The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  So he passed the baby on to one of Astyages’s herdsmen, who promptly took it home and gave it to his wife, who had just been delivered of a stillborn baby. The herdsman laid the body of his own child out on the mountainside instead, and reported back to Harpagus that the deed was done. And Cyrus grew up in the herdsman’s hut.

  This story, related by Herodotus, is clearly a reprise of the standard peril that also shows a king’s divine appointment: a baby, miraculously preserved, grows to be a great leader, thanks to the supernatural providence that so clearly lay upon his early life. But in the case of Cyrus, Herodotus’s tale also demonstrates the uneasy political relationship between the Medes and the Persians. The Medes were the ruling race, but the child of the Persian vassal king could not simply be killed outright, even by his own high king.

  The inevitable happened; Cyrus, grown to the age of ten, was discovered by his grandfather, who saw him playing a game in the public square in which he ruled over the other boys of the village. It was now too late to kill him, since no one could even pretend that it would be an accident. Making the best of the situation, Astyages acknowledged the boy’s parentage. His wise men assured him that young Cyrus’s playacting the role of king had fulfilled the omen of the vine, so Astyages sent Cyrus back to Anshan, to the house of the parents who had never seen him.

  Then he sent for Harpagus. Caught, Harpagus admitted that he had dropped the duty into someone else’s lap. Astyages behaved as though he planned to accept his cousin’s apology: “Everything has turned out fine,” he assured Harpagus. “I’ve been very upset by my daughter’s hostility to me” (an understatement, we assume) “and I didn’t feel at all good about what I’d done. Send your own son to the palace to meet his cousin, and we’ll have a feast together.”

  Harpagus sent his own young son to the palace; Astyages had the boy murdered, baked, and set out as a main course at the feast that evening. “When he thought that Harpagus had eaten his fill,” Herodotus writes, “Astyages asked him if he had enjoyed the meal. Harpagus said that he had, very much so. Then the servants brought in the boy’s head, hands, and feet.” Harpagus, seeing his son’s remains, “retained his self-control.” He told Astyages that “the king could do no wrong. Then he picked up what was left of his son’s body and returned home.”3

  Should all of this be literally true, we could assume that the Medes went in for repressing emotion on a massive scale. Reading between the lines, we might see a more ominous and complicated picture: a Median king, sinking deeper and deeper into a nasty kind of paranoid psychosis, with enough despotic power to command his royal bodyguard to carry out awful acts against other Medians; a Median official, surrounded by his royal cousin’s soldiers, watching his son marched off to a horrible death; a Persian royal family that had to obey the king’s orders, yet could not be publicly humiliated; and a Persian underclass that had to be treated with some care, lest it rise up and protest.

  Astyages was still the acknowledged overlord of the Medes and the Persians. He was still the brother-in-law of the king of Babylon, and he was still the second (or perhaps third) greatest ruler in the known world. But back in Anshan, Cyrus was growing up in the house of Cambyses, lord of Persia, mothered by a woman who hated her Median father. In the palace itself, Harpagus, still serving his cousin quietly, was planning long-term revenge: a dish served cold.

  Astyages as not unaware of all of this resentment. He mounted a guard on every road leading from Anshan to Ecbatana, so that no one could march an army to his palace without his knowledge.

  NEBUCHADNEZZAR died king of a vast territory, after forty-three years of rule. But we do not even know where his body was buried. What does emerge from the fragmentary records is a six-year period of chaos. His son Amel-Marduk157 was the obvious heir; but it seems that all had not been well between father and son. A certain resentment comes to the surface in the biblical tale of Amel-Marduk’s release of Jehoiachin, undoubtedly against Nebuchadnezzar’s wishes, as soon as the old king died. “In the year Evil-Merodach became king of Babylon,” 2 Kings tells us, “he released Jehoiachin from prison on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month. He spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat of honor…. So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes and for the rest of his life ate regularly at the king’s table.”4 A much later tradition, relayed by the twelfth-century Jewish historian Jerachmeel, says that Nebuchadnezzar actually jailed Amel-Marduk for treachery, and that when Amel-Marduk was freed after Nebuchadnezzar’s death, he took his father’s body out of the grave and threw it out for vultures to eat.5 If we are to gather anything from this, it is that Nebuchadnezzar and his son were on less than affectionate terms.

