The Xenophile Historian

539 to 336 B.C.

	The Return to Jerusalem
	Kambujiya (Cambyses) II
	Darayavahush (Darius) I
	Khshayarsha (Xerxes) I
	Artakhshassa (Artaxerxes) I
	Darius II
	Artaxerxes II
	Artaxerxes III
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Individual Jews also prospered. Some of them, like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, rose to high positions in the government. Others went into business--the Jewish talent for handling finances first appears in this period--the most successful bankers in Babylon, the Egibi family, may have been Jewish. When the Jews finally got the opportunity to go home, most of them chose to stay in Babylon, rather than uproot their prosperous careers.⁽²⁾ Still, some exiles looked to the day when they could again live in the land of their forefathers, and worship at God's Temple in Jerusalem.

When Cyrus took Babylon one of his first acts was to allow all captive peoples to return to the homelands from which they had been deported. He also restored the idols which had been taken from the temples of these peoples. There was no "idol" for the God of Israel, but Cyrus returned the golden cups and other temple furnishings that Nebuchadnezzar had confiscated. Those Jews who wanted to go to Jerusalem left with the blessing of Cyrus, and about 43,000 of them did so between 538 and 536 B.C. They found a land full of ruins and wild beasts, gone to seed after a lifetime of neglect. The returnees immediately started working on rebuilding Jerusalem, but the people who had lived there while the Jews were away, the half-Jewish Samaritans, opposed what they were doing. They sent to Susa letters accusing the Jews of plotting rebellion, and construction on Jerusalem was ordered stopped until an investigation could be made.

In just over a decade, Cyrus had overthrown three of the four greatest nations of his day, and his policy of tolerance gained him loyal subjects in the most distant corners of his realm. He also wanted to conquer the fourth major kingdom, Egypt, but troubles on the opposite end of the empire required his attention first. A tribe of Scythians, the Massagetae, led by a queen named Tomyris, was raiding the Central Asian territories. Leaving his son Cambyses behind to get the Egyptian campaign ready, Cyrus marched into Kazakhstan in 529 B.C. to deal with Tomyris. It was the only battle he ever lost. The raiders killed him, and his body was brought back to Pasargadae and placed in a simple mausoleum. Pasargadae became a sacred town afterwards. All of the Persian kings after Cyrus were crowned there, and once a month priests sacrificed a horse at the tomb of Cyrus in his honor.

Kambujiya (Cambyses) II

At first Cambyses tolerated native customs; he did not put on his Egyptian inscriptions the usual opening line used by Persian kings everywhere else: "The great god, Ahura Mazda, chose me." Instead he legitimized himself in Egyptian eyes by calling himself pharaoh and by adopting one of the pharaohs' time-honored titles: "Offspring of Ra." He also paid homage to the Egyptian gods, and recruited Egyptians into the new administration. The conquest of Egypt also brought Egypt's tributary states, Libya and Cyprus, into the Persian orbit. Cambyses planned three campaigns to conquer the rest of Africa, but they were all failures.

After that, according to Herodotus, the king went insane and started persecuting the Egyptian religion. This seems like the height of foolishness, considering the importance Cyrus placed on tolerance, unless the king was really crazy.⁽³⁾ When news arrived from Persia that his brother Smerdis was alive and had usurped the throne, Cambyses rushed home to deal with the crisis. Before he arrived he died of an accidental leg wound, possibly self-inflicted.

Darayavahush (Darius) I

At this point Darius decided that the "people's king" attitude taken by Cyrus was no longer practical for the mightiest ruler in the world. He surrounded himself with a great deal of ceremony, calling himself the Great King, the King of Kings, who strongly supported the rule of law "so that the stronger does not smite nor destroy the weak." Every year at the beginning of spring, processions came from every corner of the empire to present to the king New Year's "gifts"; actually the government had specified the nature and amount of the tribute. The gifts brought included grain, precious metals, ebony, ivory, rare furs and textiles. Arabia sent frankincense, Libya sent antelopes, and Armenia sent prize stallions. Babylon brought enough silver to pay the army's upkeep for four months, and an exotic item: 500 young eunuchs.⁽⁵⁾ During the winter the capital was at Susa, but the temperature in the land of Elam can exceed 130 degrees F. in the summer, so the whole government moved north to Ecbatana during the hotter part of the year. Darius did a great amount of building at Susa, but he wanted an even more impressive capital, so he built a new city in Anshan named Persepolis. It was from there that Xerxes and all of his successors ruled.

