hearts—as lesser peoples did not—that without such a principle, the
universe would be undone and lost to perpetual night. This was why,
so they believed, when Ahura Mazda, the greatest of all the gods, had
summoned creation into being at the beginning of time, he had en-
gendered Arta, who was Truth, to give form and order to the cosmos.
Nevertheless, chaos had never ceased to threaten the world with ruin,
for just as fire cannot burn without the accompaniment of smoke,
so Arta, the Persians knew, was inevitably shadowed by Drauga, the
Lie. These two principles—the one embodying perfection, the other
falsehood —were coiled, so the Persians believed, in a conflict that was
ultimately as ancient as time. What should responsible mortals do,
then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie,
Light against Darkness, lest the universe itself totter and fall?
This was a question that, in 522, would prove to have implications far
beyond the dimensions of priestcraft or theodicy, for it had come to af-
fect the very future of the Persian monarchy itself. First Cambyses, the
eldest son and heir of Cyrus and the king who had finally succeeded in
conquering Egypt, died in mysterious circumstances on the highroad
From Persia with Love 17
back from the Nile. Then, in the early autumn, his brother, the new
king, Bardiya, was ambushed and hacked down amid the mountains of
western Iran. Taking his place on the blood-spattered throne was his
assassin, a man blatantly guilty of usurpation, and yet Darius I, with
a display of nerve so breathtaking that it served to mark him out as a
politician of quite spectacular creativity and ruthlessness, claimed that
it was Bardiya and not himself who had been the fraud, the fake, the
liar.10 Everything he had done, he claimed, everything he had achieved,
was due to the favor of Ahura Mazda. “He bore me aid, the other gods
too, because I was not faithless, I was not a follower of the Lie, I was
not false in my actions.”11 Darius was protesting too much, of course,
but that was ultimately because, as a regicide, he had very little choice.
For all that he was quick to claim a close kinship to the house of Cyrus,
and to bundle the sisters of Cambyses and Bardiya into his marriage
bed, his dynastic claim to the throne was in reality so tenuous that he
could hardly rely on it to justify his coup. Other legitimization had to
be concocted, and fast. This was why, far more than Cyrus or his sons
had ever felt the need to do, Darius insisted on his role as the chosen
one of Ahura Mazda: as the standard-bearer of the Truth.
This seamless identification of his own rule with that of a univer-
sal god was to prove a development full of moment for the future.
Usurpers had been claiming divine sanction for their actions since time
immemorial, but never one such as Ahura Mazda could provide. Tram-
pling down his enemies, Darius was not only securing his own rule but
also, and with fateful consequences, setting his empire on a potent new
footing. At Bisitun, a mountain that rose a few miles from the scene of
Bardiya’s assassination, the new king commanded his achievements to
be recorded on the rock face directly above the main road; the result-
ing inscription was to prove a radical and telling departure from the
norms of Near Eastern self-promotion. When the Assyrian kings had
portrayed themselves subduing their foes, they had done so in the most
extravagant and blood-bespattered detail, amid the charging of shock
troops, the advance of siege engines, the trudging into exile of the de-
feated. No such specifics were recorded at Bisitun. What mattered to
Darius was not the battle but that the battle had been won, not the
bloodshed but that the blood had dried, and a new and universal era
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of peace had dawned. History, so Darius was proclaiming, had in effect
been brought to a close. The Persians’ empire was both its end and its
summation, for what else could a dominion be that contained within it
all the limits of the horizon, if not the bulwark of a truly cosmic order?
Such a monarchy, now that the new king had succeeded in redeeming
it from the Lie, might surely be expected to endure for all eternity: infi-
nite, unshakable, the watchtower of the Truth.
Here, in Darius’s vision of empire as a fusion of cosmic, moral, and
political order, was a formulation that was destined to prove stunningly
fruitful. Significant as the bloody practicalities of imperial rule were to
the new king, so also was their shadow, his sacral vision of a universal
state, one in which al his vast dominion had been imposed for the con-
quered’s good. The covenant embodied by Persian rule was henceforth
to be made clear in every manifestation of royal power, whether palaces
or progresses or plans for making war: harmony in exchange for humil-
ity, protection for abasement, the blessings of a new world order for obe-
dience. This was, of course, in comparison to the propaganda of Assyria
a prescription notably lacking in a relish for slaughter, but it did serve
very effectively to justify global conquest without limit. After al , if it was
the destiny of the King of Kings to bring peace to a bleeding world, then
what were those who defied him to be ranked as if not the agents of
anarchy and darkness, of an axis of evil? Tools of Drauga, they menaced
not merely Persian power but also the cosmic order that it mirrored.
