Mencius was not the only voice offering solutions, though. His writings reveal a very Confucian emphasis on the basic perfectability of man, man’s essential goodness, and the proper observation of forms as a way of finding peace in troubled times. And many in the Warring States found this totally insufficient. They had daily proof of man’s essential self-centeredness and lust for power; they lived in such daily chaos that the observation of forms seemed pointless.
During these years, a new philosophy, quite different from that of Mencius, was drawing together mystical threads from more ancient times. This philosophy was finally set down in writing as the Tao-Teh-Ching. Tao: the Way. The Taoist believed that the way to peace lay in a passive acceptance of the way things are, which must have seemed eminently doable.
The Taoist makes no laws. All pronouncements on ethical behavior are inevitably flawed, reflections of man’s own innate depravity.19 All positive pronouncements must be avoided, in fact, along with all aggression and ambition. As the Tao-Teh-Ching explains,
Tao inevitably does nothing,
and yet there is nothing that is not done.
If kings and dukes can preserve it,
all things will go through their own transformation….
Absence of desires will lead to quietude;
The world will, of itself, find its equilibrium.20
To withdraw from chaos, to wait in the faith that what will be, will be: this is a practical philosophy for evil times. Perhaps the most famous of Taoists was Chuang Tzu, who was born in the same year that Duke Hsiao inherited the rule of Ch’in and welcomed Shang Yang into his country. “The accomplishments of emperors and kings are superfluous affairs as far as the sage is concerned,” he wrote, “not the means by which to keep the body whole and to care for life. Yet how many gentlemen of the vulgar world today endanger themselves and throw away their lives in the pursuit of mere things! How can you help pitying them?”21
Chuang Tzu himself put it into metaphor this way:
Once Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.22
In such days, the Taoist found it most satisfying to let go of the material world. The next campaign that thundered by his door, the next law passed by his duke to restrict him: these were only incidental annoyances, not the true nature of things. No matter how many bars were placed around him, he remained as unconcerned as the butterfly.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
The Macedonian Conquerors
Between 404 and 336 BC,
ten thousand Greeks escape from Persia,
and a Macedonian takes on the task of creating Greek unity
THE WAR BETWEEN Athens and Sparta was over. Athens was desolate: broke, angry, the Long Walls ripped down, and as many as seventy thousand Athenians dead through plague, war, or political purge.1 No one had a plan for the future, and the city was filled with widows and women who would never marry because so many men had died. Aristophanes gives bitter voice to the times in his play The Assemblywomen: “The situation can yet be saved,” a woman of Athens proclaims. “I propose that we hand over the running of Athens to the women!”2 Among their solutions for the city’s troubles is a law proclaiming that any man who wants to sleep with a young woman has to “pleasure an older one first.”3
Sparta, the nominal victor, was little better off. Planting and harvesting had been thrown entirely off schedule. The armies storming through the Peloponnese had crushed vines, flattened olive trees, and killed flocks. More and more Spartans despaired of feeding themselves at home, and became mercenaries instead.
Thousands of these Spartans went to work for the Persian royal family. In 404, Artaxerxes II had inherited the throne from his father, Darius II. But a big fight over the succession was de rigueur in Persia, and Darius’s younger son Cyrus—now serving as satrap in Sardis—was planning to take the crown for himself. He was an ambitious and dashing young man, and Artaxerxes II was not a very imposing figure; he wasn’t much of a horseman,4 and Plutarch, who wrote a life of him, says that he had a “yielding and soft” nature.5
To bolster his support, Cyrus “sent orders to the commanders of his garrisons in the various cities to enroll troops from the Peloponnese, as many as possible and the best available” (this from the account written by Xenophon, a young mercenary who answered the call).6 Ostensibly, Cyrus was hiring these soldiers for the defense of the Persian holdings in Asia Minor. But by 401, his force of over ten thousand Greek mercenaries had telegraphed an alarm. The Persian satrap of Lydia, the same Tissaphernes who had negotiated with Alcibiades, rode east in haste to warn the king.