The main accomplishment of Darius was that he made the empire rich, to the point that later Persians remembered their early kings with this proverb: "Cyrus was a father, Cambyses was a master, and Darius was a shopkeeper." They introduced the Lydian invention of money to the rest of the empire, as gold coins called "Darics." Roads were built; the most important was the "Royal Road," which ran 1,700 miles from Sardis to Susa. On the roads at intervals of about fifteen miles (an average day's journey on foot), inns were set up to provide lodging for wayfarers. A pony express-style system left horses in each inn to keep royal messengers on the move. Darius also encouraged the introduction of useful crops into areas where they did not grow already; he brought rice from India to Iraq, sesame from Iraq to Egypt, and pistachios from Persia to Syria.⁽⁶⁾ Finally, he allowed the Jews to finish rebuilding their Temple in Jerusalem, sent ships out of the Persian Gulf to explore the Arabian and Red Seas, and completed the Nile-to-Red Sea canal that the Egyptians had started sixty years earlier.

Darius divided the empire into twenty provinces called "satrapies," and taxed them according to their population and ability to pay. Each satrap or governor lived like a little king in a palace, supported by vast agricultural estates. Periodically the king sent his personal agents, called the "Eyes and Ears of the King," to report on the actions of each satrap.

Should a satrap overstep his authority, the king could act very efficiently. Early in the reign of Darius, reports came back that the satrap of Sardis, a Persian named Oroetes, acted like an independent ruler and was likely to revolt at the first opportunity. Instead of sending an army to get rid of him, Darius dispatched an envoy to Sardis with several messages. Most of them were routine business, but when they were read aloud in the court at Sardis, the satrap's bodyguards listened with respect, since their loyalty was to Darius first and Oroetes second. The last two letters were directed right at the soldiers. The first told them to quit serving Oroetes. They promptly laid down their spears. The second called for the execution of Oroetes. The soldiers drew their swords and killed the satrap on the spot.

In his military campaigns, Darius was only moderately successful. His most successful conquest was his first, the Indus River Valley (around 518 B.C.). Two years later he invaded Europe, annexing Thrace and Macedonia. From there he turned northward against the Scythians, but the Scythians ran away, refusing to stay in one place and fight the Persians. Darius came home from the Ukraine empty-handed, and that shook the Persian reputation so much that the Ionian Greeks considered revolting. They did so in 499 B.C., marching inland and burning Sardis. The Greek city-state of Athens supported the Ionians, but by 494 Darius put them down. At this point Darius decided that he had gone after the wrong people when he invaded Europe. Now he was so mad at Athens that he shot an arrow straight up into the air that carried a prayer to Ahura Mazda for victory against that city. Then he had one of his servants remind him of Athens three times every evening: "Sire, remember the Athenians."

In 490 B.C., he dispatched a small seaborne expedition to punish Athens. The victory of Athens over this force at Marathon was so unexpected that it amazed the Athenians themselves. Marathon looms large as one of the most important moments in the rise of Western civilization, but Darius saw it as no more than a blow to his pride--a freak mishap that would not happen a second time. After all, two thirds of the Greek-speaking world was now under Persian domination, so how long could the rest of the Greeks hold out against his overwhelming numbers? He made preparations for a larger invasion of Greece, but died before he was ready.

Khshayarsha (Xerxes) I

A few years after restoring peace in the empire, the army was ready for the second campaign against Greece, and the honor-conscious Xerxes felt committed to accomplish what Darius could not do. The invasion got underway in 480 B.C. Thessaly fell without a struggle but the main Greek army made a last stand in the narrow pass of Thermopylae that delayed the Persians considerably. After that nothing could save Attica; the Persians occupied and burned Athens.

Now there was just the Athenian fleet and the Spartan army left to deal with before the job could be considered finished. The fleet had escaped to the nearby island of Salamis, and when the attempt by Xerxes to destroy it resulted in the destruction of his own fleet, he felt he had to abandon the offensive. He returned home, leaving a garrison of 80,000 men in Attica, but in the following year the Spartan hoplites came out and smashed it (the battle of Plataea, 479).

After these disasters, the Greeks went on the offensive against Persia. The Athenian fleet seized the Hellespont, cutting off the Persians that were still in Macedonia and Thrace and reopening the Black Sea to Greek shipping. By 466 B.C. the Greeks had retaken all Persian territory in Europe. Europe had thrown Asia back beyond the straits.

Xerxes gave up all thought of revenge, and never again left his three capitals. At Persepolis and Susa he completed the work left unfinished by his father, and spent his last years building some colossal new structures. Hemmed in and oppressed by his eunuchs, he was finally assassinated in his magnificent palace.

Both the Bible and Herodotus describe Xerxes as a mercurial character, whose mood could swing dangerously and without warning. According to Herodotus, when he marched against Greece, he met a Lydian noble named Pythius who offered his personal fortune of 3,993,000 Darics to finance the war effort. This show of support so moved Xerxes that he told him to keep the money and gave him a gift of 7,000 Darics as well, increasing his wealth to an even four million. A little later Pythius sought the king and made a personal request; he wanted the eldest of his five sons excused from the upcoming conflict so that somebody could take care of the family estates. Xerxes found the son in question, ordered him cut in two, and marched the army between the halves!