No wonder, then, that it had ended up an invincible conviction of im-
perial propagandists that there was no stronghold of Drauga so remote
that it might not ultimately be purged and redeemed. The world needed
to be made safe for the Truth. Such was the Persian mission. In 518, gaz-
ing eastward, Darius duly dispatched a naval squadron to reconnoiter the
mysterious lands along the Indus. Invasion swiftly fol owed; the Punjab
was subdued; a tribute of gold dust, elephants, and similar wonders was
imposed. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the empire, in the distant
west, a Persian battle fleet had begun to cruise the waters of the Aegean.
In 517 Samos was conquered and annexed.12 Neighboring islands, anx-
ious to forestal the Persian fleet, began to contemplate making a formal
submission to the ambassadors of the Great King. Westward as wel as
eastward, it seemed, the course of empire was taking its way.
From Persia with Love 19
And yet, unsuspected though it might be back in the cockpit of Per-
sian power, there was trouble brewing in the region—and not merely
in Ionia but beyond the Aegean as well, in Greece. Here, in a land that
to the sophisticated agents of a global monarchy could hardly help but
appear an impoverished backwater, the quarrelsome and chauvinist
character of Ionian public life found itself reflected in a whole mul-
titude of fractious polities. Greece itself was little more than a geo-
graphic expression: not a country at all but a patchwork of city-states.
True, the Greeks regarded themselves as a single people, united by
language, religion, and custo
m; but as in Ionia, so in the motherland:
what the various cities often seemed to have most in common was
an addiction to fighting one another. Nevertheless, the same restless
propensity for pushing at boundaries that in Ionia was feeding into a
momentous intellectual revolution had not been without effect on the
states of the mainland as well. Unlike the peoples of the Near East,
the Greeks lacked viable models of bureaucracy or centralization to
draw on. In their search for eunomia—“good governance”—they were,
in a sense, on their own. Racked by chronic social tensions, they were
nevertheless not entirely oblivious to the freedom that this gave them:
to experiment, to innovate, to forge their own distinctive paths. “Better
a tiny city perched on a rock,” it might even be argued, “so long as it
is well governed, than all the splendours of foolish Nineveh.”13 Ludi-
crous though such a claim would undoubtedly have appeared to the
Persians, those masters of a global empire, there were many Greeks
who were fiercely proud of their small-town eccentricities. Over the
years, repeated political and social upheaval had served to set many
cities on paths that were distinctively their own. To a degree unappreci-
ated by the Persians, who were naturally dismissive of lesser breeds in
a way that only the representatives of a superpower can be, the Greeks
represented a potentially ominous roadblock on the path to continued
expansion, for they were not a people to be broken easily to the Great
King’s formula for conquest. They were, rather, a people who, by the
standards of the Near Eastern norm, were unsettlingly different.
And some were more different than others. In Sparta, for instance,
the dominant city of the Peloponnese, a people who had once been no-
torious for the toxic quality of their class hatreds had metamorphosed
20 Holland
into homoioi: those who were the same. Merciless and universal disci-
pline had served to teach every Spartan, from the moment of his birth,
that conformity was all. The citizen would grow up to assume his place
in society, the warrior would assume his place in a line of battle. There
he would be obliged to remain for the length of his life, “his feet set
firmly apart, biting on his lip, taking a stand against his foe,”14 with only
death to redeem him from his duty. No longer, as they had originally
done, did the Spartans rank as predators on their own kind, rich upon
poor; rather, they had become hunters in a single deadly pack. For their
near neighbors in particular, the consequences of this transformation
had been devastating. The citizens of one state, Messenia, had been
reduced to a condition of brutalized serfdom, those of others in the
Peloponnese to one of political subordination. Across the entire Greek
world the Spartans had won for themselves a reputation as the fore-
most warriors in the world. Some Greeks, rather than face the wolf-
lords of the Peloponnese on the field of battle, had been known to run
away in sheer terror.
And now, in a city that had once been a byword for parochialism
and backwardness, an even more far-reaching revolution was stirring.
Athens was potentially Sparta’s only rival as the dominant power in
Greece, for the city was the mistress of a hinterland, Attica, that was by
Greek standards immense and that, unlike Sparta, had not been seized
from other Greeks. Nevertheless, throughout Athens’s history, the city
had consistently punched below its weight, and by the mid-sixth cen-
tury the Athenian people had grown ever more resentful of their own
impotence. Crisis had bred reform, reform had bred crisis. Here were
the birth pangs, so it was to prove, of a radical and startling new or-
der. For the aristocracy, even as it continued to negotiate the swirl of
its own endless rivalries, had found itself increasingly conscious of a
new and unsettling cross-current, as ambitious power players began to
make play with the support of the demos, “the people.” In 546, one of
these, a successful general by the name of Pisistratus, had succeeded
in establishing himself as the city’s undisputed strongman—a “tyrant.”
