This branding of his identity upon the land of the Saka proclaimed an imperious dual message. No more would the untamed war-bands beyond the Jaxartes be permitted to raid southward; and no more would those behind it have to fear for their security. Cyrus’ strategy had always been to menace his enemies and to reassure his slaves—and by 540 BC, with the eastern frontier stabilized, he felt ready to put it to its ultimate test. Returning to the Zagros, he fixed his predatory gaze on that supreme goal of every conqueror’s ambition, the wealthy flatlands of what is now southern Iraq, stretching from Assyria to the Persian Gulf, the stage for splendid cities since the very dawn of time. No man could truly be hailed as the master of the world until he had subdued its ancient heartland—as Cyrus, the arriviste, was all too well aware. Yet he would also have known that its inhabitants were no backward frontiersmen, untutored in the propaganda of despots. Indeed, it was they who regarded the Persians as savages. Cyrus, a man who specialized in overturning hostile preconceptions, chose to meet this new challenge head on. Launching his invasion of enemy territory, he claimed to be defending it; leading an immense army, he affected to be an avatar of peace. And everywhere, strongholds met him with an opening of their gates.
In truth, Persian firepower being what it was, this had been the only sane policy for the defenders to adopt. The one army which sought to defy the invasion had been summarily obliterated; for Cyrus, as he had shown in Lydia, was not averse to the occasional atrocity when he felt that it might serve a salutary purpose. Yet his preference, by and large, was to live up to the high-flying claims of his propaganda. His regime once established, there were no more pogroms. Executions were kept to the barest minimum. His diktats were couched in a moderate and gracious tone. To cities crowded with ancient temples, and scented with incense, Cyrus presented himself as a model of “righteousness and justice,” and his “universal lordship” as a payback from the gods.28 But which gods, precisely? Coolly, Cyrus posed as the favorite of them all. Assorted priesthoods duly scrabbled to hail him as their own, and assorted peoples as the heir to their customs and concerns—the perfect gilding on his mastery of the world. A glorious thing, for the clan chief of the upstart Achaemenids, to be the patron of ancient cities such as Ur and Uruk. Not even in their records, although they reached back to the dawn of time, could be found another man who had risen quite so fast, so far.
To many, inevitably, there appeared something fearsome, even monstrous, about this prodigy. When Cyrus at last fell in battle he was seventy, his appetite for conquest still unassuaged, for his death had come north of the Jaxartes, far beyond the limits he had once set on his own ambitions.29 In her triumph, the queen of the tribe which had killed him was said to have decapitated his corpse, and dropped the head into a blood-filled wineskin, so that the old man’s thirst might glut itself at last. This was to cast Cyrus as a spirit of the kind that haunted the imaginings of the Near East, a demon of the night, eternally hungry for human flesh. Among those who had submitted to him, however, a quite different tradition would be preserved. Cyrus, the man who had convulsed the world, would be remembered with an almost unqualified admiration, for his exceptional nobility of character, and as the architect of a universal peace. For centuries afterward, even among its bitterest enemies, the glow of its founder’s memory would suffuse the empire of the Persians. “He eclipsed all other monarchs, either before him, or since.” Such was the verdict of Xenophon, an Athenian, writing almost two centuries after Cyrus’ death. “No matter whom he conquered, he would inspire in them a deep longing to please him, and to bask in his good opinion. They found themselves longing to be guided by his rulings—his, and no one else’s.”30 An astonishing verdict, it might be thought—and yet Cyrus had indeed seduced as well as forced himself on the world, persuading a host of different peoples that he understood them, respected them and desired their love. No empire had ever before been raised on such foundations. No conqueror had ever before displayed such clemency, such restraint.
This had been the genius of Cyrus—and his reward had been dominion on a scale beyond all dreams.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
He died in the summer of 529 BC. His corpse, redeemed from the tribe that had killed him, was brought back to Persia, where an immense stone tomb stood waiting to receive it. This had been raised, according to legend, on the location of the decisive defeat of Astyages, and was just one of a number of structures which Cyrus had sponsored in the area. Less a city than an assemblage of palaces, pavilions and gardens, the site certainly bore ample witness to the scale of the Persians’ greatness—but it also suggested just how disorientating and precipitous their rise had been. Beyond the masonry, herds of livestock still roamed the bleakness of the open hills and plains. Winds gusting across the featureless landscape coated gilded doorways and columns with dust. Even the palace complex itself, despite being built of stone, conveyed in its layout more than a hint of camps and tents. Not for nothing was the site known as Pasargadae: the name of Cyrus’ tribe. It was hardly a paradox, after all, that a nomad too might have his roots.
Now, with Cyrus dead, maneuverings among the clans and tribes of Persia would affect millions. Could a successor hope to take Cyrus’ place, or was the empire of the Persians, suddenly deprived of its founder’s charisma, doomed to vanish as rapidly as it had emerged? As the chronicles of countless vanished empires bore witness, the death of a king was a moment ripe with peril for even the greatest monarchy. Cyrus, with a dynast’s natural enthusiasm for progeniture, had fathered three daughters and—more significantly—two sons; but this guaranteed nothing. To a great empire as to a nomad’s clan, a superfluity of heirs might prove quite as perilous as none.