At the Hellespont a bridge was made by tying boats together. When a storm broke up the boat-bridge, Xerxes had the engineers beheaded, ordered the water of the Hellespont beaten with three hundred lashes of the whip, and cast a pair of fetters into the water as a symbol of its submission. Then a second boat-bridge was built, with warnings to do it right this time.

Xerxes appears to have been the Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther. When his virtuous wife, Vashti, refused to be displayed at a drunken party, he divorced her and held a beauty contest to pick a new queen. A Jewish woman named Esther won, and she saved her people from extermination at the hands of an early anti-Semite, a courtier named Haman. Today the Jewish holiday of Purim commemorates her and this victory of the Jews over their enemies.

Artakhshassa (Artaxerxes) I

During the reign of Artaxerxes a Jewish scribe named Ezra led 1,500 exiles back to Jerusalem. There he persuaded the Jews to follow the law of Moses more carefully, and thus became the man who established Judaism in its present-day form. About the same time, Nehemiah, the king's cupbearer, secured a leave of absence so he could rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Around 400 B.C. the prophet Malachi gave some final words about sacrifices, and on that note the Old Testament finishes.

Artaxerxes never led his troops in person, and toward the end of his life he lost interest in Greek affairs. Most of his successors, being equally content, did the same. None of the later Achaemenids showed much initiative or intelligence. Since the empire died slowly, rather than collapsing suddenly, we must give credit for Persia's success to Cyrus, Cambyses and Darius I for the system they established, and to the many bureaucrats who kept it running smoothly afterwards.

An example of such a bureaucrat was Arsames, the satrap of Babylon between 460 and 405 B.C. After the rebellion of Inaros was crushed, the Persians put him in charge of Syria, Israel and Egypt along with Iraq, making him a very powerful governor indeed. He hired and fired subordinate governors according to their ability to collect taxes, and ruthlessly confiscated the estates of those who did not pay what they owed, adding them to his own already sizeable real estate holdings. Naturally his greedy behavior made him unpopular among his subjects, but there was no trouble in his satrapies until his long-lasting administration ended.

In the century and a half between Xerxes I and Alexander the Great, trade and cultural contacts with the Greeks increased. Greek scholars visited Egypt, Iraq, and Iran to learn the history and wisdom of the East. It was in the time of Artaxerxes I that Herodotus wrote his History, and contact with Babylonian scholars probably helped Democritus invent his atomic theory. Since the only reliable soldiers in the Persian army were the king's bodyguards⁽⁷⁾, Greek mercenaries served the empire with increasing frequency. The Greeks gained control of the Persian trade network, as evidenced by the growth of the nearest cities to them; at this point commerce replaces politics as the main reason for a city's success. The Persians, still shepherds at heart, did not promote urban growth in the eastern half of their empire or even sustain it at the Assyrian level. As a result, after 400 B.C. Babylon was the only city with a population above 30,000 that was not near the Mediterranean basin.

Darius II

The reign of Darius II was marred by intrigue, corruption, and revolts, including one in Media, which was dangerously close to home. Again Persian gold was used against Greece, this time to prolong the Peloponnesian War. When the satrap of Sardis revolted, with the support of Athens, Sparta came to the support of the Great King, lending mercenaries to crush the rebellion. After that Persia paid for the construction of a Spartan fleet to challenge the Athenians at sea, and together they attacked the allies of Athens in Ionia. Finally, when they blockaded the Hellespont and cut off Athens from her source of grain, the Athenians sued for peace. Gold had won another victory.

At home Darius picked his eldest son Artaxerxes to be the next king. Queen Parysatis, however, favored her own son Cyrus, and obtained for him the satrapies of Lydia, Phrygia and Cappadocia, and command of all the troops in those areas. That prince, known as Cyrus the Younger after this, was thus powerful enough to claim the throne for himself.

Artaxerxes II

The battle of Cunaxa.

On the western front, Athens was no longer a danger, but Sparta definitely was. Agesilaus, the Spartan king, invaded Ionia, and the nearest satraps spent too much time quarreling among themselves to stop the Spartans. The Persians ended up forming a new alliance with Athens, and Persian gold was spent on another Greek fleet, this time commanded by an Athenian admiral named Conon; gold was also used to start a rebellion on Sparta's home ground. The diplomacy worked, and Sparta recalled Agesilaus at the height of his success. He remarked that he had retreated before 10,000 archers who were not real soldiers but images stamped on Persian coins.

By 387 B.C., both Athens and Sparta were exhausted, and Artaxerxes stepped in to proclaim the "Peace of the Great King." The Greeks were forced to give all of Ionia back to the Persians and they promised to keep the balance of power in Greece itself. Later Thebes rose to become the dominant city-state in Greece, and Artaxerxes helped them smash both Athens and Sparta. What Darius I and Xerxes had failed to do with their war machine, Artaxerxes II now did with the unscrupulous use of gold.