  The Babylonian chronicles are fragmentary, but Berossus, chronicler of the pharaohs, preserves a dramatic tale: Amel-Marduk “ruled capriciously and had no regard for the law,” so that his sister’s husband planned his assassination and then took over after his death. He only ruled four years, however; and when he died, his son Labashi-Marduk, “still a child, succeeded to the throne and ruled for nine months. Because of his evil ways, his friends plotted against him and he was beaten to death.”6 Other writers from the same time tell the same tale: Amel-Marduk was “slain by his kinsman,” according to the Greek historian Megasthenes, and Labashi-Marduk “also had suffered death by violence.”7

  The man who finally ended up with the crown of Babylon was Nabonidus, the army officer who had helped negotiate the treaty between the Medes and the Lydians thirty years before. He was now well into his sixties, with a son already in his forties, and had decades of experience as both a soldier and a courtier.8 But he had no royal blood. Presumably he was from the city of Haran originally, since his long-lived mother, Adda-Guppi, had been a priestess of the moon-god Sin for many years there. An inscription at Haran identifies her: “The king of Babylon, the son and offspring of my heart,” the inscription reads, “one hundred and four propitious years in the presence of Sin, the king of the gods, to me he established and caused to live.”9

  This was an honorable, but not kingly, heritage, as Nabonidus himself admitted. In his own, most famous inscription, a cylinder describing his restoration of temples in the cities of Haran and Sippar, Nabonidus writes, “I am Nabonidus, who have not the honour of being a somebody; kingship is not within me.”10 Nevertheless, his accession seems to have been supported by both army officers and state officials. The Babylonian Chronicle is missing from the beginning of his reign, but his own inscriptions tell us, “To the midst of the palace they brought me, and cast themselves at my feet and kissed my feet and paid homage to my royalty…. As for Nebuchadnezzar who preceded me, I am[his] mighty delegate…troop shave been entrusted into my hand.”11

  The Babylon over which Nabonidus came to power had been weakened by the six years of infighting, and Nabonidus no longer had the resources to push south against Egypt as his predecessors had. But he was still the king of a very great empire. And he had few enemies. To his east, Astyages was still king of the Medes and Persians, and still his loyal ally. Cambyses, king of Persia, had died in 559, three years before, and young Cyrus had become ruler of the Persians (“Cyrus became king of the Persians in the opening year of the Fifty-fifth Olympiad,” the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus tells us, and adds that all historians agree on this date);12 but so far he had not demonstrated any ill will over his grandfather’s attempt to kill him in babyhood. He remained loyal to his Median high king, and so loyal to Babylon also.

  To the northwest, the powerful Lydians of Asia Minor were now ruled by Croesus, son of Alyattes, who had extended his empire even further; the Phrygians were subject to Lydia, and the Lydians had alliances with the Greek Ionian cities along the coast. “Sardis was at the height of its prosperity,” Herodotus remarks, “and was visited…by every learned Greek who was alive at the time, including Solon of Athens,” who was on his ten-year exile from his city. The trade routes across Asia Minor had brought Croesus as much wealth as his predecessor Midas, two hundred years befo
re; and like Midas, Croesus had gained the reputation of being one of the richest men in the world.

  Nabonidus talked Croesus into making a formal alliance between Babylon and the Lydian throne. He was at peace with Egypt too. In fact, it must have seemed for a brief time as if he had no enemies at all.

  But it was a very brief time indeed.

  Cyrus had not forgotten his grandfather’s offenses; his mother very likely helped him to remember them. He was “the bravest and best-liked of his generation,” according to Herodotus. His own family, the Achaemenids, belonged to the Pasargadae tribe, which was the largest and most powerful of all the Persian clans. These men were already on his side, should he choose to rebel against Median dominance, and he set out to convince the other tribes, one by one, to join him. The Median rule had become increasingly burdensome to them, and Cyrus found willing ears to his message: “Free yourselves from slavery…. you are at least the equals of the Medes in everything, including warfare!”13

  In addition, old Harpagus was on his side. “He had met with all of the most important Medes, one by one,” Herodotus tells us, “and had tried to convince them of the necessity of setting up Cyrus as their leader and bringing Astyages’ reign to an end.” Presumably Astyages’s behavior had grown more and more atrocious, because the Medes defected, one by one, to Harpagus’s plan.

