by Matt Waters
Darius’ Second Aegean Campaign and the Battle of Marathon
After the revolt, Darius dispatched a new military commander to Ionia, his son-in-law Mardonius. Mardonius was the son of Gobryas, one of the Seven who overthrew the magus impostor, and was married to Darius’ daughter Artozostre. Herodotus relays that Mardonius overthrew all the tyrants in Ionia and replaced them with democracies (6.43). This statement has caused much consternation among historians, who find it difficult to fathom. At minimum, it is an exaggeration, and other evidence contradicts Herodotus’ blanket statement – for example, the tyrant of Samos, Aeaces, the son of Syloson, continued to rule. For the Persians on the other hand, the form of local government under their rule was less important than that government’s conscientious delivery of tribute and adherence to Persian policies. The Persians were nothing if not pragmatic and mindful of local circumstances in their approach to governing the provinces. Persian projects on their northwestern frontier were stymied for seven years by the Ionian Revolt. Once finally quelled, Mardonius worked to finish what Megabazus had started. Whether the imperial enterprise of expansion was sufficient impetus in its own right, or whether the Ionian revolt and its consequences had changed the strategic calculus in that region, is open to debate. Despite Herodotus’ dramatic portrayal of Darius obsessed with revenge, Persian ideology did require a response to those who participated in the revolt.
Herodotus claims that Mardonius’ expedition in the northern Aegean had Athens and Eretria as its main targets, but this is suspect. Mardonius’ campaign should probably be viewed as the reassertion of Persian power in Thrace and Macedonia. A sequel was being planned: a direct naval strike across the Aegean that would encompass a multitude of islands (the Cyclades) and lead through to Eretria and Athens (Map 5.1). According to Herodotus, Darius first sent out heralds demanding earth and water, as well as messengers to those Ionian cities already beholden to him ordering that they prepare warships and transports for the campaign. All the islanders agreed to submit earth and water, as did many on the Greek mainland, but Herodotus does not name names (6.48–49). In any event, the Persians met resistance on some of the islands – suggesting that Herodotus exaggerated or that the tokens were given in bad faith.
The Persian forces gathered at a traditional mustering spot, the Aleian plain in Cilicia, east of Tarsus in the northeastern Mediterranean. Artaphernes, the son of Artaphernes the satrap of Sardis (and thus Darius’ nephew) and Datis, a high-ranking Mede (perhaps the same as the Datiya mentioned above), commanded the expedition. The fleet sailed to Ionia and, from Samos, directly across the Aegean through the Cyclades Islands (6.94–95). Naxos was successfully taken and plundered, likewise Carystus. On the other hand, the Persians made offerings at Delos – sacred to the Greek gods Apollo and Artemis – and repatriated a statue of Apollo there. We see again the Persian strategy of outright conquest coupled with select support to win over opposition. The campaign continued on to Eretria where, after fierce fighting, two prominent individuals betrayed the city and opened the gates to the Persians. A later source notes that these two were given grants of land, a typical reward for service to the King. The city was plundered, the inhabitants captured and deported, and the temples burned in retaliation for the burning of Sardis at the start of the Ionian revolt. The captives were deported to Susa and resettled near there (Hdt. 6.119).
Map 5.1 Persian Campaigns in the Aegean during the Reigns of Darius I and Xerxes. After Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 2, 1985, map 13.
The next stop was Athens, or, more specifically, the plain of Marathon, some 26 miles northeast of the city. This region was chosen so that the Persian cavalry might be used to maximum advantage. The deposed tyrant of Athens, Hippias, who had fled to Persia previously, accompanied the expedition. He provided inside information to the Persians and, had the expedition been successful, would presumably have been reinstalled as tyrant, beholden to the King. But here the Persians fell short. Herodotus relays at great length the battle and its preliminaries. The Athenians, weak in cavalry but with a strong infantry contingent, waited out the Persians and attacked as they were preparing to depart. A fierce battle ensued, as the Persians extricated their forces from the plain and prepared to sail around the Attic peninsula to attack the city itself on the west side of it. But the Athenians covered the 26 mile march – thus the origins of the modern race, the marathon – just in time and their position prevented another Persian landing. The Persian fleet remained off Phaleron (Athens’ harbor at the time) for an unspecified amount of time before it departed.
We have no Persian sources to offer insight on the Battle of Marathon, so Persian goals and perspective must be extrapolated from the Greek accounts. For the Persians it was a minor setback at the end of an otherwise successful campaign. Conversely, it is hard to overstate the importance that this battle had for the Athenian mindset and civic pride, but that is best appreciated elsewhere (see the entries under AppendixD). Until then Persian forces had been viewed as objects of terror (Hdt. 6.112). By Herodotus’ time roughly sixty years later, after the rise in Athenian hegemony in the Greek world thereafter, the Battle of Marathon had become lionized – and canonized – as the first stand against barbarian oppression on the Greek mainland. Despite claims in some modern works, it is unlikely that the Persians were planning – at least with this particular expedition – a wider domination of all Greece. If Athens and the other Greek city-states had folded like cards, there is no doubt the Persians would have welcomed the opportunity to establish mechanisms of lasting control – they already had much experience with this. But the campaign of 490 looks much more like a punitive expedition than an all-out invasion.
6 Mechanics of Empire
Kings, Queens, and the Royal Court
The power and importance of the King is a recurring theme throughout the book, and the particular ideology that evolved from and shaped the King’s status will be discussed in a separate section (pp. 147–151). The King of kings was the sun around whom all else revolved. From his physical stature to his dress and presentation, all was carefully managed and controlled to highlight his august position. The King’s robe and accoutrements marked him from others, mainly by a special type of crown, a tiara called in Greek the kidaris. Most of our descriptive evidence comes from Greek sources, though the archaeological record – especially the sculptures from Persepolis – is of course of critical importance. Quintus Curtius Rufus (3.3.17–19) describes the King’s elaborate attire as including a purple tunic interwoven with white, a gold-embroidered cloak, and a gold belt from which he often wore a special dagger, called in Greek an akinakes. This dagger was one of Elamite-style, suggesting a carryover from the preceding period; remains of two scabbards have been found in Central Asia. Garb and accessories would differ, of course, depending on the occasion and whatever function (ceremonial, military, cultic) in which the King was engaged at that time. Some elements of the King’s wardrobe were not unique to him, such as the akinakes (Figure 6.1), the wearing of which signaled royal favor. The King and members of the nobility also frequently wore false beards and are portrayed with such in the iconography, a tradition that was very old. The King’s beard, though, was generally longer and more elaborate than others.
Figure 6.1 Dagger (akinakes) Worn by the King’s Weapon-Bearer on the Treasury Relief (and see Figure 7.1), Persepolis. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
The court apparatus of the King’s nobles, advisers, guardians, scribes, and a multitude of others, were all cogs in the imperial machine. They all worked toward the same goal, and all were dependent on each other for success. The King’s centrality was all-important – among other ways this is seen in battle, when the safety of the person of the King overrode other considerations – but nevertheless the King was dependent on an elite class of nobles for his power and successful government. But this dependence worked both ways: members of the nobility were absolutely dependent upon royal favor for their positions
and prerogatives, and such could be removed. Herodotus tells the story of one of Darius’ helpers against the magus, Intaphernes, who overstepped his authority in dispensing punishment to some of Darius’ guards when they prevented Intaphernes from seeing the King (3.118–119). Darius viewed this act as a threat to his position, and Intraphernes was put to death, along with several members of his family.
Stunning displays of the disbursement of royal favor are found in descriptions of the royal table, elaborate feasts that involved veritable armies of attendants and entertainers as well as enormous quantities of food and drink. Numerous Greek and Roman sources refer to the phenomena, and Elamite and Babylonian documentation allude to the requisition of foodstuffs and other supplies.1 Gifts distributed, marks of royal favor, might include grants of land; special clothing, precious metalwork, or jewelry (markers of elite status); an akinakes; or any number of other objects, even bequests and favors. In the Intaphernes anecdote just mentioned, Herodotus specifically notes that Intaphernes used his akinakes to cut off the ears and noses – compare the similar punishments meted out by Darius as described in the Bisitun Inscription – of the King’s guards. That akinakes was a sign of high favor; it would of course been taken from Intaphernes immediately upon his arrest: not simply because it was a weapon but also for its symbolic significance, the loss of royal favor and the loss of his position.
The queen held a similarly august position to the King but one that is harder to track. The King could have several wives and concubines, but only one would be primary, the queen herself. She and the queen mother were prominent in a hierarchy that included secondary wives, concubines, and palace staff. The royal women were enormously powerful and influential, but in ways that often defy the stereotypes rampant in Greek sources. Their influence was both social and bureaucratic, as documents from Persepolis testify to their range of landholdings and economic activity. The Persepolis Fortification tablets (see discussion later in this chapter) contain dozens of references to the royal women Irtashduna and Irdabama. These women controlled significant landholdings with large retinues of staff and servants, interacted constantly with high (male) officials on official and private business, and went on long journeys.2 Irtashduna has been identified with the Artystone of Greek sources, the daughter of Cyrus whom Darius married upon taking the throne. Irdabama appears to have been even more influential, another one of Darius’ wives or perhaps even his mother; she has not been confidently identified with any women named in the Greek tradition.
Direct influence of the royal women on royal policy or the like is anecdotal and stems mainly from the Greek tradition, more appropriate to the study of Greek literary tropes than Persian politics. Herodotus provides a good example when he attributes Darius’ decision to attack Greece to Queen Atossa’s influence (3.134), a scene that Herodotus nicely sets in the king and queen’s bedroom. One might compare Hera’s machinations to distract Zeus from the Trojan Wars (Iliad, Book 14, lines 300f.). Without a doubt the Persian court saw its share of court intrigue and jockeying for influence, but the particulars are difficult to assess.
Greek sources revel in a Persian court overflowing with sexual intrigue and, as a consequence of the projected dominance of the women and eunuchs, they portray an overarching sense of effeminacy. According to this perspective, the queens and concubines were sequestered, a perspective that (at least for royal women) does not match up with other evidence such as that for Irtashduna and Irdabama alluded to earlier in this chapter. Athenaeus, writing around 200 CE but attributing his information to a fourth-century BCE Greek writer named Heracleides, claims that the Persian kings slept all day in order to be awake all night to indulge in music and sex with his concubines. To note that this is exaggerated seems superfluous, but Greek and Roman audiences loved it. A similar perspective underlies the biblical Book of Esther, which hinges on finding a new queen, or favorite, a process that involves King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) vetting his numerous concubines to discover Esther.3
The Greek fascination with opposites and inversion also found ready application in the eunuchs of the Persian court. Eunuchs seem to play an outsized role in almost every aspect of court politics and intrigue. In Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (7.5.59–65), Cyrus the Great gives a long disquisition on eunuchs and their virtues for upholding royal security, an idealized justification of their existence and utility. Ctesias’ Persica also highlights eunuchs, especially their influence and prominent roles at court. Greek fascination with eunuchs and an overestimation (willful or not) of their influence did much to foster the widespread view of the Achaemenid Empire as effeminate and lacking vigor. Our sources attest to numerous instances of eunuchs in lower-level domestic staff positions, as attendants of princesses or concubines and tutors of royal children. Castration of young males who were to become eunuchs occurs usually in contexts of tribute or punishment, and only in exceptional cases did a eunuch rise to a significant position. One example is Hermotimus, who was highly honored (as Herodotus phrases it, 8.105) by Xerxes; but many questions remain about the historicity of this episode as well.
Eunuchs as portrayed in Greek sources more often than not correspond to literary prototypes, extremes exemplifying unwavering loyalty or base treachery. A certain eunuch Bagapates, prominent in Ctesias’ Persica (Fragment 13 §9, §13, §15–16, §23), typified both. Bagapates held an influential position under Cyrus and Cambyses, arranged for the magus to take Cambyses’ place, then helped Darius and his coconspirators to kill the magus, and in the end died after sitting beside Darius’ tomb for seven years. This is taken to mean that Bagapates served as the tomb’s caretaker in an utmost expression of loyalty. In light of dramatic twists and turns of his long career, one cannot help but view him as a literary composite to appeal to a Greek audience. Other examples abound. Not only were eunuchs liminal figures because of their physicality (as castrated males) but frequently because they were placed in the middle (literally and figuratively) of competing interests at the royal court. The excess of eunuchs in the Greek accounts may also be attributed to Greek conflation and confusion of official titles at the Achaemenid court. But there seems to be as many difficulties in the modern historiography on these issues as there are in the original source material. Achaemenid court titles, of course, would not have been Greek but rather Persian – or Assyrian, Babylonian, or Elamite for those labels and court functions inherited from their imperial predecessors. Uncertainty over translation of titles and the functions implied by them has magnified the confusion in identifying actual eunuchs named in the Classical sources.
Administration of the Empire
The Persians displayed their ingenuity in their organizational and administrative systems, adopted and adapted from their predecessors. Any study of the Empire’s administration starts with the King, whose power was absolute. He was the focal point of a complicated nexus of bureaucracy and personal relationships by which the Empire was ruled. A main difficulty in understanding the administration of the Achaemenid Persian Empire is the assessment of the kings’ so-called “dahyu-lists.” The Old Persian word dahyu (plural dahyva) is best understood in context – it may mean either “people” or “country,” and is usually translated as the former. The context is not always clear. The royal inscriptions vary in number of dahyva given. Some of these dahyva may have corresponded roughly to provincial territories within the preceding empires, territories that the Persians incorporated via conquest. In scholarly literature they are sometimes called “satrapy-lists” or the like.
There are several dahyu-lists from the inscriptions of Darius and one from Xerxes. Each list includes both peoples and places, the latter not necessarily synonymous with the boundaries of a formal satrapy. In Figure 6.2 they are generally listed as regions.4 It is not always clear whether a particular term (i.e., the name of a dahyu) refers to a group of people or the land in which they live, or both. For example, to most Persians the Greeks – living in hundreds of independent city-states in Ionia and Greece itself – were mostl
y indistinguishable, and they were labeled generically by the Old Persian word Yauna, a rendering of the word “Ionia.” There are many ambiguities and peculiarities; for example, it is not entirely clear to whom Darius refers by “those of the sea” (DB §6). Some lists (DPe and XPh) attempt to differentiate these fractious Yauna, distinguishing the Ionians who lived in the sea (islanders) from those who lived across the sea, whose location is not specified – north of the Black Sea, in parts of Thrace, in Greece proper? One group of Ionians is even identified by the type of hat the people wore (DNa §3). Scythians (Saka) were also sometimes differentiated by their taste in hats or their use of a particular beverage (haoma, associated with Zoroastrian ritual contexts). It becomes clear that classification was not necessarily consistent across these lists.
Figure 6.2 Lists of dahyva in Royal Inscriptions.
Some scholars have attempted, by comparing these dahyu-lists in Darius’ and Xerxes’ inscriptions, to track the territorial expansion or contraction of the Empire, but such attempts are often as vain as they are ingenious. Beyond the Bisitun Inscription, it is impossible to date any royal inscriptions with precision. That the descriptions of dahyva seem to vary – based on parameters that we do not fully understand – causes historians no small vexation. Many assume that Xerxes’ list (XPh §3) dates after his failed invasion of Greece. If so, it does not appear to have affected the inclusion of various Yauna in his list. We should not expect it to. Because these inscriptions are expressions of imperial ideology, one may infer that the lack of specificity (as we seek it) was not necessarily unintentional. In other words, these lists portray the King’s idealized perception of his dominion and do not necessarily delineate actual, imperial control, especially on the fringes of the Empire. For example, the territorial extent of the King’s dominion over the Scythians (OP Saka) is unclear. The King may have received gifts and tribute from these Scythians, but his view and their view on their formal incorporation into the Empire may have been different.