The word, to the Greeks, did not remotely have the bloodstained con-
notations that it has for us, for a tyrannos, almost by definition, had
to have the popular touch. Without it, he could hardly hope to cling
From Persia with Love 21
to power for long, and so it was that Pisistratus and his heirs would
consistently aim to dazzle the demos with swagger and imposing public
works. Yet increasingly, the Athenians wanted more, and there were
certain aristocrats, rivals of the Pisistratids, who found themselves so
resentful of their own exclusion from the rule of their city that they
were prepared to take the ultimate sanction and see power handed over
to the people. In 507 revolution broke out. Hippias, the son of Pisistra-
tus, was sent into exile. Isonomia—“equality,” equality before the law,
equality of participation in the running of the state—was installed as
the Athenian ideal. A great and noble experiment was embarked upon:
a state in which, for the first time in Attic history, a citizen could feel
himself both engaged and in control, a state, perhaps, that might in-
deed be worth fighting for.
And that, for the upper-class sponsors of their city’s revolution, was
precisely the point. Such men were no giddy visionaries but rather
hard-nosed pragmatists whose goal, quite simply, was to profit as Athe-
nian aristocrats by making their city strong. They had calculated that
a people no longer divided among themselves might at last be able to
present a united front to their neighbors, by taking their place not in
the train of some great clan lord but as the defenders of an ideal, of iso-
nomia, of Athens itself. The first year of what later generations would
term the dêmokratia served to demonstrate that such expectations
were not farfetched. As would happen millennia later, in response to
the French, the Russian, and the Iranian revolutions, attempts by rival
powers to snuff out the alarming new cuckoo in the nest were com-
prehensively, indeed triumphantly, rebuffed. Goethe’s famous words on
the battle of Valmy might have been applied with no less justice to the
first great victories of the first great democratic state: “From here and
today there begins a new epoch in the history of the world.”15
As in Persia, then, so in Attica: something restless, dangerous, and
novel had come into being. Between a global monarchy and a tiny city
that prided itself on its people’s autochthony there might have ap-
peared few correspondences, and yet, as events were to prove, both
were now possessed of an ideology that could have no possible tol-
erance of the other. Perhaps, had democracy remained confined to
Athens, a clash might conceivably have been avoided, but revolutions
22 Holland
invariably prove exportable. In 499, a series of uprisings across Ionia
succeeded in toppling the tyrants who for decades had been se
rving the
Persians in the role of quislings; democracies were established in their
place; one year later, an Athenian task force joined the rebels in put-
ting Sardis to the torch. The Athenians themselves, however, dispirited
by their failure to capture the city’s acropolis and by their accidental
incineration of a celebrated temple, had no sooner burned the Lydian
capital than they were scampering back to Attica, gripped by nerves
and regret. Yet panicky though they undoubtedly felt at the notion that
the far-seeing and pitiless eye of the King of Kings might soon be fixed
upon them, they would surely have been even more so had they only
appreciated the precise nature of the beast whose tail they had opted
so cavalierly to tweak, for nothing could have been more calculated
to rouse the fury of the most powerful man on the planet. To Darius,
of course, it went without saying that the Ionian insurgency needed
urgently to be suppressed, and that the terrorist state beyond the Ae-
gean had to be neutralized if the northwestern flank of the empire
were ever to be rendered fully secure. The longer the punishment of
Athens was delayed, the greater was the risk that similar nests of rebels
might proliferate throughout the mountainous and inaccessible wilds
of Greece—a nightmare prospect for any Persian strategist. Geopoli-
tics, however, was far from the only prompting at the back of the Great
King’s mind. Stronghold of terrorists Athens might be, but it had also
stood revealed as a peculiarly viperous stronghold of the Lie. It was for
the good of the cosmos, then, as well as for the future stability of Ionia
that Darius began to contemplate carrying his divinely appointed mis-
sion, his war on terror, to Attica. Staging post in a necessary new phase
of imperial expansion and a blow struck against the demonic foes of
Ahura Mazda: the burning of Athens promised to be both.
Yet if the Athenians had little understanding of the motives and ide-
als of the superpower that was now ranged against them, the Persians
in turn were fatally ignorant of what they faced in the democracy. To
the strategists entrusted with the suppression of the Ionian revolt,
there seemed nothing exceptional about the new form of government;
if anything, it seemed only to have intensified the factionalism that for
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