  When all was in readiness, Cyrus and his Persians began to march towards Ecbatana. Astyages’s watchmen raised the alert. The old king, still in enough command of his wits to remember the past, ordered the wise men who had interpreted his dream as already fulfilled to be impaled outside Ecbatana’s walls. He then called up his own troops, and put Harpagus (who had been playing his part to perfection for many years now) at their head. Harpagus led all of the Medians out against the Persians, and promptly swapped sides, along with most of his commanding officers. It must have been a most satisfying moment for him.

  Astyages’s handful of loyal soldiers fled; Astyages was taken prisoner, and Cyrus took control of Ecbatana and pronounced himself king of the Medes and the Persians. “This is how Astyages’ reign came to an end, after he had ruled for thirty-five years,” Herodotus concludes. “Thanks to his cruel behaviour, the Medes became subject to the Persians after having dominated that part of Asia which lies beyond the River Halys for 128 years.”14 Cyrus, showing himself bound by the same reluctance to shed royal blood that had preserved his own life, did not kill his grandfather, but kept him in comfortable confinement until the old man died of natural causes.

  Now the Achaemenid family of Persians ruled over the lands to the east. Cyrus did not intend to take on Babylon, his old ally, but he had ambitions to rule an empire. As soon as Astyages died, he considered the treaty between the Lydians and Medes dissolved and marched towards the domain of his great-uncle Croesus.

  The two armies met at the Halys river and fought to a draw. Croesus drew back, intending to send to Babylon for aid, but Cyrus (knowing better than to allow time for this) pressed forwards into Lydia and finally cornered the Lydian army in front of Sardis itself. He scattered the Lydian cavalry by bringing in camels (which frightened the horses into bolting), laid siege to the city itself, and brought it down after only fourteen days.15

  Cyrus thought that his men deserved a reward, so he let them pour into the city, plundering it of its fabled wealth. Meanwhile Croesus—taken prisoner and marched into Cyrus’s presence—watched from the walls beside his captor. He said not a word, so Cyrus asked him why he wasn’t distressed to see his wealth disappearing. “It isn’t my wealth,” Croesus remarked, “it’s yours that they’re stealing.” Upon which Cyrus immediately ordered the plundering to stop.16

  Cyrus, the ultimate pragmatist, rewarded others with great generosity as long as it would further his own advantage.158 Even later writers who idealized him—such as the Greek general Xenophon, who fought on the side of the Persians for a time and who wrote The Education of Cyrus to explain exactly how the restraint, fairness, intelligence, and “benevolence of soul”17 of Cyrus helped him to establish the greatest empire in the world—reveal inadvertently that the Great King’s strategy was force, fear, and domination. “It is easier,” Xenophon begins, “for a human being to rule all the other kinds of animals than to rule human beings.” However,

  Cyrus, a Persian…acquired very many people, very many cities, and very many nations, all obedient to himself…. was willingly obeyed by some, even though they were distant from him by a journey of many days; by others, distant by a journey even of months; by others, who had never yet seen him; and by others, who knew quite well that they would never see him. Nevertheless, they were willing to submit to him, for so far did he excel other kings.18

  For all Cyrus’s justice and benevolence of soul, he excelled other kings primarily in creating terror. “He was able to extend fear of himself to so much of the world that he intimidated all,” Xenophon remarks, before going off into paeans of praise over Cyrus’s justice, “and no one attempted anything against him.”19 What he could not accomplish by fear, he bought; he was generous enough with his own wealth when the prospect of greater gain was in view. “He went far beyond everyone in courting with food,” Xenophon says, much later, “…he surpassed human beings still much more in giving the most gifts…Who else, by the magnitude of his gifts, is said to make people prefer himself to their brothers, to their fathers, and to their children? Who else was able to take vengeance on enemies who were a journey of many months in distance as was the king of the Persians? Who else besides Cyrus, after overturning an empire, was called ‘father’ when he died?”20

  This is a creepy use of the title “father,” and becomes creepier when Xenophon goes on to point out that “Father Cyrus” used his gifts to convince people all over his empire to become “the so-called Eyes and Ears of the King,” and to report to him anything “that would benefit the king…. There are many Ears of the king, and many Eyes; and people are everywhere afraid to say what is not advantageous to the king, just as if he were listening, and afraid to do what is not advantageous, just as if he were present.”21

  Nevertheless Xenophon insists on seeing, in Cyrus, something new: a new kind of emperor. He is wrong in thinking that this “newness” was the justice, benevolence, and fairness of the king. Cyrus, like every other great king before him, kept hold of his empire by force and by fear. But his empire was certainly “new” in the number of different peoples that it managed to unite together under one rule. Now the Medes, the Lydians (including Phrygia), and the northern provinces of Assyria (conquered by his grandfather) were all part of Persia. Cyrus gave to Harpagus the task of conquering the Ionian cities along the coast, and himself turned back to campaign to the east of the Median territory; inscriptions and mentions in ancient texts suggest that he fought his way almost all the way over to the Indus river, although he did not manage to enter the Indus valley.22 Nor did he venture into the sea. The Persians were not yet a seafaring power.

  Three kingdoms remained: the scattered dominion of the Scythians to the north, the Egyptians far to the south, and most powerful of all, the Babylonians to the west.

  Nabonidus had not been paying much attention to his empire. In fact, he had made his son Belshazzar his co-regent, turned Babylon over to him, and trekked south into Arabia, where he had taken up residence far from the center of his own kingdom.

  What exactly was Nabonidus doing down in Arabia?

  The history of Babylon’s fall composed right after his reign, the Verse Account of Nabonidus, was written by his enemies the Persians, who had a vested interest in demonstrating his unfitness to rule, and so should be taken with a spoonful of salt. But the Account inadvertently tells the truth, when it accuses Nabonidus of devotion to a god other than Marduk. The Account calls this god Nanna, and says that he was unfamiliar to the people of Babylon: a god

  59.1 The Empire of Cyrus the Great

  which nobody had ever seen in this country,

  he placed it upon a pedestal,


  he called it by the name of Nanna,

  crowned with a tiara,

  its appearance is like the eclipsed moon.23

  This god may not have been familiar to the Persians, but he was certainly no stranger to the Babylonians. He was none other than the ancient moon-god Sin, of the old city of Ur.

  Nabonidus certainly was devoted to Sin; his own mother, a priestess of the moon, mentions her son’s piety. But Nabonidus’s devotion brought him into difficulties. Although his own inscriptions attribute his rise to power (and the fall of Nebuchadnezzar’s heirs) to the blessings of Sin, this very devotion led him away from the throne he had gained with such difficulty. He ran into difficulties almost at once with the priests of Marduk, who had gained enormous influence under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, and found their hostility serious enough to make Babylon uninhabitable for him: “They disregarded [Sin’s] rites,” he complained in his own inscriptions, “…and [Sin] made me leave my city Babylon on the road to Tema…. For ten years I…did not enter my own city Babylon.”24

  His solution was simple: he turned the city of Babylon over to his son Belshazzar, whom he made co-regent, and left Marduk’s chosen city. He travelled deep into Arabia and stopped at the desert city of Tema, as the Account points out:

  He let everything go, entrusted kingship to his son,

  And his army with him, he himself turned towards Tema, deep in the west,

  when he arrived, he killed in battle the prince of Tema,

  slaughtered the flocks of the city-dwellers and the country-dwellers,

  and he himself took residence in Tema.25

  This was not entirely a move of desperation. Tema was at the center of trade routes, a city through which valuable gold and salt passed continually. From the city, Nabonidus could keep his hand on Babylonian commerce, and his correspondence with Belshazzar makes clear that he did not in fact “let everything go.” His son—who was on better terms with Marduk than the father—certainly ruled under his direction.