With his cover blown, Cyrus headed towards the Euphrates with his army, crossed over it, and then turned south, marching towards Babylon with the river on his right; presumably he planned to use Babylon as a base for attacking the heart of the Persian empire. Most of the Persian army seems to have been at Ecbatana.7 Artaxerxes II had to get his vast force assembled, provisioned, and on the march, which took him an unexpectedly long time (Plutarch says that he was afflicted with a “natural dilatoriness”).8 So Cyrus got almost all the way to Babylon before the king’s army reached him; the long journey forced him to shell out extra pay for the Greek mercenaries, since they complained loudly about the distance.9
The Persian front line finally came into view as the rebel army approached Cunaxa, a battlefield about forty miles north of Babylon.188 Xenophon, who was marching in full armor in the middle of the Greek ranks, describes their approach:
In the early afternoon dust appeared, like a white cloud, and after some time a sort of blackness extending a long way over the plain. When they got nearer, then suddenly there were flashes of bronze, and the spear points and the enemy formations became visible…cavalry with white armour…soldiers with wicker shields…hoplites with wooden shields reaching to the feet (these were said to be Egyptians)…more cavalry and archers…. In front of them…were what they called the scythed chariots. These had thin scythes extending at an angle from the axles and also under the driver’s seat, turned toward the ground, so as to cut through everything in their way. The idea was to drive them into the Greek ranks and cut through them.10
It was a huge defense force; Cyrus’s army was outnumbered and outarmed.
Despite this, Cyrus was able to plunge forwards through the Persian lines until he met his brother face-to-face and struck him in the chest with a javelin, knocking him off his horse. The king’s bodyguard dragged him away from the front to a little hill, where Ctesias dressed the wound; the javelin had gone through his armor, but had not pierced through to his heart. Cyrus, pushed backwards by the fray, thought he had won; he spurred his horse forwards, shouting victory, when a stray arrow went through his temple.189
The Persian army had managed to keep back the attack, and the would-be usurper was dead. Many of the Greek officers had been captured. Artaxerxes II sent a message to the remaining Greek mercenaries offering to accept their surrender, but they refused. Instead, ten thousand Greeks regrouped and began to retreat from Cunaxa, back in the direction from which they had come. Young Xenophon was elected to be one of their leaders.
68.1 The March of the Ten Thousand
The journey, which began sometime in September of 401, dragged on for months. The Greeks plodded along the Tigris, short of food and water, constantly attacked from behind by a Persian detachment which had been assigned to harass them and from the sides and front by hostile residents of the lands through which they passed. They trudged through desert; they climbed through mountains; they marched through winter storms and six-foot snow drifts. They died from hunger and thirst, from cold, and from battle wounds. Their shoes froze onto their feet; men who lost their toes were left behind to die.11 They despaire
d of ever reaching the coast, from which they could return to Greece.
Almost a year after their journey began, they were struggling up yet another mountain when Xenophon, bringing up the rear, heard the men at the front shouting. He thought that the yells heralded yet another attack. But “the shouting got louder and drew nearer,” he writes, “and those who were going forward started running towards the men in front, who kept on shouting, and the more there were of them, the more shouting there was.”12 At last the words became clear. They were shouting “The sea! The sea!”
The March of the Ten Thousand was an impressive feat of endurance, but not necessarily an extraordinary one. What was extraordinary was that the Persian army, under Artaxerxes, could apparently do little more than pester the retreating Greeks, who managed to escape from the very center of Persian power. “All [Artaxerxes II’s] attempts to capture the Greeks that had come up with Cyrus,” Plutarch concludes, “…proved unsuccessful, and they, though they had lost both Cyrus and their own generals, nevertheless escaped, as it were, out of his very palace.”13
Artaxerxes II’s Persian empire was weak enough to lose its grip on Egypt as well. An Egyptian nobleman from Sais named Amyrtaeus declared himself pharaoh, and the Persian satrap was unable to get enough support from the preoccupied Artaxerxes II to quell the revolt. Amyrtaeus was not the first Egyptian “freedom fighter” to organize a resistance, but he was the first in a long time to gain enough power to title himself as the first pharaoh of a new dynasty: the Twenty-Eighth. (Psammetichus III had been the last ruler of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, and Manetho lists the Persians as the Twenty-Seventh.) Amyrtaeus, who lasted four years, turned out to be the only Twenty-Eighth Dynasty pharaoh. We know very little about Egypt under his rule, although Aramaic documents from the time suggest that at least part of the country still considered itself to be under Persian rule. Inscriptions show that after Amyrtaeus died, another rebel took power as Nepherites I and announced himself as the founder of yet another dynasty, the Twenty-Ninth; after six years he was succeeded by a usurper named Achoris.14
Three years after he announced himself to be pharaoh of Egypt, Achoris sent up to Greece and asked Athens for help against Persian attempts to retake his country.
MEANWHILE, the Greeks had gone back to quarrelling with each other. Athens had not managed to get far in the rebuilding of its shattered peace; the city was still suffering from the political divisions caused by the purges of the Thirty. In 399, a year after the successful return of the Ten Thousand, the Athenians had convicted the philosopher Socrates of vague anti-Athenian wrongdoings. Socrates had been friendly both with Alcibiades and with the most ruthless of the Thirty, an aristocrat named Kritias who had died in the fighting that wrapped up the Thirty’s horrendous rule. Sentenced to death, Socrates scorned flight and instead drank down hemlock; his death was recorded by one of his students, a young man named Plato.
Meanwhile Sparta had rethought its deal with Persia. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans had promised to give up the Ionian cities to the Persians, in exchange for Persian gold. Now they reneged on the promise, and sent Spartan officials to run the cities instead. This was blatant empire-building, and the other Greek cities were not in the mood to tolerate it. The thirty years of fighting had barely ended when Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos banded together with what was left of their armies to force Sparta to give up its claims.
Fighting in this so-called Corinthian War began in 395. After three years of pointless battling, Sparta backpedaled—not to the Greeks, but to the Persians, offering to give up those Ionian cities after all, if the Persians would come back in on the Spartan side.
Artaxerxes II agreed and sent Persian ships to help out. This made Athens quite willing to help Achoris of Egypt fight off the Persians; an Egyptian-Athenian alliance was a possible counter to a Persian-Spartan alliance.
Unfortunately, Athenian soldiers were too thin on the ground to keep it up, and the Spartans soon found that their soldiers were exhausted too. In 387, Artaxerxes II (happy to see that his potential enemies had once again worn themselves out against each other) decreed that unless the two cities agreed to a peace, the Persians would step in: “Should any of the parties concerned not accept this peace,” he announced (according to Xenophon, who preserved the actual treaty in his Hellenica), “I, Artaxerxes, will war against him…by land and by sea, with ships and with money.”15
Athens backed, regretfully, out of its Egyptian alliance, leaving Achoris to fight his anti-Persian war alone; Sparta disarmed; and for a little while everyone went back to rebuilding their cities. The so-called King’s Peace was in full effect. “So it was,” Xenophon writes, “that the Spartans and Athenians, with their allies, found themselves in the enjoyment of peace for the first time since…the demolition of the walls of Athens.”16
The reclaiming of Asia Minor was the high point of Artaxerxes II’s otherwise undistinguished reign. Egyptian inscriptions show that he did eventually sent a halfhearted party of soldiers down to brace Achoris in his den, but when Achoris (who had managed to talk a few Greek mercenaries into becoming a part of the regular Egyptian navy) fought back, the Persians retreated.
When Achoris died and a new Egyptian seized command—an unknown soldier named Nectanebo I, founder of the Thirtieth Dynasty—Artaxerxes II made one more stab at getting Egypt back. This time he tried to turn the tables on Egypt by hiring Athenian mercenaries of his own and sailing down to the attack, entering the Delta on its western side rather than by the fortress of Pelusium on the east, in the usual way.17 Nectanebo fought off this combined force, which was stronger than his own, with a brilliant bit of strategy. He made a stand at each stream in the Delta, fighting for a while before retreating a little bit farther south, pulling the invaders in further and further. He knew—as the Athenians and Persians did not—exactly when the flooding of the Nile was about to occur, and he managed to hold the combined invasion force off until the waters began to rise rapidly around him. At that he beat a quick retreat south; startled and overwhelmed by the flooding, the Persians and Athenians retreated back out of the Delta.18 Nectanebo held onto his throne for eighteen prosperous years, and Artaxerxes II did not try again.190
THE RUIN OF GREECE had convinced at least one Athenian that the cities of Greece would only survive if they could manage to pull themselves together under one banner of Greek identity. Pan-Hellenism, not empire-building by force, was the only hope for the Greek world.
This Athenian was Isocrates, an orator and teacher of rhetoric who had been born before the Peloponnesian War began and had watched his city fall into tatters. In 380, seven years after the King’s Peace, he published Panegyricus, a written speech begging for all Greek cities to recognize their common heritage.191Athens must be the leader in such an attempt, Isocrates writes, because “the city has made the name ‘Greek’ seem to be not that of a people but of a way of thinking; and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in our birth.”19
This was a resurrection of that call for willing identification with an idea that Pericles had first made in the throes of war, reshaped to bind Athens and Sparta together as Greeks against a non-Greek world. The Panegyricus is first a summons to pan-Hellenic unity, but it is also a call for the Hellenes to join willingly against those who have not been educated as Greeks: against the Persians and their king Artaxerxes II, who rules “not by consent” of the parts of his empire, but rather “by having a greater army.”20
This call for pan-Hellenism was answered from a slightly unexpected source.
In the year 359, two thrones were passed along at the same time. Artaxerxes II’s oldest son, Darius, planned to kill his father, suspecting that Artaxerxes might be leaning towards declaring his younger son Ochus the heir. Artaxerxes got wind of the plot and sat up in bed on the night of the planned assassination, waiting. When Darius arrived, he called for his bodyguard. Darius was arrested, convicted, and put to death by having his throat cut.
Artaxerxes died of old age not long after; Ochus poisoned his other brothers and, his throne secure, became Artaxerxes III.
Over in Macedonia another king came to the throne in the same year. His name was Philip II; and he was the thirteenth king since Amyntas I had surrendered to Darius the Great, a hundred years before. Thirteen kings in a century works out to an average of less than eight years apiece; to be king of Macedonia was not a safe job.
Philip’s elderly father, Amyntas IV, had married a much younger wife late in life, in order to get himself a legitimate heir for the throne (he had already fathered at least three illegitimate children who had their eye on it).21 This woman, Eurydice, gave birth to the required heirs: three sons, Alexander II, Perdikkas, and Philip. She then started carrying on a blatant affair with a Macedonian courtier named Ptolemy; according to Macedonian accounts, the old king actually caught the two of them in bed at one point, but at nearly eighty decided not to make a fuss about it.
When ancient Amyntas died, Alexander II became king. He had troubles to his northwest, where the Illyrian tribes were threatening to invade. The Macedonian alliance with Persia had given Macedonia some protection from its enemies to the north and south, but by Alexander II’s reign, the Persians were no longer casting such a long shadow. The third-century historian Justin tells us that Alexander II had to avoid conquest by paying the Illyrians off and sending his younger brother Philip (only ten years old) to live in Illyria as a hostage.
Eventually Philip was allowed to return home, but his older brother was doomed. Eurydice, Alexander’s own mother, had arranged to have him murdered so that her lover Ptolemy could seize power. As soon as Alexander II was dead, Ptolemy announced himself to be regent on behalf of the legitimate heir, the second son Perdikkas. Philip, now fifteen, was sent off again as a hostage; this time he ended up in the southern Greek city of Thebes, which had been threatening to invade Macedonia.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 59
