrus launched his armies south. At the city of Opis, the Persians, joined by Gobryas and his troops, met the Babylonians and defeated them. Almost immediately, the people of the region rose in revolt against Babylon. But they rose a bit too early and were apparently slaughtered in great numbers by Nabonidus’s retreating forces.3 Cyrus crossed the Euphrates at Opis, south of the massive Median Wall, which was taken in flank and rear and rendered useless.4 Just as Cyrus made good use of Harpagos after he deserted Astyages, he also put Gobryas to good use. H
aving split his army in two, Cyrus took command of one portion himself and marched along the rear of the Median Wall, apparently in pursuit of Nabonidus and the remnants of the Babylonian army. After a two-week pursuit, Cyrus appeared before the walls of Sippar, on the east bank of the Euphrates, and the city threw open its gates. Nabonidus, who much to his surprise had found himself barred from entering Sippar, was still unable to meet the Persians in battle on the open plain, so he fled to Babylon.

  Gobryas, in command of the other portion of the Persian army, had marched directly on Babylon. Upon arriving well ahead of Nabonidus, he also found the city gates open and marched into a welcoming Babylon without a fight.5 When Nabonidus arrived from Sippar, the city had already fallen, and he was taken captive. The chronicles are silent as to his fate.6

  Cyrus’s careful preparations had paid off: The whole of Babylon’s empire had fallen to him after just one battle. Everywhere he was greeted as a liberator, and he apparently worked assiduously to keep his pre-war promises and to maintain his popularity. The Nabonidus Chronicle relates that Gobryas kept his forces in hand and placed a special guard around the Babylonian temples to prevent looting.7 Two weeks after Gobryas captured the city, Cyrus arrived (October 29). According to the Babylonian Chronicles, his path was lined with green twigs and a “state of peace was imposed upon the city.” The chronicle continues: “Cyrus sent greeting to all Babylon. Gobryas, his governor, installed subgovernors throughout Babylon.” Once again, Cyrus wisely placed a trusted Babylonian face on his rule, at least through the critical transition period. Unfortunately, Gobryas died soon after, but by that time the important work was done and Cyrus’s place on the Babylonian throne was secure. As the Nabonidus verse relates: “To the inhabitants of Babylon a joyful heart is now given. They are like prisoners when the prisons are opened. Liberty is restored to those who were surrounded by oppression. All rejoice to look upon him as king!”8 Cyrus immediately reversed Nabonidus’s placement of the moon god, Sin, ahead of the foremost Babylonian god, Marduk. He also ended the former ruler’s other unpopular religious policies, which were responsible for much of the city’s discontent. More famously, he released the Jews from their Babylonian Captivity and ordered his governors in Syria to supply funds to help them rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. Although there is no evidence to the fact, this was probably a policy he extended to other transplanted populations as well. Cyrus tarried in Babylon for several months to consolidate his rule before returning to his capital at Ecbatana. Before leaving, he had inscribed on a stone cylinder: