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The Persians
buschmaster
Member Posts: 14,229 ✭✭✭
The Assyrians were the badassest of all badasses in Mesopotamia. They were everything a hollywood producer could imagine, brought to life: they drove their chariots all through Mesopotamia looting, raping, and pillaging; they subdued a conquered Mesopotamia through acts of destruction, torture, and rape on a massive scale, and gloated about it to the world; they took as much money and loot as they could carry and demanded the rest to be carried to them. and, they wore black leather.
After a time, the entire people of Mesopotamia got sick of that and united to destroy them. Every last Assyrian was annihilated, every building and house was razed to the ground, every last piece of writing and art was destroyed; the Assyrians were utterly obliterated and literally no trace of their existence remained.
The Medes were among those civilizations, and being the ancestors of the Persians, that is where the story of the Persians starts.
this is a lot of reading, but you will learn a lot. you will see how the Persians were an influence on the Romans who followed, and ultimately modern civilization; how the Greeks admired them, and how the Greeks were somewhat inferior; why Nietzsche chose Zarathustra as the character in his most popular book; how the Spartans could defeat them at Thermopylae and why the later Greek victories at Marathon and Plataea finally broke the spirit of the gargantuan Persian Empire; and how they were not the slave-masters they were portrayed to be in that most entertaining, yet inaccurate, movie "300".
if you can't do it, don't wuss out and still think you know everything. you don't.
Will Durant
The Story Of Civilization, 1935
Volume I: Our Oriental Heritage
Book I: The Near East
Chapter XIII: Persia
I. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MEDES. Their origins- Rulers- The blood treaty of Sardis- Degeneration
WHO were the Medes that had played so vital a role in the destruction of Assyria? Their origin, of course, eludes us; history is a book that one must begin in the middle. The first mention we have of them is on a tablet recording the expedition of Shalmaneser III into a country called Par sua, in the mountains of Kurdistan (837 B.C.); there, it seems, twenty-seven chieftain-kings ruled over twenty-seven states thinly populated by a people called Amadai, Madai, Medes. As Indo-Europeans they had probably come into western Asia about a thousand years before Christ, from the shores of the Caspian Sea. The Zend-Avesta, sacred scriptures of the Persians, idealized the racial memory of this ancient homeland, and described it as a paradise: the scenes of our youth, like the past, are always beautiful if we do not have to live in them again. The Medes appear to have wandered through the region of Bokhara and Samarkand, and to have migrated farther and farther south, at last reaching Persia. They found copper, iron, lead, gold and silver, marble and precious stones, in the mountains in which they made their new home; and being a simple and vigorous people they developed a prosperous agriculture on the plains and the slopes of the hills.
At Ecbatana- i.e., "a meeting-place of many ways"- in a picturesque valley made fertile by the melting snows of the highlands, their first king, Deioces, founded their first capital, adorning and dominating it with a royal palace spread over an area two-thirds of a mile square. According to an uncorroborated passage in Herodotus, Deioces achieved power by acquiring a reputation for justice, and having achieved power, became a despot. He issued regulations "that no man should be admitted to the King's presence, but every one should consult him by means of messengers; and moreover, that it should be accounted indecency for any one to laugh or spit before him. He established such ceremony about his person for this reason, . . . that he might appear to be of a different nature to them who did not see him." Under his leadership the Medes, strengthened by their natural and frugal life, and hardened by custom and environment to the necessities of war, became a threat to the power of Assyria- which repeatedly invaded Media, thought it most instructively defeated, and found it in fact never tired of fighting for its liberty. The greatest of the Median kings, Cyaxares, settled the matter by destroying Nineveh. Inspired by this victory, his army swept through western Asia to the very gates of Sardis, only to be turned back by an eclipse of the sun. The opposing leaders, frightened by this apparent warning from the skies, signed a treaty of peace, and sealed it by drinking each other's blood/ In the next year Cyaxares died, having in the course of one reign expanded his kingdom from a subject province into an empire embracing Assyria, Media and Persia. Within a generation after his death this empire came to an end.
Its tenure was too brief to permit of any substantial contribution to civilization, except in so far as it prepared for the culture of Persia. To Persia the Medes gave their Aryan language, their alphabet of thirty-six characters, their replacement of clay with parchment and pen as writing materials, their extensive use of the column in architecture, their moral code of conscientious husbandry in time of peace and limitless bravery in time of war, their Zoroastrian religion of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, their patriarchal family and polygamous marriage, and a body of law sufficiently like that of the later empire to be united with it in the famous phrase of Daniel about "the law of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not." Of their literature and their art not a stone or a letter remains.
Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages, who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied. He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways; wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry, the very horses were often caparisoned in gold. These once simple and pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees, now rode in expensive chariots from feast to feast. The early kings had prided themselves on justice; but Astyages, being displeased with Harpagus, served up to him the dismembered and headless body of his own son, and forced him to eat of it. Harpagus ate, saying that whatever a king did was agreeable to him; but he revenged himself by helping Cyrus to depose Astyages. When Cyrus, the brilliant young ruler of the Median dependency of Anshan, in Persia, rebelled against the effeminate despot of Ecbatana, the Medes themselves welcomed Cyrus' victory, and accepted him, almost without protest, as their king. By one engagement Media ceased to be the master of Persia, Persia became the master of Media, and prepared to become master of the whole Near Eastern world.
II. THE GREAT KINGS. The romantic Cyrus- His enlightened policies- Cambyses- Darius the Great- The invasion of Greece
Cyrus was one of those natural rulers at whose coronation, as Emerson said, all men rejoice. Royal in spirit and action, capable of wise administration as well as of dramatic conquest, generous to the defeated and loved by those who had been his enemies- no wonder the Greeks made him the subject of innumerable romances, and- to their minds- the greatest hero before Alexander. It is a disappointment to us that we cannot draw a reliable picture of him from either Herodotus or Xenophon. The former has mingled many fables with his history, while the other has made the Cyropcedia an essay on the military art, with incidental lectures on education and philosophy; at times Xenophon confuses Cyrus and Socrates. These delightful stories being put aside, the figure of Cyrus becomes merely an attractive ghost. We can only say that he was handsome-since the Persians made him their model of physical beauty to the end of their ancient art; that he established the Achaemenid Dynasty of "Great Kings," which ruled Persia through the most famous period of its history; that he organized the soldiery of Media and Persia into an invincible army, captured Sardis and Babylon, ended for a thousand years the rule of the Semites in western Asia, and absorbed the former realms of Assyria, Babylonia, Lydia and Asia Minor into the Persian Empire, the largest political organization of pre-Roman antiquity, and one of the best-governed in history.
So far as we can visualize him through the haze of legend, he was the most amiable of conquerors, and founded his empire upon generosity. His enemies knew that he was lenient, and they did not fight him with that desperate courage which men show when their only choice is to kill or die. We have seen how, according to Herodotus, he rescued Croesus from the funeral pyre at Sardis, and made him one of his most honored counselors; and we have seen how magnanimously he treated the Jews. The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship- that religion is stronger than the state. Instead of sacking cities and wrecking temples he showed a courteous respect for the deities of the conquered, and contributed to maintain their shrines; even the Babylonians, who had resisted him so long, warmed towards him when they found him preserving their sanctuaries and honoring their pantheon. Wherever he went in his unprecedented career he offered pious sacrifice to the local divinities. Like Napoleon he accepted indifferently all religions, and- with much better grace- humored all the gods.
Like Napoleon, too, he died of excessive ambition. Having won all the Near East, he began a series of campaigns aimed to free Media and Persia from the inroads of central Asia's nomadic barbarians. He seems to have carried these excursions as far as the Jaxartes on the north and India on the east. Suddenly, at the height of his curve, he was slain in battle with the Massagetae, an obscure tribe that peopled the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Like Alexander he conquered an empire, but did not live to organize it.
One great defect had sullied his character- occasional and incalculable cruelty. It was inherited, unmixed with Cyrus' generosity, by his half-mad son. Cambyses began by putting to death his brother and rival, Smerdis; then, lured by the accumulated wealth of Egypt, he set forth to extend the Persian Empire to the Nile. He succeeded, but apparently at the cost of his sanity. Memphis was captured easily, but an army of fifty thousand Persians sent to annex the Oasis of Ammon perished in the desert, and an expedition to Carthage failed because the Phoenician crews of the Persian fleet refused to attack a Phoenician colony. Cambyses lost his head, and abandoned the wise clemency and tolerance of his father. He publicly scoffed at the Egyptian religion, and plunged his dagger derisively into the bull revered by the Egyptians as the god Apis; he exhumed mummies and pried into royal tombs regardless of ancient curses; he profaned the temples and ordered their idols to be burned. He thought in this way to cure the Egyptians of superstition; but when he was stricken with illness- apparently epileptic convulsions- the Egyptians were certain that their gods had punished him, and that their theology was now confirmed beyond dispute. As if again to illustrate the inconveniences of monarchy, Cambyses, with a Napoleonic kick in the stomach, killed his sister and wife Roxana, slew his son Prexaspes with an arrow, buried twelve noble Persians alive, condemned Croesus to death, repented, rejoiced to learn that the sentence had not been carried out, and punished the officers who had delayed in executing it. On his way back to Persia he learned that a usurper had seized the throne and was being supported by widespread revolution. From that moment he disappears from history; tradition has it that he killed himself.
The usurper had pretended to be Smerdis, miraculously preserved from Cambyses' fratricidal jealousy; in reality he was a religious fanatic, a devotee of the early Magian faith who was bent upon destroying Zoroastrianism, the official religion of the Persian state. Another revolution soon deposed him, and the seven aristocrats who had organized it raised one of their number, Darius, son of Hystaspes, to the throne. In this bloody way began the reign of Persia's greatest king.
Succession to the throne, in Oriental monarchies, was marked not only by palace revolutions in strife for the royal power, but by uprisings in subject colonies that grasped the chance of chaos, or an inexperienced ruler, to reclaim their liberty. The usurpation and assassination of "Smerdis" gave to Persia's vassals an excellent opportunity: the governors of Egypt and Lydia refused submission, and the provinces of Susiana, Babylonia, Media, Assyria, Armenia, Sacia and others rose in simultaneous revolt. Darius subdued them with a ruthless hand. Taking Babylon after a long siege, he crucified three thousand of its leading citizens as an inducement to obedience in the rest; and in a series of swift campaigns he "pacified" one after another of the rebellious states. Then, perceiving how easily the vast empire might in any crisis fall to pieces, he put off the armor of war, became one of the wisest administrators in history, and set himself to reestablish his realm in a way that became a model of imperial organization till the fall of Rome. His rule gave western Asia a generation of such order and prosperity as that quarrelsome region had never known before.
He had hoped to govern in peace, but it is the fatality of empire to breed repeated war. For the conquered must be periodically reconquered, and the conquerors must keep the arts and habits of camp and battlefield; and at any moment the kaleidoscope of change may throw up a new empire to challenge the old. In such a situation wars must be invented if they do not arise of their own accord; each generation must be inured to the rigors of campaigns, and taught by practice the sweet decorum of dying for one's country.
Perhaps it was in part for this reason that Darius led his armies into southern Russia, across the Bosphorus and the Danube to the Volga, to chastise the marauding Scythians; and again across Afghanistan and a hundred mountain ranges into the valley of the Indus, adding thereby extensive regions and millions of souls and rupees to his realm. More substantial reasons must be sought for his expedition into Greece. Herodotus would have us believe that Darius entered upon this historic faux pas because one of his wives, Atossa, teased him into it in bed;" but it is more dignified to believe that the Bang recognized in the Greek city-states and their colonies a potential empire, or an actual confederacy, dangerous to the Persian mastery of western Asia. When Ionia revolted and received aid from Sparta and Athens, Darius reconciled himself reluctantly to war. All the world knows the story of his passage across the ./Egean, the defeat of his army at Marathon, and his gloomy return to Persia. There, amid farflung preparations for another attempt upon Greece, he suddenly grew weak, and died.
