by Tom Holland
With his brother, Artaphernes, and a majority of the seven backing him, Darius had his way. His calculations had been precise. A rare opportunity was indeed now opening. As the conspirators and their train, following the Khorasan Highway, closed in on the foothills of the Zagros, they would have felt the violent heat of summer on the plains starting to diminish. Autumn was on its way. Soon, the king would be descending from the mountains. If the assassination squad could ambush him on open ground, somewhere on the road between Ecbatana and the heartland of royal power in Persia, then he might be dispatched with relative ease. Practised horsemen all — for there had never been a Persian nobleman not raised in the saddle — the seven conspirators and their accomplices rode at a scorching pace, desperate not to lose their chance. By September, they had arrived at the borders of Media. Ahead of them lay the Khorasan Highway, twisting through the mountains up to Ecbatana. And descending it, approaching them, somewhere, was Bardiya.
News of his progress would have been easily come by. The road was always busy. Merchants, profiting from the consolidation of
Persian authority, had begun to throng the great highway in growing numbers, businessmen from the wealthy trading cities of the lowlands, their talk an exotic babel, their laden pack-animals clopping in tow.''4 Those coming from Ecbatana would have been able to assure the conspirators that the king had indeed left his summer capital, that he was on the move, that he was not far ahead of them. Then, with Bardiya drawing ever nearer, the traffic on the road would have grown even more varied, the king's lackeys and outriders increasingly in evidence, their costumes rich, their beards and hair elaborately curled, their peacock extravagance alerting travellers to the approach of their master, the King of Persia, the King of the World.
Nevertheless, amid all the clamour and clarions and colour, traces of a far more ancient order still abided. By late September, as the conspirators pressed along the northern edge of Nisaea, the most fertile of the Zagros valleys, they would have been able to mark the most dramatic of these. Away from the courtiers and caravans on the highway, covering the clover-rich pastureland, there spread a spectacle familiar to numberless generations; indeed, a reminder of ways more primordial than Media itself. Horses, white horses, covered the plain — as many as 160,000 of them, it was said. These were the same breed that had been paid in tribute to the Assyrians almost two centuries before, 'the best, and the largest"15 in the world, for not even the fabulous kingdoms of India — where, as was well known, every animal grew to a prodigious size — had anything to compare. Once the Medes had been nomads, and now they were the subjects of a foreign monarchy; but riding across the Nisaean plain, abreast of the shimmering herds, they knew themselves supreme as the tamers of horses still. A splendid consolation to them in their slavery: for the white horses, so strong and swift and beautiful, were regarded by the peoples of the Zagros as creatures sacred, bound by mysterious ties of communion to the divine, and to their king.
Even the conquering Persians acknowledged this. At Pasargadae, a horse from Nisaea would be sacrificed every month before the hallowed tomb of Cyrus himself. Perhaps that was why Bardiya, turning off the Khorasan Highway and pausing in his descent towards the lowlands, lingered in the presence of the herd. Whether he sought legitimisation, or a sign from the heavens, or perhaps just the reading of bad dreams, he would have found in Nisaea ready experts on hand. Magi, interpreters of all that was mysterious, were the guardians of the sacred horses too. Did Bardiya summon these masters of ritual to his presence and ask them what his future might hold? Perhaps. What is certain, however, is that on 29 September 522 bc, a man calling himself Bardiya was in Nisaea, in a fort named Sikyavautish — and that it was there that Darius finally tracked him down.
What happened next would be retold by all those who traced their lineage from the seven leaders of the assassination squad. Many versions must have been elaborated over the years. All agreed, however, that Bardiya was taken wholly by surprise. It seems that the conspirators and their followers, coolly riding up to the gates of the fortress, baldly announced that they had come to see the king. The guards, overawed by the rank of the new arrivals, scurried to let them in. Only in the courtyard, as they approached the royal quarters, did anyone think to challenge them — but by then it was too late. The assassins, overpowering the courtiers in their path, burst into Bardiya's chamber. The king, it is said, was with a concubine. Desperately, he sought to stave off his attackers with the leg of a broken stool, but to no avail. It is also said that it was Darius' brother, 'faithful Artaphernes', who finally plunged the dagger home.46
And Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, King of the Persians, slumped dead to the ground.
Double Vision
Or did he? No sooner had the assassins completed their bloody work than they themselves were promoting a quite different tale. The corpse of the murdered man may not have been exposed to public view, but a great deal else was now revealed, to universal amazement. The story told by the conspirators was staggering. The man they had slain, they claimed, was not Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, at all. That Bardiya was already long dead. Cambyses, jealous and savage, had ordered his execution years before. Had it not been for the acumen of Darius and his fellow patriots, who had stumbled upon the secret, and their courage in daring to expose it, the Persian people might never have learned of the monstrous scam.
All of which begged a rather obvious question. If the man assassinated at Sikyavautish had not been the son of Cyrus — and the rightful king — then who had he been? Here the revelations took an even more sinister turn. That an impostor had taken on the role of a prince of the royal blood was alarming enough, but that he had played it for years unsuspected even by his family and household could only be evidence of the blackest necromancy. Surely, then, a Magus, one who had been schooled in the mastery of the supernatural, was the likeliest suspect? Could it have been merely a coincidence that the imposter had been surprised in Nisaea, on the plain of the sacred horses, well known as a haunt of the Magi? It seemed not — for Bardiya's doppelganger, the conspirators hurriedly announced, had indeed been a Magus, 'Gaumata by name'.47 An obscure and low-born villain he may have been, and yet so potent had his sorcery proved itself, and so audacious his plot, that he had almost won the empire by his fraud.
Sensationalist retellings would tease out the full implications of this scandal and adorn them further. For all his powers, it appeared that the Magus had forgotten to conceal one crucial detail: his ears, for some unspecified crime, had long before been cut off by Cyrus. A daughter of Otanes named Phaidime, a wife of Bardiya who had never suspected that he might have been killed and replaced by a double, had brushed the side of her husband's head one evening while he slept, and uncovered the appalling truth. Telling her father of her discovery, she had thereby set in train the dramatic sequence of events which had culminated in the murder of the impostor. Such, at any rate, was the story which years later would be told across the empire. And there was nobody, by then, left to dispute it.
Even on the night of the assassination, if there had been anyone in Nisaea to query the conspirators' self-justification, or to point out some of its more glaring implausibilities, or to ask why the corpse of the supposed impostor had been disposed of with such speed, he would have known better than to speak his mind. With blood still being washed from the fittings of Sikyavautish, it was hardly the time for quibbles. The conspirators were in no mood to tolerate dissent. The warning given by Darius could not have been more stentorian: 'Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a follower of the Lie, him do thou punish well!'48 Here, from a master political strategist, was a dazzling sleight-of-hand. It would serve to place not the assassins but their accusers on the defensive. Sceptics were to be anathematised as the enemies of truth.
And this, for any Persian, was a feared and dreadful fate. It was an article of faith to Darius' countrymen that they were the most honest people in the world. Three thin
gs were taught them, it was said: 'to ride, to fire a bow and to tell the truth'.49 Darius, by threatening those who might doubt his story of the Magus' crimes, was not just shoring up a rickety case; his claims were altogether more soaring. Only a Persian could have made them - for only a Persian could understand what truth really meant. He knew, as more benighted peoples did not, that the universe without truth would be undone and lost to perpetual night. More than an abstraction, more even than an ideal, it formed instead the very fabric of existence.
This was why, in the beginning, when Ahura Mazda, greatest of the gods, had summoned time and creation into being, he had engendered Arta, who was Truth, to give order to the universe. Without Arta, it would have lacked form or beauty, and the great cycles of existence set in motion by Lord Mazda could not have brought life into the world. Even so, the work of Truth was never done. Just as fire, when it rises to the heavens, is accompanied by black smoke, so Arta, the Persians knew, was shadowed by Drauga, the Lie. Two orders - one of perfection, the other of falsehood, each the image of the other — were coiled in a conflict as ancient as time. What should mortals do, then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie, lest the universe itself should totter and fail? The wretch who weaves deceit will bring death into his country':50 so it had been anciently proclaimed. How much more deadly the peril, then, if a 'wretch' had somehow seized his country's throne. The Magus, by taking on the image of Bardiya, and impersonating the rightful king, had handed to Drauga the sceptre of the world. Darius and his fellows, by riding to Sikyavautish, had toppled an evil infinitely more threatening than a mere imposter. Far from staging a squalid putsch, they had been engaged in nothing less than the redemption of the cosmos.
And now, with Gaumata justly toppled and dispatched, the throne which he had tainted stood empty. The insignia of royal power — a robe, a bow and a shield — waited in Sikyavautish for the rightful claimant. Who that might be, however, and how he was to be recognised, remained, on the evening of the assassination, a mystery. Only the most garbled account of what followed has survived. The conspirators, it was said, rode out by night into the open plain. At an agreed point, they reined in their horses and awaited the coming of dawn. When the sun's first rays appeared above the rugged line of mountains to the east, it was Darius' horse who neighed to them in greeting. At once, his companions slipped from their saddles and fell to their knees in homage. The Greeks, when they repeated this story, would claim that it had been agreed among the conspirators that 'the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne'51 — and they added, furthermore, that Darius had cheated. His groom, it was said, had dabbled his fingers inside a mare's vulva beforehand, and then, just as the sun rose, placed them beside the nose of Darius' horse. But this was scurrilous nonsense, and typical of the Greeks. How like them to distort the holy rites of Truth!
For it is evident, even from the unsatisfactory version that we have, that Darius' accession was marked by potent and awful ritual. The conspirators gathered in the chill of that September night not because they wished to discover who the next king might be, but because they already knew. Otanes, Darius' only conceivable rival, had already bowed to the inevitable and discounted himself as a candidate for the throne: the noblemen riding across the plain of Nisaea were celebrating a fait accompli. Blessed by the neighing of the sacred white horses, and by the mountain dawn, Darius could know himself doubly the champion of Arta. As the first rays illuminated the plain, so night, the order of Drauga, menacing and indistinct, began to fade before the brilliant light of the sun. 'So can I recognise you as strong and holy, O Mazda, when by the hand in which you hold the twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man, and by the glow of your fire whose power is the Truth, the might of Good Thought shall come to me.'52 And now, that late September dawn, the might of Good Thought had indeed come to Nisaea, for the Liar was dead, and the Righteous Man was king.
Or so it pleased Darius to claim. Yet the imagery, although it would suffuse his propaganda, was not his own. If it bore witness to the reverence for Arta found among all the Aryans,then it drew as well on the teachings of a far more rigorous dualism. 'The twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man': not Darius' words but those of that most fabled of visionaries, Zoroaster, the prophet of the Aryans, the man who had first revealed to a startled world that it was the battleground in a relentless war between good and evil. Here, in this war, was the great death-struggle of things - for the Prophet, continuing with his novel doctrines, had taught that the cycles of the cosmos would not keep revolving for ever, as had always been assumed, but move instead towards a mighty end, a universal apocalypse in which Truth would annihilate all falsehoods, and establish on their ruin an eternal reign of peace. Presiding over this final and decisive victory would be the Lord of Life, Wisdom and Light, Ahura Mazda himself— not, as other Iranians had always believed, one among a multitude of divinities, but the supreme, the all-powerful, the only uncreated god. From him, like fire leaping from beacon to beacon, all goodness proceeded: six great emanations of his own eternal light, the Amesha Spentas, holy and immortal;51 a broader pantheon of beneficent spirits; the world in its many beauties; plants and animals (and, in particular, because it spent its days preying upon insects, those swarming spawn of the dark side, the hedgehog); the faithful and ever-righteous dog; and finally, noblest of all creations, man himself. 'Unblock your ears, then, to hear the Good News — gaze at the bright flames with clear-seeing thought!' the Prophet had proclaimed, alerting humanity to the great decision that confronted it. 'You have the choice as to which faith you will follow, everyone, person by person, with that freedom all are granted in the mighty test of life.'5'1 Choose wrong, and the path of the Lie, and of chaos, would be opened; choose right, and the path of order, tranquillity and hope.
Was Darius the first usurper to appreciate just how amenable to his purposes this great religion of peace and justice might prove to be? We shall never know for sure. The early history of Zoroaster and his doctrines was a puzzle even to his own followers. That the Prophet had been the only baby to laugh, rather than cry, at his birth; that he had been granted his first vision of Ahura Mazda at the age of thirty, as he emerged from a river; that he had finally succumbed, aged seventy-seven, to an assassin's knife: these few scraps of his biography had been preserved by the devout. But as to when he had lived, and where, wildly divergent opinions were held: some dated Zoroaster to the dawn of time, others only to the reign of King Astyages;55 some held that he had been raised in Bactria, others on the steppes. What everyone agreed, however, was that he had been neither a Mede nor a Persian — and that the knowledge of his teachings had first come to the Zagros from the East.56
But to what effect? The empire founded by Cyrus was certainly no theocracy; it was never, in any real sense, 'Zoroastrian' at all. The Persians continued to worship their ancient gods, to honour mountains and flowing streams, and to sacrifice horses before the tombs of their kings. But if the Achaemenid court remained pagan in much of its practice, it was also, in its dominant sensibility, not entirely removed from Zoroaster's teachings. As in the eastern kingdoms of Iran, where the monotheism of the Prophet had taken its strongest hold, so also in the west, Ahura Mazda had long been worshipped as supreme. Between the native paganism of the Persians and the teachings of Zoroaster there appears to have been, not rivalry, but rather synergy, and even fusion. Both were the expressions of a single religious impulse, one that had been evolving over centuries, and was still, as the Persians conquered the world, in a state of flux. In particular, between the Magi, who had long been adepts of the most occult and sacred knowledge, and the priests of Zoroaster, there were numerous correspondences. It was not even clear which order had first proclaimed eternal war against insects and reptiles, had first worn white robes as the mark of their status, or had first exposed the corpses of their fellows to be consumed by birds and dogs (a fate otherwise regarded among the Persians as so terrible that it wa
s reserved for regicides). So too with the worship of the Good Lord, Ahura Mazda himself, influence had long been percolating both ways. Far from dividing the Medes and Persians from their cousins in the East, their 'Mazdaism' appears to have served them as a source of unity.
A bond certainly appreciated by Cyrus. Looking to dramatise his unprecedented dominion over the various Iranian peoples, he had consciously adopted certain customs from their ancient heartlands. In the nursery of his own tribe, at Pasargadae, far distant from Bactria or Sogdiana, he had ordered the building of three startling new structures: fire-holders made of stone, their tops hollowed out into deep, wide bowls, in which white-hot ashes could be kept forever burning.57 Fire had long been sacred to all the Iranians, but to no one more than to Zoroaster himself, who had taught that its flames were the very symbol of righteousness and truth. Daily prayer before fire had been laid upon his followers as a sacred duty, and Cyrus, in the course of his eastern conquests, would surely have witnessed the spectacle of such worship for himself. There can be no doubt that it was from Zoroaster that the Persians 'derived the rule against burning dead bodies or defiling fire in any way', for a Lydian scholar, in the earliest reference to the Prophet recorded by an anairya, commented as much.58 The fire-holders built by Cyrus, their flames rising into the azure of the Persian sky, would certainly have blazed out the new doctrine high and clear — but they would also have served to broadcast a very different lesson. Cyrus had hit upon the perfect image of his power. How better to represent royal greatness than to associate it with fire? Even those otherwise ignorant of the customs of the Iranians might readily appreciate such a notion. Soon enough, throughout the empire, similar sanctuaries began to appear, their flames guarded by the Magi, only ever to be extinguished on the death of the reigning monarch, symbols both of Arta and of the rule of Persia's king.
