Takht-e Jamshid, people had begun to call the ruin—“Jamshid’s Throne.”d Yet, even with responsibility for its destruction firmly pinned on a brain-eating demon, the name of the true, the authentic culprit remained one fit to chill the blood of any devout Zoroastrian. Although the priests of Ohrmazd had long since forgotten what every Greek historian took for granted, that it was in fact no demon who had burned Persepolis, but rather an earthly warlord, their amnesia was far from total. In Persia, the name of the conqueror whose drunken arson had left the palace a smoking ruin had most certainly not been forgotten. Eight hundred years on, and the fame of Alexander the Great still blazed undiminished. To many, and not only in the West, he remained a figure of incomparable glamour: king of a once-backward Greek kingdom by the time he was twenty; master of the empire founded by Cyrus five years later; dead, having marched to the limits of the world, at the age of thirty-three. Even the Persians, whose dominion he had overthrown, were not wholly immune to the allure of his glory. At the royal court a craze was brewing for romances in which the great man, somewhat improbably, featured as the son of a Persian king. There were plenty in Iranshahr, however, less than thrilled by this innovation. To the Zoroastrian priesthood, in particular, any notion that the conqueror of their country might have been a hero was not merely anathema but heresy. The memories preserved by the mowbeds of Alexander were terrible ones: of a criminal, a vandal, accursed. “For he entered Iranshahr with terrible violence, war and torture, and killed the King, and destroyed and razed to the ground the court and all the kingdom.”61 Not exactly a demon, perhaps—but demonic, certainly. Even the non-existence of ancient books of Zoroastrian lore was attributed by the priests, not to the fact that they had only just come up with a script capable of recording their holy scriptures, but to Alexander’s imagined taste for burning libraries. There was just a single mercy, in short: that the fiend had ended up “plunged into hell.”62
And the evil he had done lived after him. For centuries, Iranshahr had been left broken and humiliated. Even Ardashir and his successors, despite their self-evident status as favourites of Ohrmazd, had found it impossible to fulfil their stated ambition—“to restore to the Persian people the complete extent of their vanished empire.”63 Long gone Alexander might be—and yet the path back to their one-time western provinces remained firmly blocked. A second superpower, no less vaunting in its pretensions than Iranshahr itself, had come to occupy all the lands around the Mediterranean once ruled by Cyrus. This empire, however, was not Alexander’s. Indeed, it was not even Greek. Rather, it had been won by a people whose origins lay far to the west, in an iron-jawed city by the name of Rome. More than half a millennium had passed now since the winning by the Romans of lands that had originally provided Alexander with his own first taste of global conquest: Greece and Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. This, in itself, would have been more than sufficient to raise Persian hackles; but even more insufferable was the fact that the Romans seemed to have inherited Alexander’s appetite for pushing ever further eastwards. Time and again, the emperors of “Rum”—the Caesars, as they were known—had attempted to topple the dominion of the Persians; and time and again, the Persians had succeeded in “annihilating their invasions.”64
As a result, when Kavad scouted around for some heroic exploit that might demonstrate to his dubious and unhappy subjects the potency of his farr, he did not have far to look. Nothing, not even a wholesale slaughter of Hephthalites, could possibly rival the glory to be gleaned from humbling a Caesar. Bragging rights over the Romans offered a Shahanshah the ultimate in self-esteem. The House of Sasan had grasped this right from the start. Ten miles to the west of Persepolis, chiselled into a rock face where the ancient kings of Persia had once carved out their tombs, could be seen a splendid portrait of the son of Ardashir, Shapur I, crowned and imperious on his war-horse, while before him—one on bended knee, the other raising his hands in pitiful submission—two Caesars grovelled for mercy. There was more to this relief, however, than simple boasting. To defeat Rome was to defeat the successors of Alexander. It was to affirm that good would triumph over evil, that the light of Truth would ultimately banish the darkness of the Lie. To a king such as Kavad—a self-confessed heretic—this offered a tantalising opportunity. What better way of demonstrating to the fretful and suspicious Zoroastrian Church that he was truly touched by the favour of the heavens than by winning a glorious victory over the Romans, those heirs of Alexander?
And the mark of his success, as well as glory, would be loot. Such, at any rate, was Kavad’s confident expectation. The land of Rum, as everyone knew, was quite sensationally rich. The Shahanshah would never have acknowledged it openly, but there was, in his decision to invade the West, just a hint of jealousy. While Rome had long served the Persians as a worthy—indeed the ultimate—foe, it had also encouraged in the House of Sasan a certain competitive sense of upward mobility. Shapur I, whose drubbings of a whole succession of Caesars had left him with an immense reservoir of prisoners, had set about exploiting the know-how of his captives with a particular gusto. Whether it was wall-paintings in the royal throne room, or a network of massive dams, or entire cities planted in the Iranian outback, his infant empire had been given a decidedly Roman makeover. Two centuries on, and the ambition of the Sasanian monarchy to emulate its western rival had diminished not a jot. A peculiarly ostentatious marker of this was Kavad’s love of bathing. Here, in the opinion of many Persians, and especially the mowbeds, was a thoroughly shocking innovation—one that positively reeked of the Roman. This, though, for Kavad himself, was precisely the point. More, very much more, than issues of personal hygiene were at stake. To imitate Rome would be to overtake her. Truly to become wealthy required learning all the lessons of Roman greatness. Even as Iranshahr tottered, Kavad’s fondness for a scrubdown served to signal to his people that he had his gaze fixed firmly on the future.