III. PERSIAN LIFE AND INDUSTRY. The empire- The people- The language- The peasants- The imperial highways- Trade and finance
At its greatest extent, under Darius, the Persian Empire included twenty provinces or "satrapies," embracing Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia, Lydia, Phrygia, Ionia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Armenia, Assyria, the Caucasus, Babylonia, Media, Persia, the modern Afghanistan and Baluchistan, India west of the Indus, Sogdiana, Bactria, and the regions of the Massagetae and other central Asiatic tribes. Never before had history recorded so extensive an area brought under one government.
Persia itself, which was to rule these forty million souls for two hundred years, was not at that time the country now known to us as Persia, and to its inhabitants as Iran; it was that smaller tract, immediately east of the Persian Gulf, known to the ancient Persians as Pars, and to the modern Persians as Fars or Farsistan Composed almost entirely of mountains and deserts, poor in rivers, subject to severe winters and hot, arid summers, it could support its two million inhabitants only through such external contributions as trade or conquest might bring. Its race of hardy mountaineers came, like the Medes, of Indo-European stock perhaps from South Russia; and its language and early religion reveal its close kinship with those Aryans who crossed Afghanistan to become the ruling caste of northern India. Darius I, in an inscription at Nakshi-Rustam, described himself as "a Persian, the son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan descent." The Zoroastrians spoke of their primitive land as Airy ana-vaejo- "the Aryan home." Strabo applied the name Ariana to what is now called by essentially the same word- Iran.
The Persians were apparently the handsomest people of the ancient Near East. The monuments picture them as erect and vigorous, made hardy by their mountains and yet refined by their wealth, with a pleasing symmetry of features, an almost Greek straightness of nose, and a certain nobility of countenance and carriage. They adopted for the most part the Median dress, and later the Median ornaments. They considered it indecent to reveal more than the face; clothing covered them from turban, fillet or cap to sandals or leather shoes. Triple drawers, a white undergarment of linen, a double tunic, with sleeves hiding the hands, and a girdle at the waist, kept the population warm in winter and hot in summer. The king distinguished himself with embroidered trousers of a crimson hue, and saffron-buttoned shoes. The dress of the women differed from that of the men only in a slit at the breast. The men wore long beards and hung their hair in curls, or, later, covered it with wigs. In the wealthier days of the empire men as well as women made much use of cosmetics; creams were employed to improve the complexion, and coloring matter was applied to the eyelids to increase the apparent size and brilliance of the eyes. A special class of "adorners," called kosmetai by the Greeks, arose as beauty experts to the aristocracy. The Persians were connoisseurs in scents, and were believed by the ancients to have invented cosmetic creams. The king never went to war without a case of costly unguents to ensure his fragrance in victory or defeat.
Many languages have been used in the long history of Persia. The speech of the court and the nobility in the days of Darius I was Old Persian- so closely related to Sanskrit that evidently both were once dialects of an older tongue, and were cousins to our own. Old Persian developed on the one hand into Zend- the language of the Zend-Avesta- and on the other hand into Pahlavi, a Hindu tongue from which has come the Persian language of today. When the Persians took to writing they adopted the Babylonian cuneiform for their inscriptions, and the Aramaic alphabetic script for their documents. They simplified the unwieldly syllabary of the Babylonians from three hundred characters to thirty-six signs which gradually became letters instead of syllables, and constituted a cuneiform alphabet. Writing, however, seemed to the Persians an effeminate amusement, for which they could spare little time from love, war and the chase. They did not condescend to produce literature.
The common man was contentedly illiterate, and gave himself completely to the culture of the soil. The Zend-Avesta exalted agriculture as the basic and noblest occupation of mankind, pleasing above all other labors to Ahura-Mazda, the supreme god. Some of the land was tilled by peasant proprietors, who occasionally joined several families in agricultural cooperatives to work extensive areas together. Part of the land was owned by feudal barons, and cultivated by tenants in return for a share of the crop; part of it was tilled by foreign (never Persian) slaves. Oxen pulled a plough of wood armed with a metal point. Artificial irrigation drew water from the mountains to the fields. Barley and wheat were the staple crops and foods, but much meat was eaten and much wine drunk. Cyrus served wine to his army, and Persian councils never undertook serious discussions of policy when sobert- though they took care to revise their decisions the next morning. One intoxicating drink, the haoma, was offered as a pleasant sacrifice to the gods, and was believed to engender in its addicts not excitement and anger, but righteousness and piety.
Industry was poorly developed in Persia; she was content to let the nations of the Near East practice the handicrafts while she bought their products with their imperial tribute. She showed more originality in the improvement of communications and transport. Engineers under the instructions of Darius I built great roads uniting the various capitals; one of these highways, from Susa to Sardis, was fifteen hundred miles long. The roads were accurately measured by parasangs (3.4 miles); and at every fourth parasang, says Herodotus, "there are royal stations and excellent inns, and the whole road is through an inhabited and safe country." At each station a fresh relay of horses stood ready to carry on the mail, so that, though the ordinary traveler required ninety days to go from Susa to Sardis, the royal mail moved over the distance as quickly as an automobile party does now- that is, in a little less than a week. The larger rivers were crossed by ferries, but the engineers could, when they wished, throw across the Euphrates, even across the Hellespont, substantial bridges over which hundreds of sceptical elephants could pass in safety. Other roads led through the Afghanistan passes to India, and made Susa a halfway house to the already fabulous riches of the East. These roads were built primarily for military and governmental purposes, to facilitate central control and administration; but they served also to stimulate commerce and the exchange of customs, ideas, and the indispensable superstitions of mankind. Along these roads, for example, angels and the Devil passed from Persian into Jewish and Christian mythology.
Navigation was not so vigorously advanced as land transportation; the Persians had no fleet of their own, but merely engaged or conscripted the vessels of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Darius built a great canal uniting Persia with the Mediterranean through the Red Sea and the Nile, but the carelessness of his successors soon surrendered this achievement to the shifting sands. When Xerxes royally commanded part of his naval forces to circumnavigate Africa, it turned back in disgrace shortly after passing through the Pillars of Hercules. Commerce was for the most part abandoned to foreigners- Babylonians, Phoenicians and Jews; the Persians despised trade, and looked upon a market place as a breeding-ground of lies. The wealthy classes took pride in supplying most of their wants directly from their own fields and shops, not contaminating their fingers with either buying or selling. Payments, loans and interest were at first in the form of goods, especially cattle and grain; coinage came later from Lydia. Darius issued gold and silver "darics" stamped with his features, and valued at a gold-to-silver ratio of 13.5 to 1. This was the origin of the bimetallic ratio in modern currencies.
IV. AN EXPERIMENT IN GOVERNMENT. The king- The nobles- The army- Law- A savage punishment- The capitals- The satrapies- An achievement in administration
The life of Persia was political and military rather than economic; its wealth was based not on industry but on power; it existed precariously as a little governing isle in an immense and unnaturally subject sea. The imperial organization that maintained this artefact was one of the most unique and competent in history. At its head was the king, or Khshathra -i.e., warrior; the title indicates the military origin and character of the Persian monarchy. Since lesser kings were vassal to him, the Persian ruler entitled himself "King of Kings," and the ancient world made no protest against his claim; the Greeks called him simply Basileus-The King. His power was theoretically absolute; he could kill with a word, without trial or reason given, after the manner of some very modern dictator; and occasionally he delegated to his mother or his chief wife this privilege of capricious slaughter. Few even of the greatest nobles dared offer any criticism or rebuke, and public opinion was cautiously impotent. The father whose innocent son had been shot before his eyes by the king merely complimented the monarch on his excellent archery; offenders bastinadoed by the royal order thanked His Majesty for keeping them in mind. The king might rule as well as reign, if, like Cyrus and the first Darius, he cared to bestir himself; but the later monarchs delegated most of the cares of government to noble subordinates or imperial eunuchs, and spent their time at love, dice or the chase. The court was overrun with eunuchs who, from their coigns of vantage as guards of the harem and pedagogues to the princes, stewed a poisonous brew of intrigue in every reign, The king had the right to choose his successor from among his sons, but ordinarily the succession was determined by assassination and revolution.
The royal power was limited in practice by the strength of the aristocracy that mediated between the people and the throne. It was a matter of custom that the six families of the men who had shared with Darius I the dangers of the revolt against false Smerdis, should have exceptional privileges and be consulted in all matters of vital interest. Many of the nobles attended court, and served as a council for whose advice the monarch usually showed the highest regard. Most members of the aristocracy were attached to the throne by receiving their estates from the king; in return they provided him with men and materials when he took the field. Within their fiefs they had almost complete authority- levying taxes, enacting laws, executing judgment, and maintaining their own armed forces.
The real basis of the royal power and imperial government was the army; an empire exists only so long as it retains its superior capacity to kill. The obligation to enlist on any declaration of war fell upon every able-bodied male from fifteen to fifty years of age. When the father of three sons petitioned Darius to exempt one of them from service, all three were put to death; and when another father, having sent four sons to the battlefield, begged Xerxes to permit the fifth son to stay behind and manage the family estate, the body of this fifth son was cut in two by royal order and placed on both sides of the road by which the army was to pass. The troops marched off to war amid the blare of martial music and the plaudits of citizens above the military age.
The spearhead of the army was the Royal Guard- two thousand horsemen and two thousand infantry, all nobles- whose function it was to guard the king. The standing army consisted exclusively of Persians and Medes, and from this permanent force came most of the garrisons stationed as centers of persuasion at strategic points in the empire. The complete force consisted of levies from every subject nation, each group with its own distinct language, weapons and habits of war. Its equipment and retinue was as varied as its origin: bows and arrows, scimitars, javelins, daggers, pikes, slings, knives, shields, helmets, leather cuirasses, coats of mail, horses, elephants, heralds, scribes, eunuchs, prostitutes, concubines, and chariots armed on each hub with great steel scythes. The whole mass, though vast in number, and amounting in the expedition of Xerxes to 1,800,000 men, never achieved unity, and at the first sign of a reverse it became a disorderly mob. It conquered by mere force of numbers, by an elastic capacity for absorbing casualties; it was destined to be overthrown as soon as it should. encounter a well-organized army speaking one speech and accepting one discipline. This was the secret of Marathon and Plataea.
In such a state the only law was the will of the king and the power of the army; no rights were sacred against these, and no precedents could avail except an earlier decree of the king. For it was a proud boast of Persia that its laws never changed, and that a royal promise or decree was irrevocable. In his edicts and judgments the king was supposed to be inspired by the god Ahura-Mazda himself; therefore the law of the realm was the Divine Will, and any infraction of it was an offense against the deity. The king was the supreme court, but it was his custom to delegate this function to some learned elder in his retinue. Below him was a High Court of Justice with seven members, and below this were local courts scattered through the realm. The priests formulated the law, and for a long time acted as judges; in later days laymen, even laywomen, sat in judgment. Bail was accepted in all but the most important cases, and a regular procedure of trial was followed. The court occasionally decreed rewards as well as punishments, and in considering a crime weighed against it the good record and services of the accused. The law's delays were mitigated by fixing a time-limit for each case, and by proposing to all disputants an arbitrator of their own choice who might bring them to a peaceable settlement. As the law gathered precedents and complexity a class of men arose called "speakers of the law," who offered to explain it to litigants and help them conduct their cases. Oaths were taken, and use was occasionally made of the ordeal. Bribery was discouraged by making the tender or acceptance of it a capital offense. Cambyses improved the integrity of the courts by causing an unjust judge to be flayed alive, and using his skin to upholster the judicial bench- to which he then appointed the dead judge's son.
