In 539 BC, when Babylon was conquered by the Persians, just as Assyria seven decades previously had been conquered by the Babylonians, the gods of the vanquished metropolis had not hesitated to hail its new master as their favourite. Cyrus, the founder of his people’s greatness, and whose capture of the world’s largest city had set the seal on a lifetime of astonishing victories, had graciously accepted their patronage. The Persian king boasted of having entered Babylon at their explicit invitation; of having restored their temples; of having cared daily for their worship. Cyrus, as deft a propagandist as he was effective a military commander, knew full well what he was doing. Starting his reign as the king of an obscure and upstart people, he ended it as lord of the largest agglomeration of territories that the world had ever seen – and on a scale, certainly, that far exceeded the wildest fantasies of any Assyrian or Babylonian monarch. Yet Cyrus, when he looked to promote himself as a global ruler, had little option but to look to the heritage of Mesopotamia. Nowhere else in his dominions had offered him a model of kingship so rooted in antiquity, so burnished by self-satisfaction. ‘King of the universe, mighty king, king of Babylon’:8 here were titles that the Persian conqueror had been eager to make his own.
Nevertheless, Mesopotamian tradition had in the long run proven inadequate to the needs of his heirs. The Babylonians, despite all Cyrus’ flattering of their pretensions, had only reluctantly accepted their loss of independence. Among the rebels who rose against Darius when, seventeen years after the fall of Babylon, he seized the Persian throne, there was one who claimed to be the son of the city’s last native king. Defeated in battle, the wretched man and his lieutenants – as was only to be expected, of course – were all briskly impaled. Darius also made sure, though, to skewer his defeated rival’s reputation. Inscriptions broadcast to the world the full scale of the pretender’s deceptions. Far from having been a prince of the blood, it was announced, he had not even been a Babylonian, but an Armenian by the name of Arakha. ‘He was a liar.’9 This, of all the many accusations that a Persian might level against an adversary, was easily the most damning. The falsehood of which Arakha had been convicted was an offence, not just against Darius, but against the very stability of the universe. All good and all wise though the Lord Mazda was, his creation, so the Persians believed, was menaced by a darkness to which they gave the name of Drauga: ‘the Lie’. In fighting Arakha and his fellow rebels, Darius had not merely been defending his own interests. Infinitely more had been at stake. The spreading filth of the Lie, had it not been purged by Darius, would have ended up splashing the radiance of all that was good with the poison of its sewage. Rebels against his authority as king were also rebels against that of the Wise Lord. ‘Ignorant of the worship of Ahura Mazda,’10 they had assailed a cosmic order that was synonymous with Truth itself. Not for nothing did the Persians use the same word, Arta, for them both. Darius, in committing himself to the defence of Truth, was setting an example for all who would follow him onto the throne. ‘You, who shall be king hereafter, be firmly on your guard against the Lie. The man who shall be a follower of the Lie – punish him well.’
And his heirs had done so. Like Darius, they knew themselves engaged in a conflict as old as time, and as wide as the universe. Between the light and the darkness, all had to choose their side. There was nothing so tiny, no creeping or coiling thing so insignificant, that it might not rank as a minion of the Lie. The worms and maggots that fed on a man sentenced to the scaphe, bred of his filth, confirmed by consuming his flesh that both were agents of falsehood and darkness. In a similar manner, those barbarians who lurked beyond the limits of Persian order, where the writ of the Great King did not run, were the servants not of gods, but of demons. Naturally, this did not mean blaming foreigners merely because, unlucky not to have been born Persian, they were ignorant of Ahura Mazda. Such a policy would have been grotesque: an offence against all accepted custom. Cyrus, by lavishing patronage on the temples of Babylon, had blazed a path that his heirs made sure to follow. Who was any mortal, even the Great King, to mock the gods of other peoples? Nevertheless, as the man charged by Ahura Mazda with the defence of the world against the Lie, it was his responsibility to purge strife-torn lands of demons no less than of rebels. Just as Arakha had seduced Babylon into revolt by taking on the appearance of their dead king’s son, so did demons similarly practise deception by aping the appearance of gods. Faced with such a danger, what recourse did a Great King have save to take punitive action?
So it was that Darius, looking to the lands beyond his northern frontiers, and alerted to the fractious character of a people named the Scythians, had recognised in their savagery something ominous: a susceptibility to the seductions of demons. ‘They were vulnerable, these Scythians, to the Lie’11 – and so Darius, ever the dutiful servant of Ahura Mazda, had made sure to pacify them. In similar manner, after capturing Athens, Xerxes had ordered the temples on the Acropolis be scoured clean with fire; and only then, once he could be certain that they were purged of demons, had he permitted the gods of the city to be offered sacrifice once again. Power such as the Great King wielded was something unprecedented. More than any other ruler before him, he was able, by virtue of the sheer immensity of his territorial possessions, to believe himself charged with a universal mission. The word he gave to his empire, bumi, was synonymous with the world. The Athenians, when they thought to defy Xerxes’ claim to Europe by crucifying one of his servants beside the Hellespont, only confirmed themselves as adherents of the Lie.
Beyond the physical apparatus of the Great King’s vast empire, then, beyond the palaces, and the barrack rooms, and the way-posts on dusty roads, there shimmered a sublime and momentous conceit. The dominion forged by Cyrus and secured by Darius served as a mirror to the heavens. To resist it or to subvert it was to defy Truth itself. Never before had a monarchy with ambitions to rule the world endowed its sway with quite so potent an ethical character. The reach of the Great King’s power, which extended to the limits of east and west, even cast its light into the grave. ‘These are the words of Darius, the King: that whosoever worships Ahura Mazda will be blessed with divine favour, both living and dead.’12 Perhaps, as he endured his death-agonies, Artaÿctes was able to find comfort in such a reflection.
Certainly, the news of his execution would only have confirmed the Great King in his disdain for the Athenians as terrorists. Truth or falsehood; light or darkness; order or chaos: these were the choices that humans everywhere had to make.