The Persians had resolved the Greek situation to their satisfaction, but elsewhere the empire lost ground. When Artaxerxes became king, Egypt's governor declared independence. Persia engineered at least two coups to put a pro-Persian native on the Egyptian throne, but after a while each ruler fell under the influence of nationalism and declared himself pharaoh of an independent Egypt. Finally two outright invasions were attempted, but both failed miserably. As a result, Egypt was independent from 404 to 342 B.C., and Egyptians remember this period as their last years of native rule for twenty-three centuries.

At some point during the reign of Artaxerxes II or III, India also drifted into independence. We don't know exactly when that happened, but all traces of the Persian administration were gone by the time Alexander the Great entered that region.

On the heels of the defeat in Egypt came an enormous problem: the revolt of the satraps. Under the later Achaemenids many satrapies became hereditary offices, powerful enough that the king could not control or even supervise them (the "Eyes and Ears of the King" were only a memory by this time). One by one every satrap west of the Euphrates revolted; Aroandas of Armenia went so far as to stamp his own coins as a direct challenge to the Great King. The general plan of the rebels was to launch a combined attack. They invited the Egyptian pharaoh Tachos to participate, and Tachos hired Agesilaus and some Spartan mercenaries. Another satrap, Datames of Syria, went ahead of the others and crossed the Euphrates. Tacho and Agesilaus advanced as far as Sidon before a coup in Egypt forced both Egyptians and Greeks to drop out of the war. That allowed Artaxerxes to divide and defeat his remaining enemies, and put the pieces of the empire together again. Several satraps, including Aroandas, were actually forgiven and allowed to remain in their jobs. How different would have been the wrath of Darius! Probably it was because lawlessness and unrest continued in many areas after the rebellion ended; the satraps certainly had more control over local events than Artaxerxes had in his empire.

Artaxerxes III

Artaxerxes was poisoned by his physician, at the order of a eunuch named Bagoas. Bagoas made Arses (338-336) the next king, in hopes of being the power behind the throne. When Arses did not bend to his will Bagoas poisoned him also. So many members of the royal family had been killed off by this time that the closest relative to the late king was Darius III, a 45-year-old satrap from Armenia and grandnephew to Artaxerxes II. The first thing Darius did was to secure his position by poisoning the kingmaker. Yet his coronation also marked the beginning of the end of the empire, for in the same year that Darius III became king of Persia, Alexander the Great became king of Macedonia and Greece.

2. Those who stayed behind became a sizeable community of Iraqi Jews, who later wrote the Babylonian Talmud. They did not go to Israel until they were forced out of Iraq in 1948 A.D.

3. Scholars now suggest that Egyptian priests exaggerated what happened, and that Cambyses merely cut back on the lavish contributions the pharaohs had always given to the temples. However, we know for a fact that he increased the appropriation for the main temple in Sais, Egypt's most recent capital. We have a statue from a priest of that temple named Udjahorresne, covered with hieroglyphics expressing his support for Cambyses. Nor was he alone; after Udjahorresne's death, a cult of personality sprang up around him.

4. The Persians had learned the use of cuneiform from the Assyrians a century earlier, and were still barely literate by the time of Darius. Before long the Persians would discard cuneiform for the more versatile Aramaic alphabet, which later evolved to become the modern Farsi (Persian) script. Because it was understood over a wider area than any other language, including Persian, Darius made Aramaic the official language of the empire.

5. We do not know the origin of eunuchs. One theory suggests that some frenzied devotees of Ishtar got carried away in worship services and castrated themselves, giving their sex organs to the sex goddess. Another theory is that some king with absolute power, thinking of men as his oxen, would geld them as needed. Whatever the case, kings noticed that men "fixed" in such a manner grew plump and passionless, and someone who was 100% aggression-free could be useful at court, especially as a harem guard. The Assyrians were the first nation we know of that employed them on a large scale, and the Old Testament mentions that institution existing in Israel and Babylon as well (e.g., see 2 Kings 9:32, 20:18, and Daniel 1). Later Roman and Chinese emperors hired them, and used so many that they corrupted the court.

6. During his war with the Greeks, Darius introduced Median alfalfa to Europe. So much did the Persians value gardening, in fact, that our word paradise comes from the Farsi pairidaeza, meaning "walled garden."

7. The king's elite guard was known as the "Immortals" because whenever one of them was killed, somebody else would be promoted on the spot to take his place. They also had the nickname of "apple bearers" because the butts of their spears were decorated with golden apples. Originally numbering 1,000, the corps of the Immortals was later increased by the Achaemenids, who thought if they had enough of them the army would be unbeatable.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball