First, some clarification: when Aeschines recounted the sack of Persepolis to you, he really meant the sack of the town adjacent to the citadel. This was a settlement built largely of mud brick, and contained the houses of the servants who ran the palace, and the artisans who continued to work on it up until the day it was destroyed. Parsa was, in fact, never a completed work, and was never truly lived in. Let it be a testament to its opulence that the greed of the Macedonian soldiers could be satisfied in this way. It was the richest sack many of them had seen in a lifetime of looting Greek cities, and they had seen only the servant’s quarters!
No-the real treasures were stolen by a quieter, more discriminating bunch. As the glow of the fires below the citadel began to rise, and screams of the raped and murdered Persians filtered through the tiled walls, Alexander and his friends embarked on a torchlight tour of Darius’s palace with the Great King’s chamberlain. It took all night to get through the maze of pylons and palaces, armories and stables. The gardens alone had no parallel in Greece or Macedon, with great reflecting pools flanked with pomegranate trees, jujube, willows and tamarisk, and stocked with enormous carp that practically nuzzled one’s hand to be fed. Peafowl and ibises strode the paths, and hidden among the topiaries, our guide said, there remained a single survivor from the Great King’s collection of tame Indian tigers.
The greatest excitement was reserved, of course, for the treasuries. It was the big room, the vault of the great Darius, that contained the fortune in bullion I have mentioned-some 120,000 talents’ worth.
The chamber was too dark for the party’s taste, so a brazier was lit with whatever fuel was at hand. By its light, they marveled at a spectacle of gleaming metal that inspired some, such as Ptolemy, to drop to their knees in a fit of pecuniary ecstasy. More braziers were ordered, and more fuel to light up the treasure, until their Persian guide lost his voice, his face having gone white.
“What is it?” asked Hephaestion, smiling.
“We have burned the original manuscript of the Avesta-12,000 leaves in letters of gold, dictated by Zarathushtra himself. It is a thousand years old.”
“How old is this?” asked Alexander, holding up a gilded drinking cup.
The King’s taste, you see, was different: gold interested him more when it plated or gilded fancy things, such as the flatware made for his table, or the fine cedar beams that held up the tapestries that would soon cool his crowned head.
The impression that I got of the place from a distance, that it was a kind of royal dollhouse, was only strengthened when I got inside. The carved gateways and palmetted columns seemed to bear no distinctive style. Or shall I say they had a kind of corporate style that was at the same time Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian, and therefore amounted to neither. Though we understood construction of the citadel to have begun by the elder Darius well before the first invasion of Greece, the floors seemed unscraped by groveling retainers, the striding stone bulls unappreciated by human eyes. Not even the royal dinnerware seemed ever to have known use.
We were not prepared to find temples or sanctuaries of any kind in Persepolis, for Herodotus had written that the Persians abjured such things. We were fools to place any stock in Herodotus: there was a splendid fire temple there, reserved for the use of the Great King and his family. In design it was a windowless, orthogonal room, unadorned with any of the faux-Egyptian or Babylonian frillery we saw elsewhere. The walls were caked in a fine, black, aromatic ash that both charmed the nose and devoured all light except the glow of the sacred flame. The atmosphere was both tomb-like and intimate, like the private boudoir of Kore.
Unlike in our temples, there was no statue of their god, and the altar was inside the temple. The latter was a bed of glowing embers on an upraised platform. It is said that this fire, the Atas Bahram, had first been kindled in the days of Zarathushtra himself, centuries before, and had been carried to Pars from the east in an earthenware pot during the reign of Cyrus the Great. At first I dismissed this as a mere story. In all the years since that time, after all the invasions and upheavals, did not this Atas Bahram go out at least once?
I began to believe the legend when Parmenion announced that his scouts had captured two Persian priests travelling away from the capital in different directions. Each of these priests bore an earthenware pot with burning embers from the sacred fire. As the Zoroastrians considered the number three to be sacred, I imagine a third messenger escaped Parmenion’s screen. The embers he carried might already have kindled another Atas Bahram, safely hidden from the Macedonians, as it was from the invading Assyrians, Medes, Cimmerians, Scythians and Babylonians in their time.
As it was, Alexander had no interest in extinguishing the altar. On the contrary, he declared that it looked unhealthily weak! On his orders, wooden chairs and tables were fetched from elsewhere in the palace, broken up, and tossed on the altar so that it flared up like a proper campfire. The priests dared show neither approval nor disapproval at this, but stood off to the side smiling tightly, their shadows dancing on the bare walls behind them.
The climax of the tour was the royal throne room. It was known as the Hall of One Hundred Columns, which testified to the literal truth. Yet here again the combination of enormous expense and practical uselessness was striking, for at no place in the Hall was a view of the throne unobstructed by a column. This could only have been the work of a deliberate but perversely alien mind.
As Alexander faced the throne of the Great King, he saw that someone had toppled a large statue of Darius’s ancestor, Xerxes. Then, as he was wont to do at dramatic moments, he mused conspicuously.
“Shall I set you back on your feet, Xerxes, because the heart of a lion beat in your chest? Or shall you lie there as a villain, because of your crimes against the Greeks?”
It seemed a good question, but not one Alexander cared to answer, for he was already distracted by the carved device of the winged disk over the throne. He pointed at the inscription underneath.
“What does that say?” he asked the chamberlain.
“It says that the Great King of Kings has built a palace befitting Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra, and that the gods approve of what he has done in the name of asha, or righteousness. It says that as Ahuramazda honors the King as his earthly counterpart in the great struggle against the daevas, his home will never suffer its degradation.”
“The daevas?”
The chamberlain, looking uncomfortable, took a long time before answering.
“They are minions of the Hostile Spirit, Angra Mainyu. They are bringers of chaos and destruction.”
At this Alexander gave only a nod, and passed the throne by without sitting in it. It may have been the warning by Ahuramazda that dissuaded him, but more likely he did not want to risk a repetition of his misadventure on the throne at Susa, where his legs were too short to reach the floor.
Alexander lingered at Persepolis for almost five months. As the exhilaration of this conquest wore off, the King’s determination to keep going wavered. His mandate from the Greek cities, after all, had provided only for the freeing of the Ionians. His rant at the Persian envoy notwithstanding, he came to worry that everything else he had done, from the destruction of the Persian army three times over to the occupation of Babylon to the seizure of the royal seat, smacked of hubris. To change his mind, Hephaestion, Ptolemy, and the rest came at him from every side, arguing that to break off the offensive then would invite a counter-attack. If Darius did not return this year, or next, he would in ten years, or twenty. And besides, of what concern to a god such as Alexander are the bleats of urban gossips back home? Even to a mortal king like Philip, those people counted for little.