Minor punishments took the form of flogging- from five to two hundred blows with a horsewhip; the poisoning of a shepherd dog received two hundred strokes, manslaughter ninety. The administration of the law was partly financed by commuting stripes into fines, at the rate of six rupees to a stripe. More serious crimes were punished with branding, maiming, mutilation, blinding, imprisonment or death. The letter of the law forbade any one, even the king, to sentence a man to death for a simple crime; but it could be decreed for treason, rape, sodomy, murder, "self-pollution," burning or burying the dead, intrusion upon the king's privacy, approaching one of his concubines, accidentally sitting upon his throne, or for any displeasure to the ruling house. Death was procured in such cases by poisoning, impaling, crucifixion, hanging (usually with the head down), stoning, burying the body up to the head, crushing the head between huge stones, smothering the victim in hot ashes, or by the incredibly cruel rite called "the boats":
Because the soldier Mithridates, in his drunkenness, blurted out the fact that it was he, and not the king, who should have received credit for slaying Cyrus the Younger at the battle of Cunaxa, Artaxerxes II, says Plutarch, "decreed that Mithridates should be put to death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lay down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, they offer him food, and if he refuse to eat it, they force him to do it by pricking his eyes; then, after he has eaten, they drench him with a mixture of milk and honey, pouring it not only into his mouth but all over his face. They then keep his face continually turned toward the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle upon it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired."
With these laws and this army the king sought to govern his twenty satrapies from his many capitals- originally Pasargadae, occasionally Persepolis, in summer Ecbatana, usually Susa; here, in the ancient capital of Elam, the history of the ancient Near East came full circle, binding the beginning and the end. Susa had the advantage of inaccessibility, and the disadvantages of distance; Alexander had to come two thousand miles to take it, but it had to send its troops fifteen hundred miles to suppress revolts in Lydia or Egypt. Ultimately the great roads merely paved the way for the physical conquest of western Asia by Greece and Rome, and the theological conquest of Greece and Rome by western Asia.
The empire was divided into provinces or satrapies for convenience of administration and taxation. Each province was governed in the name of the King of Kings, sometimes by a vassal prince, ordinarily by a "satrap" (ruler) royally appointed for as long a time as he could retain favor at the court. To keep the satraps in hand Darius sent to each province a general to control its armed forces independently of the governor; and to make matters trebly sure he appointed in each province a secretary, independent of both satrap and general, to report their behavior to the king. As a further precaution an intelligence service known as "The King's Eyes and Ears" might appear at any moment to examine the affairs, records and finances of the province. Sometimes the satrap was deposed without trial, sometimes he was quietly poisoned by his servants at the order of the king. Underneath the satrap and the secretary was a horde of clerks who carried on so much of the government as had no direct need of force; this body of clerks carried over from one administration to another, even from reign to reign. The king dies, but the bureaucracy is immortal.
The salaries of these provincial officials were paid not by the king but by the people whom they ruled. The remuneration was ample enough to provide the satraps with palaces, harems, and extensive hunting parks to which the Persians gave the historic name of paradise. In addition, each satrapy was required to send the king, annually, a fixed amount of money and goods by way of taxation. India sent 4680 talents, Assyria and Babylonia 1000, Egypt 700, the four satrapies of Asia Minor 1760, etc., making a total of some 14,560 talents- variously estimated as equivalent to from $160,000,000 to $218,000,000 a year. Furthermore, each province was expected to contribute to the king's needs in goods and supplies: Egypt had to furnish corn annually for 120,000 men; the Medes provided 100,000 sheep, the Armenians 30,000 foals, the Babylonians five hundred young eunuchs. Other sources of wealth swelled the central revenue to such a point that when Alexander captured the Persian capitals after one hundred and fifty years of Persian extravagance, after a hundred expensive revolts and wars, and after Darius III had carried off 8000 talents with him in his flight, he found 180,000 talents left in the royal treasuries- some $2,700,000,000.
Despite these high charges for its services, the Persian Empire was the most successful experiment in imperial government that the Mediterranean world would know before the coming of Rome- which was destined to inherit much of the earlier empire's political structure and administrative forms. The cruelty and dissipation of the later monarchs, the occasional barbarism of the laws, and the heavy burdens of taxation were balanced, as human governments go, by such order and peace as made the provinces rich despite these levies, and by such liberty as only the most enlightened empires have accorded to subject states. Each region retained its own language, laws, customs, morals, religion and coinage, and sometimes its native dynasty of kings. Many of the tributary nations, like Babylonia, Phoenicia and Palestine, were well satisfied with the situation, and suspected that their own generals and tax-gatherers would have plucked them even more ferociously. Under Darius I the Persian Empire was an achievement in political organization; only Trajan, Hadrian and. the Antonines would equal it.
V. ZARATHUSTRA. The coming of the Prophet- Persian religion before Zarathustra- The Bible of Persia- Ahura-Mazda- The good and the evil spirits- Their struggle for the possession of the world
Persian legend tells how, many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, a great prophet appeared in Airyana-vaejo, the ancient "home of the Aryans." His people called him Zarathustra; but the Greeks, who could never bear the orthography of the "barbarians" patiently, called him Zoroastres. His conception was divine: his guardian angel entered into an haoma plant, and passed with its juice into the body of a priest as the latter offered divine sacrifice; at the same time a ray of heaven's glory entered the bosom of a maid of noble lineage. The priest espoused the maid, the imprisoned angel mingled with the imprisoned ray, and Zarathustra began to be. He laughed aloud on the very day of his birth, and the evil spirits that gather around every life fled from him in tumult and terror. Out of his great love for wisdom and righteousness he withdrew from the society of men, and chose to live in a mountain wilderness on cheese and the fruits of the soil. The Devil tempted him, but to no avail. His breast was pierced with a sword, and his entrails were filled with molten lead; he did not complain, but clung to his faith in Ahura-Mazda- the Lord of Light- as supreme god. Ahura-Mazda appeared to him and gave into his hands the Avesta, or Book of Knowledge and Wisdom, and bade him preach it to mankind. For a long time all the world ridiculed and persecuted him; but at last a high prince of Iran- Vishtaspa or Hystaspes- heard him gladly, and promised to spread the new faith among his people. Thus was the Zoroastrian religion born. Zarathustra himself lived to a very old age, was consumed in a flash of lightning, and ascended into heaven.
We cannot tell how much of his story is true; perhaps some Josiah discovered him. The Greeks accepted him as historical, and honored him with an antiquity of 5500 years before their time; Berosus the Babylonian brought him down to 2000 B.C.; modern historians, when they believe in his existence, assign him to any century between the tenth and the sixth before Christ. When he appeared, among the ancestors of the Medes and the Persians, he found his people worshiping animals, ancestors, the earth and the sun, in a religion having many elements and deities in common with the Hindus of the Vedic age. The chief divinities of this pre-Zoroastrian faith were Mithra, god of the sun, Anaita, goddess of fertility and the earth, and Haoma the bull-god who, dying, rose again, and gave mankind his blood as a drink that would confer immortality; him the early Iranians worshiped by drinking the intoxicating juice of the haoma herb found on their mountain slopes. Zarathustra was shocked at these primitive deities and this Dionysian ritual; he rebelled against the "Magi" or priests who prayed and sacrificed to them; and with all the bravery of his contemporaries Amos and Isaiah he announced to the world one God- here Ahura-Mazda, the Lord of Light and Heaven, of whom all other gods were but manifestations and qualities. Perhaps Darius I, who accepted the new doctrine, saw in it a faith that would both inspire his people and strengthen his government. From the moment of his accession he declared war upon the old cults and the Magian priesthood, and made Zoroastrianism the religion of the state.
The Bible of the new faith was the collection of books in which the disciples of the Master had gathered his sayings and his prayers. Later followers called these books Avesta; by the error of a modern scholar they are known to the Occidental world as the Zend-Avesta.^ The contemporary non-Persian reader is terrified to find that the substantial volumes that survive, though much shorter than our Bible, are but a small fraction of the revelation vouchsafed to Zarathustra by his god- What remains is, to the foreign and provincial observer, a confused mass of prayers, songs, legends, prescriptions, ritual and morals, brightened now and then by noble language, fervent devotion, ethical elevation, or lyric piety. Like our Old Testament it is a highly eclectic composition. The student discovers here and there the gods, the ideas, sometimes the very words and phrases of the Rig-veda- to such an extent that some Indian scholars consider the Avesta to have been inspired not by Ahura-Mazda but by the Vedas? at other times one comes upon passages of ancient Babylonian provenance, such as the creation of the world in six periods (the heavens, the waters, the earth, plants, animals, man,) the descent of all men from two first parents, the establishment of an earthly paradise, the discontent of the Creator with his creation, and his resolve to destroy all but a remnant of it by a flood. But the specifically Iranian elements suffice abundantly to characterize the whole: the world is conceived in dualistic terms as the stage of a conflict, lasting twelve thousand years, between the god Ahura-Mazda and the devil Ahriman; purity and honesty are the greatest of the virtues, and will lead to everlasting life; the dead must not be buried or burned, as by the obscene Greeks or Hindus, but must be thrown to the dogs or to birds of prey.
The god of Zarathustra was first of all "the whole circle of the heavens" themselves. Ahura-Mazda "clothes himself with the solid vault of the firmament as his raiment; ... his body is the light and the sovereign glory; the sun and the moon are his eyes." In later days, when the religion passed from prophets to politicians, the great deity was pictured as a gigantic king of imposing majesty. As creator and ruler of the world he was assisted by a legion of lesser divinities, originally pictured as forms and powers of nature- fire and water, sun and moon, wind and rain; but it was the achievement of Zarathustra that he conceived his god as supreme over all things, in terms as noble as the Book of Job:
This I ask thee, tell me truly, O Ahura-Mazda: Who determined the paths of suns and stars- who is it by whom the moon waxes and wanes? . . . Who, from below, sustained the earth and the firmament from falling-who sustained the waters and plants- who yoked swiftness with the winds and the clouds- who, Ahura-Mazda, called forth the Good Mind?
This "Good Mind" meant not any human mind, but a divine wisdom, almost a Logos used by Ahura-Mazda as an intermediate agency of creation. Zarathustra had interpreted Ahura-Mazda as having seven aspects or qualities: Light, Good Mind, Right, Dominion, Piety, Well-being, and Immortality. His followers, habituated to polytheism, interpreted these attributes as persons (called by them amesha spent a, or immortal holy ones) who, under the leadership of Ahura-Mazda, created and managed the world; in this way the majestic monotheism of the founder became- as in the case of Christianity- the polytheism of the people. In addition to these holy spirits were the guardian angels, of which Persian theology supplied one for every man, woman and child. But just as these angels and the immortal holy ones helped men to virtue, so, according to the pious Persian (influenced, presumably, by Babylonian demonology), seven dcevas, or evil spirits, hovered in the air, always tempting men to crime and sin, and forever engaged in a war upon Ahura-Mazda and every form of righteousness. The leader of these devils was Angro-Mainyus or Ahriman, Prince of Darkness and ruler of the nether world, prototype of that busy Satan whom the Jews appear to have adopted from Persia and bequeathed to Christianity. It was Ahriman, for example, who had created serpents, vermin, locusts, ants, winter, darkness, crime, sin, sodomy, menstruation, and the other plagues of life; and it was these inventions of the Devil that had ruined the Paradise in which Ahura-Mazda had placed the first progenitors of the human race. Zara-thustra seems to have regarded these evil spirits as spurious deities, popular and superstitious incarnations of the abstract forces that resist the progress of man. His followers, however, found it easier to think of them as living beings, and personified them in such abundance that in after times the devils of Persian theology were numbered in millions.
As this system of belief came from Zarathustra it bordered upon monotheism. Even with the intrusion of Ahriman and the evil spirits it remained as monotheistic as Christianity was to be with its Satan, its devils and its angels; indeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy. The Zoroastrian conception of God might have satisfied as particular a spirit as Matthew Arnold: Ahura-Mazda was the sum-total of all those forces in the world that make for righteousness; and morality lay in cooperation with those forces. Furthermore there was in this dualism a certain justice to the contradictoriness and perversity of things, which monotheism never provided; and though the Zoroastrian theologians, after the manner of Hindu mystics and Scholastic philosophers, sometimes argued that evil was unreal, they offered, in effect, a theology well adapted to dramatize for the average mind the moral issues of life. The last act of the play, they promised, would be- for the just man- a happy ending: after four epochs of three thousand years each, in which Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman would alternately predominate, the forces of evil would be finally destroyed; right would triumph everywhere, and evil would forever cease to be. Then all good men would join Ahura-Mazda in Paradise, and the wicked would fall into a gulf of outer darkness, where they would feed on poison eternally.
VI. ZOROASTRIAN ETHICS. Man as a battlefield- The Undying Fire- Hell, Purgatory and Paradise- The cult of Mithra-The Magi- The Parsees
By picturing the world as the scene of a struggle between good and evil, the Zoroastrians established in the popular imagination a powerful supernatural stimulus and sanction for morals. The soul of man, like the universe, was represented as a battleground of beneficent and maleficent spirits; every man was a warrior, whether he liked it or not, in the army of either the Lord or the Devil; every act or omission advanced the cause of Ahura-Mazda or of Ahriman. It was an ethic even more admirable than the theology- if men must have supernatural supports for their morality; it gave to the common life a dignity and significance grander than any that could come to it from a world-view that locked upon man (in medieval phrase) as a helpless worm or (in modern terms) as a mechanical automaton. Human beings were not, to Zarathustra's thinking, mere pawns in this cosmic war; they had free will, since Ahura-Mazda wished them to be personalities in their own right; they might freely choose whether they would follow the Light or the Lie. For Ahriman was the Living Lie, and every liar was his servant.
Out of this general conception emerged a detailed but simple code of morals, centered about the Golden Rule. "That nature alone is good which shall not do unto another whatever is not good unto its own self." Man's duty, says the Avesta, is three-fold: "To make him who is an enemy a friend; to make him who is wicked righteous; and to make him who is ignorant learned." The greatest virtue is piety; second only to that is honor and honesty in action and speech. Interest was not to be charged to Persians, but loans were to be looked upon as almost sacred. The worst sin of all (in the Avestan as in the Mosaic code) is unbelief. We may judge from the severe punishments with which it was honored that scepticism existed among the Persians; death was to be visited upon the apostate without delay. The generosity and kindliness enjoined by the Master did not apply, in practice, to infidels- i.e., foreigners; these were inferior species of men, whom Ahura-Mazda had deluded into loving their own countries only in order that they should not invade Persia. The Persians, says Herodotus, "esteem themselves to be far the most excellent of men in every respect"; they believe that other nations approach to excellence according to their geographical proximity to Persia, "but that they are the worst who live farthest from them." The words have a contemporary ring, and a universal application.
Piety being the greatest virtue, the first duty of life was the worship of God with purification, sacrifice and prayer. Zoroastrian Persia tolerated neither temples nor idols; altars were erected on hill-tops, in palaces, or in the center of the city, and fires were kindled upon them in honor of Ahura-Mazda or some lesser divinity. Fire itself was worshiped as a god, Atar, the very son of the Lord of Light. Every family centered round the hearth; to keep the home fire burning, never to let it be extinguished, was part of the ritual of faith. And the Undying Fire of the skies, the Sun, was adored as the highest and most characteristic embodiment of Ahura-Mazda or Mithra, quite as Ikhnaton had worshiped it in Egypt. "The morning Sun," said the Scriptures, "must be reverenced till mid-day, and that of mid-day must be reverenced till the afternoon, and that of the afternoon must be reverenced till evening. . . . While men reverence not the Sun, the good works which they do that day are not their own." To the sun, to fire, to Ahura-Mazda, sacrifice was offered of flowers, bread, fruit, perfumes, oxen, sheep, camels, horses, * and stags; anciently, as elsewhere, human victims had been offered too. The gods received only the odor; the edible portions were kept for the priests and the worshipers, for as the Magi explained, the gods required only the soul of the victim. Though the Master abominated it, and there is no mention of it in the Avesta, the old Aryan offering of the intoxicating haoma juice to the gods continued far into Zoroastrian days; the priest drank part of the sacred fluid, and divided the remainder among the faithful in holy communion. When people were too poor to offer such tasty sacrifices they made up for it by adulatory prayer. Ahura-Mazda, like Yahveh, liked to sip his praise, and made for the pious an imposing list of his accomplishments, which became a favorite Persian litany.
Given a life of piety and truth, the Persian might face death unafraid: this, after all, is one of the secret purposes of religion. Astivihad, the god of death, finds every one, no matter where. And yet- for it is in the nature of religion to threaten and terrify as well as to console- the Persian could not look upon death unafraid unless he had been a faithful warrior in Ahura-Mazda's cause. Beyond that most awful of all mysteries lay a hell and a purgatory as well as a paradise. All dead souls would have to pass over a Sifting Bridge: the good soul would come, on the other side, to the "Abode of Song," where it would be welcomed by a "young maiden radiant and strong, with well-developed bust," and would live in happiness with Ahura-Mazda to the end of time; but the wicked soul, failing to get across, would fall into as deep a level of hell as was adjusted to its degree of wickedness. This hell was no mere Hades to which, as in earlier religions, all the dead descended, whether good or bad; it was an abyss of darkness and terror in which condemned souls suffered torments to the end of the world. If a man's virtues outweighed his sins he would endure the cleansing of a temporary punishment; if he had sinned much but had done good works, he would suffer for only twelve thousand years, and then would rise into heaven. Already, the good Zoroastrians tell us, the divine consummation of history approaches: the birth of Zarathustra began the last world-epoch of three thousand years; after three prophets of his seed have, at intervals, carried his doctrine throughout the world, the Last Judgment will be pronounced, the Kingdom of Ahura-Mazda will come, and Ahriman and all the forces of evil will be utterly destroyed. Then all good souls will begin life anew in a world without evil, darkness or pain. "The dead shall rise, life shall return to the bodies, and they shall breathe again; . . . the whole physical world shall become free from old age and death, from corruption and decay, forever and ever."
Here again, as in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we hear the threat of that awful Last Judgment which seems to have passed from Persian to Jewish eschatology in the days of the Persian ascendancy in Palestine. It was an admirable formula for frightening children into obeying their parents; and since one function of religion is to ease the difficult and necessary task of disciplining the young by the old, we must grant to the Zoroastrian priests a fine professional skill in the brewing of theology. All in all it was a splendid religion, less warlike and bloody, less idolatrous and superstitious, than the other religions of its time; and it did not deserve to die so soon.
For a while, under Darius I, it became the spiritual expression of a nation at its height. But humanity loves poetry more than logic, and without a myth the people perish. Underneath the official worship of Ahura-Mazda the cult of Mithra and Anaita- god of the sun and goddess of vegetation and fertility, generation and sex- continued to find devotees; and in the days of Artaxerxes II their names began to appear again in the royal inscriptions. Thereafter Mithra grew powerfully in favor and Ahura-Mazda faded away until, in the first centuries of our era, the cult of Mithra as a divine youth of beautiful countenance- with a radiant halo over his head as a symbol of his ancient identity with the sun- spread throughout the Roman Empire, and shared in giving Christmas to Christianity. Christmas was originally a solar festival, celebrating, at the winter solstice (about December 22nd), the lengthening of the day and the triumph of the sun over his enemies. It became a Mithraic, and finally a Christian, holy day.
Zarathustra, had he been immortal, would have been scandalized to find statues of Anaita, the Persian Aphrodite, set up in many cities of the empire within a few centuries after his death. And surely it would not have pleased him to find so many pages of his revelation devoted to magic formulas for healing, divination and sorcery. After his death the old priesthood of "Wise Men" or Magi conquered him as priesthoods conquer in the end every vigorous rebel or heretic- by adopting and absorbing him into their theology; they numbered him among the Magi and forgot him. By an austere and monogamous life, by a thousand precise observances of sacred ritual and ceremonial cleanliness, by abstention from flesh food, and by a simple and unpretentious dress, the Magi acquired, even among the Greeks, a high reputation for wisdom, and among their own people an almost boundless influence. The Persian kings themselves became their pupils, and took no step of consequence without consulting them. The higher ranks among them were sages, the lower were diviners and sorcerers, readers of stars and interpreters of dreams; the very word magic is taken from their name. Year by year the Zoroastrian elements in Persian religion faded away; they were revived for a time under the Sassanid Dynasty (226-651 a.d.), but were finally eliminated by the Moslem and Tatar invasions of Persia. Zoroastrianism survives today only among small communities in the province of Fars, and among the ninety thousand Parsees of India. These devotedly preserve and study the ancient scriptures, worship fire, earth, water and air as sacred, and expose their dead in "Towers of Silence" to birds of prey lest burning or burial should defile the holy elements. They are a people of excellent morals and character, a living tribute to the civilizing effect of Zarathustra's doctrine upon mankind.
VII. PERSIAN MANNERS AND MORALS. Violence and honor- The code of cleanliness- Sins of the flesh- Virgins and bachelors- Marriage- Women- Children- Persian ideas of education
Nevertheless it is surprising how much brutality remained in the Medes and the Persians despite their religion. Darius I, their greatest king, writes in the Behistun inscription: "Fravartish was seized and brought to me. I cut off his nose and ears, and I cut out his tongue, and I put out his eyes. At my court he was kept in chains; all the people saw him. Later I crucified him in Ecbatana. . . . Ahura-Mazda was my strong support; under the protection of Ahura-Mazda my army utterly smote the rebellious army, and they seized Citrankakhara and brought him to me. Then I cut off his nose and ears and put out his eyes. He was kept in chains at my court; all the people saw him. Afterwards I crucified him." The murders retailed in Plutarch's life of Artaxerxes II offer a sanguinary specimen of the morals of the later courts. Traitors were dealt with without sentiment: they and their leaders were crucified, their followers were sold as slaves, their towns were pillaged, their boys were castrated, their girls were sold into harems. But it would be unfair to judge the people from their kings; virtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history. Even the kings showed on occasion a fine generosity, and were known among the faithless Greeks for their fidelity; a treaty made with them could be relied upon, and it was their boast that they never broke their word. It is a testimony to the character of the Persians that whereas any one could hire Greeks to fight Greeks, it was rare indeed that a Persian could be hired to fight Persians. When the Persians fought Alexander at Granicus practically all the "Persian" infantry were Greek mercenaries. At the battle of Issus 30,000 Greek mercenaries formed the center of the Persian line.
Manners were milder than the blood and iron of history would suggest. The Persians were free and open in speech, generous, warm-hearted and hospitable. Etiquette was almost as punctilious among them as with the Chinese. When equals met they embraced, and kissed each other on the lips; to persons of higher rank they made a deep obeisance; to those of lower rank they offered the cheek; to commoners they bowed. They thought it unbecoming to eat or drink anything in the street, or publicly to spit or blow the nose. Until the reign of Xerxes the people were abstemious in food and drink, eating only one meal per day, and drinking nothing but water. Cleanliness was rated as the greatest good after life itself. Good works done with dirty hands were worthless; "for while one doth not utterly destroy corruption" ("germs"?), "there is no coming of the angels to his body." Severe penalties were decreed for those who spread contagious diseases. On festal occasions the people gathered together all clothed in white. The Avestan code, like the Brahman and the Mosaic, heaped up ceremonial precautions and ablutions; great arid tracts of the Zoroastrian Scriptures are given over to wearisome formulas for cleansing the body and the soul. Parings of nails, cuttings of hair and exhalations of the breath were marked out as unclean things, which the wise Persian would avoid unless they had been purified.
The code was again Judaically stern against the sins of the flesh. Onanism was to be punished with flogging; and men and women guilty of sexual promiscuity or prostitution "ought to be slain even more than gliding serpents, than howling wolves." That practice kept its usual distance from precept appears from an item in Herodotus: "To carry off women by violence the Persians think is the act of wicked men; but to trouble one's self about avenging them when so carried off is the act of foolish men; and to pay no regard to them when carried off is the act of wise men; for it is clear that if they had not been willing, they could not have been carried off." He adds, elsewhere, that the Persians "have learnt from the Greeks a passion for boys"; and though we cannot always trust this supreme reporter, we scent some corroboration of him in the intensity with which the Avesta excoriates sodomy; for that deed, it says again and again, there is no forgiveness; "nothing can wash it away."
Virgins and bachelors were not encouraged by the code, but polygamy and concubinage were allowed; a military society has use for many children. "The man who has a wife," says the Avesta, "is far above him who lives in continence; he who keeps a house is far above him who has none; he who has children is far above him who has none; he who has riches is far above him who has none"; m these are criteria of social standing fairly common among the nations. The family is ranked as the holiest of all institutions. "O Maker of the material world," Zarathustra asks Ahura-Mazda, "thou Holy One, which is the second place where the earth feels most happy?" And Ahura-Mazda answers him: "It is the place whereon one of the faithful erects a house with a priest within, with cattle, with a wife, with children, and good herds within; and wherein afterwards the cattle continue to thrive, the wife to thrive, the child to thrive, the fire to thrive, and every blessing of life to thrive." The animal- above all others the dog- was an integral part of the family, as in the last commandment given to Moses. The nearest family was enjoined to take in and care for any homeless pregnant beast. Severe penalties were prescribed for those who fed unfit food to dogs, or served them their food too hot; and fourteen hundred stripes were the punishment for "smiting a * which has been covered by three dogs. The bull was honored for his procreative powers, and prayer and sacrifice were offered to the cow.
Matches were arranged by the parents on the arrival of their children at puberty. The range of choice was wide, for we hear of the marriage of brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son. Concubines were for the most part a luxury of the rich; the aristocracy never went to war without them. In the later days of the empire the king's harem contained from 329 to 360 concubines, for it had become a custom that no woman might share the royal couch twice unless she was overwhelmingly beautiful.
In the time of the Prophet the position of woman in Persia was high, as ancient manners went: she moved in public freely and unveiled; she owned and managed property, and could, like most modern women, direct the affairs of her husband in his name, or through his pen. After Darius her status declined, especially among the rich. The poorer women retained their freedom of movement, because they had to work; but in other cases the seclusion always enforced in the menstrual periods was extended to the whole social life of woman, and laid thfc foundations of the Moslem institution of purdah. Upper-class women could not venture out except in curtained litters, and were not permitted to mingle publicly with men; married women were forbidden to see even their nearest male relatives, such as their fathers or brothers. Women are never mentioned or represented in the public inscriptions and monuments of ancient Persia. Concubines had greater freedom, since they were employed to entertain their masters' guests. Even in the later reigns women were powerful at the court, rivaling the eunuchs in the persistence of their plotting and the kings in the refinements of their cruelty.
Children as well as marriage were indispensable to respectability. Sons were highly valued as economic assets to their parents and military assets to the king; girls were regretted, for they had to be brought up for some other man's home and profit. "Men do not pray for daughters," said the Persians, "and angels do not reckon them among their gifts to mankind."
Statira was a model queen to Artaxerxes II; but his mother, Parysatis, poisoned her out of jealousy, encouraged the king to marry his own daughter Atossa, played dice with him for the life of a eunuch, and, winning, had him flayed alive. When Airtaxerxes ordered the execution of a Carian soldier, Parysatis bettered his instructions by
After a time, the entire people of Mesopotamia got sick of that and united to destroy them. Every last Assyrian was annihilated, every building and house was razed to the ground, every last piece of writing and art was destroyed; the Assyrians were utterly obliterated and literally no trace of their existence remained.
The Medes were among those civilizations, and being the ancestors of the Persians, that is where the story of the Persians starts.
this is a lot of reading, but you will learn a lot. you will see how the Persians were an influence on the Romans who followed, and ultimately modern civilization; how the Greeks admired them, and how the Greeks were somewhat inferior; why Nietzsche chose Zarathustra as the character in his most popular book; how the Spartans could defeat them at Thermopylae and why the later Greek victories at Marathon and Plataea finally broke the spirit of the gargantuan Persian Empire; and how they were not the slave-masters they were portrayed to be in that most entertaining, yet inaccurate, movie "300".
if you can't do it, don't wuss out and still think you know everything. you don't.
Will Durant
The Story Of Civilization, 1935
Volume I: Our Oriental Heritage
Book I: The Near East
Chapter XIII: Persia
I. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MEDES. Their origins- Rulers- The blood treaty of Sardis- Degeneration
WHO were the Medes that had played so vital a role in the destruction of Assyria? Their origin, of course, eludes us; history is a book that one must begin in the middle. The first mention we have of them is on a tablet recording the expedition of Shalmaneser III into a country called Par sua, in the mountains of Kurdistan (837 B.C.); there, it seems, twenty-seven chieftain-kings ruled over twenty-seven states thinly populated by a people called Amadai, Madai, Medes. As Indo-Europeans they had probably come into western Asia about a thousand years before Christ, from the shores of the Caspian Sea. The Zend-Avesta, sacred scriptures of the Persians, idealized the racial memory of this ancient homeland, and described it as a paradise: the scenes of our youth, like the past, are always beautiful if we do not have to live in them again. The Medes appear to have wandered through the region of Bokhara and Samarkand, and to have migrated farther and farther south, at last reaching Persia. They found copper, iron, lead, gold and silver, marble and precious stones, in the mountains in which they made their new home; and being a simple and vigorous people they developed a prosperous agriculture on the plains and the slopes of the hills.
At Ecbatana- i.e., "a meeting-place of many ways"- in a picturesque valley made fertile by the melting snows of the highlands, their first king, Deioces, founded their first capital, adorning and dominating it with a royal palace spread over an area two-thirds of a mile square. According to an uncorroborated passage in Herodotus, Deioces achieved power by acquiring a reputation for justice, and having achieved power, became a despot. He issued regulations "that no man should be admitted to the King's presence, but every one should consult him by means of messengers; and moreover, that it should be accounted indecency for any one to laugh or spit before him. He established such ceremony about his person for this reason, . . . that he might appear to be of a different nature to them who did not see him." Under his leadership the Medes, strengthened by their natural and frugal life, and hardened by custom and environment to the necessities of war, became a threat to the power of Assyria- which repeatedly invaded Media, thought it most instructively defeated, and found it in fact never tired of fighting for its liberty. The greatest of the Median kings, Cyaxares, settled the matter by destroying Nineveh. Inspired by this victory, his army swept through western Asia to the very gates of Sardis, only to be turned back by an eclipse of the sun. The opposing leaders, frightened by this apparent warning from the skies, signed a treaty of peace, and sealed it by drinking each other's blood/ In the next year Cyaxares died, having in the course of one reign expanded his kingdom from a subject province into an empire embracing Assyria, Media and Persia. Within a generation after his death this empire came to an end.
Its tenure was too brief to permit of any substantial contribution to civilization, except in so far as it prepared for the culture of Persia. To Persia the Medes gave their Aryan language, their alphabet of thirty-six characters, their replacement of clay with parchment and pen as writing materials, their extensive use of the column in architecture, their moral code of conscientious husbandry in time of peace and limitless bravery in time of war, their Zoroastrian religion of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, their patriarchal family and polygamous marriage, and a body of law sufficiently like that of the later empire to be united with it in the famous phrase of Daniel about "the law of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not." Of their literature and their art not a stone or a letter remains.
Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages, who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied. He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways; wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry, the very horses were often caparisoned in gold. These once simple and pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees, now rode in expensive chariots from feast to feast. The early kings had prided themselves on justice; but Astyages, being displeased with Harpagus, served up to him the dismembered and headless body of his own son, and forced him to eat of it. Harpagus ate, saying that whatever a king did was agreeable to him; but he revenged himself by helping Cyrus to depose Astyages. When Cyrus, the brilliant young ruler of the Median dependency of Anshan, in Persia, rebelled against the effeminate despot of Ecbatana, the Medes themselves welcomed Cyrus' victory, and accepted him, almost without protest, as their king. By one engagement Media ceased to be the master of Persia, Persia became the master of Media, and prepared to become master of the whole Near Eastern world.
II. THE GREAT KINGS. The romantic Cyrus- His enlightened policies- Cambyses- Darius the Great- The invasion of Greece
Cyrus was one of those natural rulers at whose coronation, as Emerson said, all men rejoice. Royal in spirit and action, capable of wise administration as well as of dramatic conquest, generous to the defeated and loved by those who had been his enemies- no wonder the Greeks made him the subject of innumerable romances, and- to their minds- the greatest hero before Alexander. It is a disappointment to us that we cannot draw a reliable picture of him from either Herodotus or Xenophon. The former has mingled many fables with his history, while the other has made the Cyropcedia an essay on the military art, with incidental lectures on education and philosophy; at times Xenophon confuses Cyrus and Socrates. These delightful stories being put aside, the figure of Cyrus becomes merely an attractive ghost. We can only say that he was handsome-since the Persians made him their model of physical beauty to the end of their ancient art; that he established the Achaemenid Dynasty of "Great Kings," which ruled Persia through the most famous period of its history; that he organized the soldiery of Media and Persia into an invincible army, captured Sardis and Babylon, ended for a thousand years the rule of the Semites in western Asia, and absorbed the former realms of Assyria, Babylonia, Lydia and Asia Minor into the Persian Empire, the largest political organization of pre-Roman antiquity, and one of the best-governed in history.
So far as we can visualize him through the haze of legend, he was the most amiable of conquerors, and founded his empire upon generosity. His enemies knew that he was lenient, and they did not fight him with that desperate courage which men show when their only choice is to kill or die. We have seen how, according to Herodotus, he rescued Croesus from the funeral pyre at Sardis, and made him one of his most honored counselors; and we have seen how magnanimously he treated the Jews. The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship- that religion is stronger than the state. Instead of sacking cities and wrecking temples he showed a courteous respect for the deities of the conquered, and contributed to maintain their shrines; even the Babylonians, who had resisted him so long, warmed towards him when they found him preserving their sanctuaries and honoring their pantheon. Wherever he went in his unprecedented career he offered pious sacrifice to the local divinities. Like Napoleon he accepted indifferently all religions, and- with much better grace- humored all the gods.
Like Napoleon, too, he died of excessive ambition. Having won all the Near East, he began a series of campaigns aimed to free Media and Persia from the inroads of central Asia's nomadic barbarians. He seems to have carried these excursions as far as the Jaxartes on the north and India on the east. Suddenly, at the height of his curve, he was slain in battle with the Massagetae, an obscure tribe that peopled the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Like Alexander he conquered an empire, but did not live to organize it.
One great defect had sullied his character- occasional and incalculable cruelty. It was inherited, unmixed with Cyrus' generosity, by his half-mad son. Cambyses began by putting to death his brother and rival, Smerdis; then, lured by the accumulated wealth of Egypt, he set forth to extend the Persian Empire to the Nile. He succeeded, but apparently at the cost of his sanity. Memphis was captured easily, but an army of fifty thousand Persians sent to annex the Oasis of Ammon perished in the desert, and an expedition to Carthage failed because the Phoenician crews of the Persian fleet refused to attack a Phoenician colony. Cambyses lost his head, and abandoned the wise clemency and tolerance of his father. He publicly scoffed at the Egyptian religion, and plunged his dagger derisively into the bull revered by the Egyptians as the god Apis; he exhumed mummies and pried into royal tombs regardless of ancient curses; he profaned the temples and ordered their idols to be burned. He thought in this way to cure the Egyptians of superstition; but when he was stricken with illness- apparently epileptic convulsions- the Egyptians were certain that their gods had punished him, and that their theology was now confirmed beyond dispute. As if again to illustrate the inconveniences of monarchy, Cambyses, with a Napoleonic kick in the stomach, killed his sister and wife Roxana, slew his son Prexaspes with an arrow, buried twelve noble Persians alive, condemned Croesus to death, repented, rejoiced to learn that the sentence had not been carried out, and punished the officers who had delayed in executing it. On his way back to Persia he learned that a usurper had seized the throne and was being supported by widespread revolution. From that moment he disappears from history; tradition has it that he killed himself.
The usurper had pretended to be Smerdis, miraculously preserved from Cambyses' fratricidal jealousy; in reality he was a religious fanatic, a devotee of the early Magian faith who was bent upon destroying Zoroastrianism, the official religion of the Persian state. Another revolution soon deposed him, and the seven aristocrats who had organized it raised one of their number, Darius, son of Hystaspes, to the throne. In this bloody way began the reign of Persia's greatest king.
Succession to the throne, in Oriental monarchies, was marked not only by palace revolutions in strife for the royal power, but by uprisings in subject colonies that grasped the chance of chaos, or an inexperienced ruler, to reclaim their liberty. The usurpation and assassination of "Smerdis" gave to Persia's vassals an excellent opportunity: the governors of Egypt and Lydia refused submission, and the provinces of Susiana, Babylonia, Media, Assyria, Armenia, Sacia and others rose in simultaneous revolt. Darius subdued them with a ruthless hand. Taking Babylon after a long siege, he crucified three thousand of its leading citizens as an inducement to obedience in the rest; and in a series of swift campaigns he "pacified" one after another of the rebellious states. Then, perceiving how easily the vast empire might in any crisis fall to pieces, he put off the armor of war, became one of the wisest administrators in history, and set himself to reestablish his realm in a way that became a model of imperial organization till the fall of Rome. His rule gave western Asia a generation of such order and prosperity as that quarrelsome region had never known before.
He had hoped to govern in peace, but it is the fatality of empire to breed repeated war. For the conquered must be periodically reconquered, and the conquerors must keep the arts and habits of camp and battlefield; and at any moment the kaleidoscope of change may throw up a new empire to challenge the old. In such a situation wars must be invented if they do not arise of their own accord; each generation must be inured to the rigors of campaigns, and taught by practice the sweet decorum of dying for one's country.
Perhaps it was in part for this reason that Darius led his armies into southern Russia, across the Bosphorus and the Danube to the Volga, to chastise the marauding Scythians; and again across Afghanistan and a hundred mountain ranges into the valley of the Indus, adding thereby extensive regions and millions of souls and rupees to his realm. More substantial reasons must be sought for his expedition into Greece. Herodotus would have us believe that Darius entered upon this historic faux pas because one of his wives, Atossa, teased him into it in bed;" but it is more dignified to believe that the Bang recognized in the Greek city-states and their colonies a potential empire, or an actual confederacy, dangerous to the Persian mastery of western Asia. When Ionia revolted and received aid from Sparta and Athens, Darius reconciled himself reluctantly to war. All the world knows the story of his passage across the ./Egean, the defeat of his army at Marathon, and his gloomy return to Persia. There, amid farflung preparations for another attempt upon Greece, he suddenly grew weak, and died.
III. PERSIAN LIFE AND INDUSTRY. The empire- The people- The language- The peasants- The imperial highways- Trade and finance
At its greatest extent, under Darius, the Persian Empire included twenty provinces or "satrapies," embracing Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia, Lydia, Phrygia, Ionia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Armenia, Assyria, the Caucasus, Babylonia, Media, Persia, the modern Afghanistan and Baluchistan, India west of the Indus, Sogdiana, Bactria, and the regions of the Massagetae and other central Asiatic tribes. Never before had history recorded so extensive an area brought under one government.
Persia itself, which was to rule these forty million souls for two hundred years, was not at that time the country now known to us as Persia, and to its inhabitants as Iran; it was that smaller tract, immediately east of the Persian Gulf, known to the ancient Persians as Pars, and to the modern Persians as Fars or Farsistan Composed almost entirely of mountains and deserts, poor in rivers, subject to severe winters and hot, arid summers, it could support its two million inhabitants only through such external contributions as trade or conquest might bring. Its race of hardy mountaineers came, like the Medes, of Indo-European stock perhaps from South Russia; and its language and early religion reveal its close kinship with those Aryans who crossed Afghanistan to become the ruling caste of northern India. Darius I, in an inscription at Nakshi-Rustam, described himself as "a Persian, the son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan descent." The Zoroastrians spoke of their primitive land as Airy ana-vaejo- "the Aryan home." Strabo applied the name Ariana to what is now called by essentially the same word- Iran.
The Persians were apparently the handsomest people of the ancient Near East. The monuments picture them as erect and vigorous, made hardy by their mountains and yet refined by their wealth, with a pleasing symmetry of features, an almost Greek straightness of nose, and a certain nobility of countenance and carriage. They adopted for the most part the Median dress, and later the Median ornaments. They considered it indecent to reveal more than the face; clothing covered them from turban, fillet or cap to sandals or leather shoes. Triple drawers, a white undergarment of linen, a double tunic, with sleeves hiding the hands, and a girdle at the waist, kept the population warm in winter and hot in summer. The king distinguished himself with embroidered trousers of a crimson hue, and saffron-buttoned shoes. The dress of the women differed from that of the men only in a slit at the breast. The men wore long beards and hung their hair in curls, or, later, covered it with wigs. In the wealthier days of the empire men as well as women made much use of cosmetics; creams were employed to improve the complexion, and coloring matter was applied to the eyelids to increase the apparent size and brilliance of the eyes. A special class of "adorners," called kosmetai by the Greeks, arose as beauty experts to the aristocracy. The Persians were connoisseurs in scents, and were believed by the ancients to have invented cosmetic creams. The king never went to war without a case of costly unguents to ensure his fragrance in victory or defeat.
Many languages have been used in the long history of Persia. The speech of the court and the nobility in the days of Darius I was Old Persian- so closely related to Sanskrit that evidently both were once dialects of an older tongue, and were cousins to our own. Old Persian developed on the one hand into Zend- the language of the Zend-Avesta- and on the other hand into Pahlavi, a Hindu tongue from which has come the Persian language of today. When the Persians took to writing they adopted the Babylonian cuneiform for their inscriptions, and the Aramaic alphabetic script for their documents. They simplified the unwieldly syllabary of the Babylonians from three hundred characters to thirty-six signs which gradually became letters instead of syllables, and constituted a cuneiform alphabet. Writing, however, seemed to the Persians an effeminate amusement, for which they could spare little time from love, war and the chase. They did not condescend to produce literature.
The common man was contentedly illiterate, and gave himself completely to the culture of the soil. The Zend-Avesta exalted agriculture as the basic and noblest occupation of mankind, pleasing above all other labors to Ahura-Mazda, the supreme god. Some of the land was tilled by peasant proprietors, who occasionally joined several families in agricultural cooperatives to work extensive areas together. Part of the land was owned by feudal barons, and cultivated by tenants in return for a share of the crop; part of it was tilled by foreign (never Persian) slaves. Oxen pulled a plough of wood armed with a metal point. Artificial irrigation drew water from the mountains to the fields. Barley and wheat were the staple crops and foods, but much meat was eaten and much wine drunk. Cyrus served wine to his army, and Persian councils never undertook serious discussions of policy when sobert- though they took care to revise their decisions the next morning. One intoxicating drink, the haoma, was offered as a pleasant sacrifice to the gods, and was believed to engender in its addicts not excitement and anger, but righteousness and piety.
Industry was poorly developed in Persia; she was content to let the nations of the Near East practice the handicrafts while she bought their products with their imperial tribute. She showed more originality in the improvement of communications and transport. Engineers under the instructions of Darius I built great roads uniting the various capitals; one of these highways, from Susa to Sardis, was fifteen hundred miles long. The roads were accurately measured by parasangs (3.4 miles); and at every fourth parasang, says Herodotus, "there are royal stations and excellent inns, and the whole road is through an inhabited and safe country." At each station a fresh relay of horses stood ready to carry on the mail, so that, though the ordinary traveler required ninety days to go from Susa to Sardis, the royal mail moved over the distance as quickly as an automobile party does now- that is, in a little less than a week. The larger rivers were crossed by ferries, but the engineers could, when they wished, throw across the Euphrates, even across the Hellespont, substantial bridges over which hundreds of sceptical elephants could pass in safety. Other roads led through the Afghanistan passes to India, and made Susa a halfway house to the already fabulous riches of the East. These roads were built primarily for military and governmental purposes, to facilitate central control and administration; but they served also to stimulate commerce and the exchange of customs, ideas, and the indispensable superstitions of mankind. Along these roads, for example, angels and the Devil passed from Persian into Jewish and Christian mythology.
Navigation was not so vigorously advanced as land transportation; the Persians had no fleet of their own, but merely engaged or conscripted the vessels of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Darius built a great canal uniting Persia with the Mediterranean through the Red Sea and the Nile, but the carelessness of his successors soon surrendered this achievement to the shifting sands. When Xerxes royally commanded part of his naval forces to circumnavigate Africa, it turned back in disgrace shortly after passing through the Pillars of Hercules. Commerce was for the most part abandoned to foreigners- Babylonians, Phoenicians and Jews; the Persians despised trade, and looked upon a market place as a breeding-ground of lies. The wealthy classes took pride in supplying most of their wants directly from their own fields and shops, not contaminating their fingers with either buying or selling. Payments, loans and interest were at first in the form of goods, especially cattle and grain; coinage came later from Lydia. Darius issued gold and silver "darics" stamped with his features, and valued at a gold-to-silver ratio of 13.5 to 1. This was the origin of the bimetallic ratio in modern currencies.
IV. AN EXPERIMENT IN GOVERNMENT. The king- The nobles- The army- Law- A savage punishment- The capitals- The satrapies- An achievement in administration
The life of Persia was political and military rather than economic; its wealth was based not on industry but on power; it existed precariously as a little governing isle in an immense and unnaturally subject sea. The imperial organization that maintained this artefact was one of the most unique and competent in history. At its head was the king, or Khshathra -i.e., warrior; the title indicates the military origin and character of the Persian monarchy. Since lesser kings were vassal to him, the Persian ruler entitled himself "King of Kings," and the ancient world made no protest against his claim; the Greeks called him simply Basileus-The King. His power was theoretically absolute; he could kill with a word, without trial or reason given, after the manner of some very modern dictator; and occasionally he delegated to his mother or his chief wife this privilege of capricious slaughter. Few even of the greatest nobles dared offer any criticism or rebuke, and public opinion was cautiously impotent. The father whose innocent son had been shot before his eyes by the king merely complimented the monarch on his excellent archery; offenders bastinadoed by the royal order thanked His Majesty for keeping them in mind. The king might rule as well as reign, if, like Cyrus and the first Darius, he cared to bestir himself; but the later monarchs delegated most of the cares of government to noble subordinates or imperial eunuchs, and spent their time at love, dice or the chase. The court was overrun with eunuchs who, from their coigns of vantage as guards of the harem and pedagogues to the princes, stewed a poisonous brew of intrigue in every reign, The king had the right to choose his successor from among his sons, but ordinarily the succession was determined by assassination and revolution.
The royal power was limited in practice by the strength of the aristocracy that mediated between the people and the throne. It was a matter of custom that the six families of the men who had shared with Darius I the dangers of the revolt against false Smerdis, should have exceptional privileges and be consulted in all matters of vital interest. Many of the nobles attended court, and served as a council for whose advice the monarch usually showed the highest regard. Most members of the aristocracy were attached to the throne by receiving their estates from the king; in return they provided him with men and materials when he took the field. Within their fiefs they had almost complete authority- levying taxes, enacting laws, executing judgment, and maintaining their own armed forces.
The real basis of the royal power and imperial government was the army; an empire exists only so long as it retains its superior capacity to kill. The obligation to enlist on any declaration of war fell upon every able-bodied male from fifteen to fifty years of age. When the father of three sons petitioned Darius to exempt one of them from service, all three were put to death; and when another father, having sent four sons to the battlefield, begged Xerxes to permit the fifth son to stay behind and manage the family estate, the body of this fifth son was cut in two by royal order and placed on both sides of the road by which the army was to pass. The troops marched off to war amid the blare of martial music and the plaudits of citizens above the military age.
The spearhead of the army was the Royal Guard- two thousand horsemen and two thousand infantry, all nobles- whose function it was to guard the king. The standing army consisted exclusively of Persians and Medes, and from this permanent force came most of the garrisons stationed as centers of persuasion at strategic points in the empire. The complete force consisted of levies from every subject nation, each group with its own distinct language, weapons and habits of war. Its equipment and retinue was as varied as its origin: bows and arrows, scimitars, javelins, daggers, pikes, slings, knives, shields, helmets, leather cuirasses, coats of mail, horses, elephants, heralds, scribes, eunuchs, prostitutes, concubines, and chariots armed on each hub with great steel scythes. The whole mass, though vast in number, and amounting in the expedition of Xerxes to 1,800,000 men, never achieved unity, and at the first sign of a reverse it became a disorderly mob. It conquered by mere force of numbers, by an elastic capacity for absorbing casualties; it was destined to be overthrown as soon as it should. encounter a well-organized army speaking one speech and accepting one discipline. This was the secret of Marathon and Plataea.
In such a state the only law was the will of the king and the power of the army; no rights were sacred against these, and no precedents could avail except an earlier decree of the king. For it was a proud boast of Persia that its laws never changed, and that a royal promise or decree was irrevocable. In his edicts and judgments the king was supposed to be inspired by the god Ahura-Mazda himself; therefore the law of the realm was the Divine Will, and any infraction of it was an offense against the deity. The king was the supreme court, but it was his custom to delegate this function to some learned elder in his retinue. Below him was a High Court of Justice with seven members, and below this were local courts scattered through the realm. The priests formulated the law, and for a long time acted as judges; in later days laymen, even laywomen, sat in judgment. Bail was accepted in all but the most important cases, and a regular procedure of trial was followed. The court occasionally decreed rewards as well as punishments, and in considering a crime weighed against it the good record and services of the accused. The law's delays were mitigated by fixing a time-limit for each case, and by proposing to all disputants an arbitrator of their own choice who might bring them to a peaceable settlement. As the law gathered precedents and complexity a class of men arose called "speakers of the law," who offered to explain it to litigants and help them conduct their cases. Oaths were taken, and use was occasionally made of the ordeal. Bribery was discouraged by making the tender or acceptance of it a capital offense. Cambyses improved the integrity of the courts by causing an unjust judge to be flayed alive, and using his skin to upholster the judicial bench- to which he then appointed the dead judge's son.
Minor punishments took the form of flogging- from five to two hundred blows with a horsewhip; the poisoning of a shepherd dog received two hundred strokes, manslaughter ninety. The administration of the law was partly financed by commuting stripes into fines, at the rate of six rupees to a stripe. More serious crimes were punished with branding, maiming, mutilation, blinding, imprisonment or death. The letter of the law forbade any one, even the king, to sentence a man to death for a simple crime; but it could be decreed for treason, rape, sodomy, murder, "self-pollution," burning or burying the dead, intrusion upon the king's privacy, approaching one of his concubines, accidentally sitting upon his throne, or for any displeasure to the ruling house. Death was procured in such cases by poisoning, impaling, crucifixion, hanging (usually with the head down), stoning, burying the body up to the head, crushing the head between huge stones, smothering the victim in hot ashes, or by the incredibly cruel rite called "the boats":
Because the soldier Mithridates, in his drunkenness, blurted out the fact that it was he, and not the king, who should have received credit for slaying Cyrus the Younger at the battle of Cunaxa, Artaxerxes II, says Plutarch, "decreed that Mithridates should be put to death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lay down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, they offer him food, and if he refuse to eat it, they force him to do it by pricking his eyes; then, after he has eaten, they drench him with a mixture of milk and honey, pouring it not only into his mouth but all over his face. They then keep his face continually turned toward the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle upon it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired."
With these laws and this army the king sought to govern his twenty satrapies from his many capitals- originally Pasargadae, occasionally Persepolis, in summer Ecbatana, usually Susa; here, in the ancient capital of Elam, the history of the ancient Near East came full circle, binding the beginning and the end. Susa had the advantage of inaccessibility, and the disadvantages of distance; Alexander had to come two thousand miles to take it, but it had to send its troops fifteen hundred miles to suppress revolts in Lydia or Egypt. Ultimately the great roads merely paved the way for the physical conquest of western Asia by Greece and Rome, and the theological conquest of Greece and Rome by western Asia.
The empire was divided into provinces or satrapies for convenience of administration and taxation. Each province was governed in the name of the King of Kings, sometimes by a vassal prince, ordinarily by a "satrap" (ruler) royally appointed for as long a time as he could retain favor at the court. To keep the satraps in hand Darius sent to each province a general to control its armed forces independently of the governor; and to make matters trebly sure he appointed in each province a secretary, independent of both satrap and general, to report their behavior to the king. As a further precaution an intelligence service known as "The King's Eyes and Ears" might appear at any moment to examine the affairs, records and finances of the province. Sometimes the satrap was deposed without trial, sometimes he was quietly poisoned by his servants at the order of the king. Underneath the satrap and the secretary was a horde of clerks who carried on so much of the government as had no direct need of force; this body of clerks carried over from one administration to another, even from reign to reign. The king dies, but the bureaucracy is immortal.
The salaries of these provincial officials were paid not by the king but by the people whom they ruled. The remuneration was ample enough to provide the satraps with palaces, harems, and extensive hunting parks to which the Persians gave the historic name of paradise. In addition, each satrapy was required to send the king, annually, a fixed amount of money and goods by way of taxation. India sent 4680 talents, Assyria and Babylonia 1000, Egypt 700, the four satrapies of Asia Minor 1760, etc., making a total of some 14,560 talents- variously estimated as equivalent to from $160,000,000 to $218,000,000 a year. Furthermore, each province was expected to contribute to the king's needs in goods and supplies: Egypt had to furnish corn annually for 120,000 men; the Medes provided 100,000 sheep, the Armenians 30,000 foals, the Babylonians five hundred young eunuchs. Other sources of wealth swelled the central revenue to such a point that when Alexander captured the Persian capitals after one hundred and fifty years of Persian extravagance, after a hundred expensive revolts and wars, and after Darius III had carried off 8000 talents with him in his flight, he found 180,000 talents left in the royal treasuries- some $2,700,000,000.
Despite these high charges for its services, the Persian Empire was the most successful experiment in imperial government that the Mediterranean world would know before the coming of Rome- which was destined to inherit much of the earlier empire's political structure and administrative forms. The cruelty and dissipation of the later monarchs, the occasional barbarism of the laws, and the heavy burdens of taxation were balanced, as human governments go, by such order and peace as made the provinces rich despite these levies, and by such liberty as only the most enlightened empires have accorded to subject states. Each region retained its own language, laws, customs, morals, religion and coinage, and sometimes its native dynasty of kings. Many of the tributary nations, like Babylonia, Phoenicia and Palestine, were well satisfied with the situation, and suspected that their own generals and tax-gatherers would have plucked them even more ferociously. Under Darius I the Persian Empire was an achievement in political organization; only Trajan, Hadrian and. the Antonines would equal it.
V. ZARATHUSTRA. The coming of the Prophet- Persian religion before Zarathustra- The Bible of Persia- Ahura-Mazda- The good and the evil spirits- Their struggle for the possession of the world
Persian legend tells how, many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, a great prophet appeared in Airyana-vaejo, the ancient "home of the Aryans." His people called him Zarathustra; but the Greeks, who could never bear the orthography of the "barbarians" patiently, called him Zoroastres. His conception was divine: his guardian angel entered into an haoma plant, and passed with its juice into the body of a priest as the latter offered divine sacrifice; at the same time a ray of heaven's glory entered the bosom of a maid of noble lineage. The priest espoused the maid, the imprisoned angel mingled with the imprisoned ray, and Zarathustra began to be. He laughed aloud on the very day of his birth, and the evil spirits that gather around every life fled from him in tumult and terror. Out of his great love for wisdom and righteousness he withdrew from the society of men, and chose to live in a mountain wilderness on cheese and the fruits of the soil. The Devil tempted him, but to no avail. His breast was pierced with a sword, and his entrails were filled with molten lead; he did not complain, but clung to his faith in Ahura-Mazda- the Lord of Light- as supreme god. Ahura-Mazda appeared to him and gave into his hands the Avesta, or Book of Knowledge and Wisdom, and bade him preach it to mankind. For a long time all the world ridiculed and persecuted him; but at last a high prince of Iran- Vishtaspa or Hystaspes- heard him gladly, and promised to spread the new faith among his people. Thus was the Zoroastrian religion born. Zarathustra himself lived to a very old age, was consumed in a flash of lightning, and ascended into heaven.
We cannot tell how much of his story is true; perhaps some Josiah discovered him. The Greeks accepted him as historical, and honored him with an antiquity of 5500 years before their time; Berosus the Babylonian brought him down to 2000 B.C.; modern historians, when they believe in his existence, assign him to any century between the tenth and the sixth before Christ. When he appeared, among the ancestors of the Medes and the Persians, he found his people worshiping animals, ancestors, the earth and the sun, in a religion having many elements and deities in common with the Hindus of the Vedic age. The chief divinities of this pre-Zoroastrian faith were Mithra, god of the sun, Anaita, goddess of fertility and the earth, and Haoma the bull-god who, dying, rose again, and gave mankind his blood as a drink that would confer immortality; him the early Iranians worshiped by drinking the intoxicating juice of the haoma herb found on their mountain slopes. Zarathustra was shocked at these primitive deities and this Dionysian ritual; he rebelled against the "Magi" or priests who prayed and sacrificed to them; and with all the bravery of his contemporaries Amos and Isaiah he announced to the world one God- here Ahura-Mazda, the Lord of Light and Heaven, of whom all other gods were but manifestations and qualities. Perhaps Darius I, who accepted the new doctrine, saw in it a faith that would both inspire his people and strengthen his government. From the moment of his accession he declared war upon the old cults and the Magian priesthood, and made Zoroastrianism the religion of the state.
The Bible of the new faith was the collection of books in which the disciples of the Master had gathered his sayings and his prayers. Later followers called these books Avesta; by the error of a modern scholar they are known to the Occidental world as the Zend-Avesta.^ The contemporary non-Persian reader is terrified to find that the substantial volumes that survive, though much shorter than our Bible, are but a small fraction of the revelation vouchsafed to Zarathustra by his god- What remains is, to the foreign and provincial observer, a confused mass of prayers, songs, legends, prescriptions, ritual and morals, brightened now and then by noble language, fervent devotion, ethical elevation, or lyric piety. Like our Old Testament it is a highly eclectic composition. The student discovers here and there the gods, the ideas, sometimes the very words and phrases of the Rig-veda- to such an extent that some Indian scholars consider the Avesta to have been inspired not by Ahura-Mazda but by the Vedas? at other times one comes upon passages of ancient Babylonian provenance, such as the creation of the world in six periods (the heavens, the waters, the earth, plants, animals, man,) the descent of all men from two first parents, the establishment of an earthly paradise, the discontent of the Creator with his creation, and his resolve to destroy all but a remnant of it by a flood. But the specifically Iranian elements suffice abundantly to characterize the whole: the world is conceived in dualistic terms as the stage of a conflict, lasting twelve thousand years, between the god Ahura-Mazda and the devil Ahriman; purity and honesty are the greatest of the virtues, and will lead to everlasting life; the dead must not be buried or burned, as by the obscene Greeks or Hindus, but must be thrown to the dogs or to birds of prey.
The god of Zarathustra was first of all "the whole circle of the heavens" themselves. Ahura-Mazda "clothes himself with the solid vault of the firmament as his raiment; ... his body is the light and the sovereign glory; the sun and the moon are his eyes." In later days, when the religion passed from prophets to politicians, the great deity was pictured as a gigantic king of imposing majesty. As creator and ruler of the world he was assisted by a legion of lesser divinities, originally pictured as forms and powers of nature- fire and water, sun and moon, wind and rain; but it was the achievement of Zarathustra that he conceived his god as supreme over all things, in terms as noble as the Book of Job:
This I ask thee, tell me truly, O Ahura-Mazda: Who determined the paths of suns and stars- who is it by whom the moon waxes and wanes? . . . Who, from below, sustained the earth and the firmament from falling-who sustained the waters and plants- who yoked swiftness with the winds and the clouds- who, Ahura-Mazda, called forth the Good Mind?
This "Good Mind" meant not any human mind, but a divine wisdom, almost a Logos used by Ahura-Mazda as an intermediate agency of creation. Zarathustra had interpreted Ahura-Mazda as having seven aspects or qualities: Light, Good Mind, Right, Dominion, Piety, Well-being, and Immortality. His followers, habituated to polytheism, interpreted these attributes as persons (called by them amesha spent a, or immortal holy ones) who, under the leadership of Ahura-Mazda, created and managed the world; in this way the majestic monotheism of the founder became- as in the case of Christianity- the polytheism of the people. In addition to these holy spirits were the guardian angels, of which Persian theology supplied one for every man, woman and child. But just as these angels and the immortal holy ones helped men to virtue, so, according to the pious Persian (influenced, presumably, by Babylonian demonology), seven dcevas, or evil spirits, hovered in the air, always tempting men to crime and sin, and forever engaged in a war upon Ahura-Mazda and every form of righteousness. The leader of these devils was Angro-Mainyus or Ahriman, Prince of Darkness and ruler of the nether world, prototype of that busy Satan whom the Jews appear to have adopted from Persia and bequeathed to Christianity. It was Ahriman, for example, who had created serpents, vermin, locusts, ants, winter, darkness, crime, sin, sodomy, menstruation, and the other plagues of life; and it was these inventions of the Devil that had ruined the Paradise in which Ahura-Mazda had placed the first progenitors of the human race. Zara-thustra seems to have regarded these evil spirits as spurious deities, popular and superstitious incarnations of the abstract forces that resist the progress of man. His followers, however, found it easier to think of them as living beings, and personified them in such abundance that in after times the devils of Persian theology were numbered in millions.
As this system of belief came from Zarathustra it bordered upon monotheism. Even with the intrusion of Ahriman and the evil spirits it remained as monotheistic as Christianity was to be with its Satan, its devils and its angels; indeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy. The Zoroastrian conception of God might have satisfied as particular a spirit as Matthew Arnold: Ahura-Mazda was the sum-total of all those forces in the world that make for righteousness; and morality lay in cooperation with those forces. Furthermore there was in this dualism a certain justice to the contradictoriness and perversity of things, which monotheism never provided; and though the Zoroastrian theologians, after the manner of Hindu mystics and Scholastic philosophers, sometimes argued that evil was unreal, they offered, in effect, a theology well adapted to dramatize for the average mind the moral issues of life. The last act of the play, they promised, would be- for the just man- a happy ending: after four epochs of three thousand years each, in which Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman would alternately predominate, the forces of evil would be finally destroyed; right would triumph everywhere, and evil would forever cease to be. Then all good men would join Ahura-Mazda in Paradise, and the wicked would fall into a gulf of outer darkness, where they would feed on poison eternally.
VI. ZOROASTRIAN ETHICS. Man as a battlefield- The Undying Fire- Hell, Purgatory and Paradise- The cult of Mithra-The Magi- The Parsees
By picturing the world as the scene of a struggle between good and evil, the Zoroastrians established in the popular imagination a powerful supernatural stimulus and sanction for morals. The soul of man, like the universe, was represented as a battleground of beneficent and maleficent spirits; every man was a warrior, whether he liked it or not, in the army of either the Lord or the Devil; every act or omission advanced the cause of Ahura-Mazda or of Ahriman. It was an ethic even more admirable than the theology- if men must have supernatural supports for their morality; it gave to the common life a dignity and significance grander than any that could come to it from a world-view that locked upon man (in medieval phrase) as a helpless worm or (in modern terms) as a mechanical automaton. Human beings were not, to Zarathustra's thinking, mere pawns in this cosmic war; they had free will, since Ahura-Mazda wished them to be personalities in their own right; they might freely choose whether they would follow the Light or the Lie. For Ahriman was the Living Lie, and every liar was his servant.
Out of this general conception emerged a detailed but simple code of morals, centered about the Golden Rule. "That nature alone is good which shall not do unto another whatever is not good unto its own self." Man's duty, says the Avesta, is three-fold: "To make him who is an enemy a friend; to make him who is wicked righteous; and to make him who is ignorant learned." The greatest virtue is piety; second only to that is honor and honesty in action and speech. Interest was not to be charged to Persians, but loans were to be looked upon as almost sacred. The worst sin of all (in the Avestan as in the Mosaic code) is unbelief. We may judge from the severe punishments with which it was honored that scepticism existed among the Persians; death was to be visited upon the apostate without delay. The generosity and kindliness enjoined by the Master did not apply, in practice, to infidels- i.e., foreigners; these were inferior species of men, whom Ahura-Mazda had deluded into loving their own countries only in order that they should not invade Persia. The Persians, says Herodotus, "esteem themselves to be far the most excellent of men in every respect"; they believe that other nations approach to excellence according to their geographical proximity to Persia, "but that they are the worst who live farthest from them." The words have a contemporary ring, and a universal application.
Piety being the greatest virtue, the first duty of life was the worship of God with purification, sacrifice and prayer. Zoroastrian Persia tolerated neither temples nor idols; altars were erected on hill-tops, in palaces, or in the center of the city, and fires were kindled upon them in honor of Ahura-Mazda or some lesser divinity. Fire itself was worshiped as a god, Atar, the very son of the Lord of Light. Every family centered round the hearth; to keep the home fire burning, never to let it be extinguished, was part of the ritual of faith. And the Undying Fire of the skies, the Sun, was adored as the highest and most characteristic embodiment of Ahura-Mazda or Mithra, quite as Ikhnaton had worshiped it in Egypt. "The morning Sun," said the Scriptures, "must be reverenced till mid-day, and that of mid-day must be reverenced till the afternoon, and that of the afternoon must be reverenced till evening. . . . While men reverence not the Sun, the good works which they do that day are not their own." To the sun, to fire, to Ahura-Mazda, sacrifice was offered of flowers, bread, fruit, perfumes, oxen, sheep, camels, horses, * and stags; anciently, as elsewhere, human victims had been offered too. The gods received only the odor; the edible portions were kept for the priests and the worshipers, for as the Magi explained, the gods required only the soul of the victim. Though the Master abominated it, and there is no mention of it in the Avesta, the old Aryan offering of the intoxicating haoma juice to the gods continued far into Zoroastrian days; the priest drank part of the sacred fluid, and divided the remainder among the faithful in holy communion. When people were too poor to offer such tasty sacrifices they made up for it by adulatory prayer. Ahura-Mazda, like Yahveh, liked to sip his praise, and made for the pious an imposing list of his accomplishments, which became a favorite Persian litany.
Given a life of piety and truth, the Persian might face death unafraid: this, after all, is one of the secret purposes of religion. Astivihad, the god of death, finds every one, no matter where. And yet- for it is in the nature of religion to threaten and terrify as well as to console- the Persian could not look upon death unafraid unless he had been a faithful warrior in Ahura-Mazda's cause. Beyond that most awful of all mysteries lay a hell and a purgatory as well as a paradise. All dead souls would have to pass over a Sifting Bridge: the good soul would come, on the other side, to the "Abode of Song," where it would be welcomed by a "young maiden radiant and strong, with well-developed bust," and would live in happiness with Ahura-Mazda to the end of time; but the wicked soul, failing to get across, would fall into as deep a level of hell as was adjusted to its degree of wickedness. This hell was no mere Hades to which, as in earlier religions, all the dead descended, whether good or bad; it was an abyss of darkness and terror in which condemned souls suffered torments to the end of the world. If a man's virtues outweighed his sins he would endure the cleansing of a temporary punishment; if he had sinned much but had done good works, he would suffer for only twelve thousand years, and then would rise into heaven. Already, the good Zoroastrians tell us, the divine consummation of history approaches: the birth of Zarathustra began the last world-epoch of three thousand years; after three prophets of his seed have, at intervals, carried his doctrine throughout the world, the Last Judgment will be pronounced, the Kingdom of Ahura-Mazda will come, and Ahriman and all the forces of evil will be utterly destroyed. Then all good souls will begin life anew in a world without evil, darkness or pain. "The dead shall rise, life shall return to the bodies, and they shall breathe again; . . . the whole physical world shall become free from old age and death, from corruption and decay, forever and ever."
Here again, as in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we hear the threat of that awful Last Judgment which seems to have passed from Persian to Jewish eschatology in the days of the Persian ascendancy in Palestine. It was an admirable formula for frightening children into obeying their parents; and since one function of religion is to ease the difficult and necessary task of disciplining the young by the old, we must grant to the Zoroastrian priests a fine professional skill in the brewing of theology. All in all it was a splendid religion, less warlike and bloody, less idolatrous and superstitious, than the other religions of its time; and it did not deserve to die so soon.
For a while, under Darius I, it became the spiritual expression of a nation at its height. But humanity loves poetry more than logic, and without a myth the people perish. Underneath the official worship of Ahura-Mazda the cult of Mithra and Anaita- god of the sun and goddess of vegetation and fertility, generation and sex- continued to find devotees; and in the days of Artaxerxes II their names began to appear again in the royal inscriptions. Thereafter Mithra grew powerfully in favor and Ahura-Mazda faded away until, in the first centuries of our era, the cult of Mithra as a divine youth of beautiful countenance- with a radiant halo over his head as a symbol of his ancient identity with the sun- spread throughout the Roman Empire, and shared in giving Christmas to Christianity. Christmas was originally a solar festival, celebrating, at the winter solstice (about December 22nd), the lengthening of the day and the triumph of the sun over his enemies. It became a Mithraic, and finally a Christian, holy day.
Zarathustra, had he been immortal, would have been scandalized to find statues of Anaita, the Persian Aphrodite, set up in many cities of the empire within a few centuries after his death. And surely it would not have pleased him to find so many pages of his revelation devoted to magic formulas for healing, divination and sorcery. After his death the old priesthood of "Wise Men" or Magi conquered him as priesthoods conquer in the end every vigorous rebel or heretic- by adopting and absorbing him into their theology; they numbered him among the Magi and forgot him. By an austere and monogamous life, by a thousand precise observances of sacred ritual and ceremonial cleanliness, by abstention from flesh food, and by a simple and unpretentious dress, the Magi acquired, even among the Greeks, a high reputation for wisdom, and among their own people an almost boundless influence. The Persian kings themselves became their pupils, and took no step of consequence without consulting them. The higher ranks among them were sages, the lower were diviners and sorcerers, readers of stars and interpreters of dreams; the very word magic is taken from their name. Year by year the Zoroastrian elements in Persian religion faded away; they were revived for a time under the Sassanid Dynasty (226-651 a.d.), but were finally eliminated by the Moslem and Tatar invasions of Persia. Zoroastrianism survives today only among small communities in the province of Fars, and among the ninety thousand Parsees of India. These devotedly preserve and study the ancient scriptures, worship fire, earth, water and air as sacred, and expose their dead in "Towers of Silence" to birds of prey lest burning or burial should defile the holy elements. They are a people of excellent morals and character, a living tribute to the civilizing effect of Zarathustra's doctrine upon mankind.
VII. PERSIAN MANNERS AND MORALS. Violence and honor- The code of cleanliness- Sins of the flesh- Virgins and bachelors- Marriage- Women- Children- Persian ideas of education
Nevertheless it is surprising how much brutality remained in the Medes and the Persians despite their religion. Darius I, their greatest king, writes in the Behistun inscription: "Fravartish was seized and brought to me. I cut off his nose and ears, and I cut out his tongue, and I put out his eyes. At my court he was kept in chains; all the people saw him. Later I crucified him in Ecbatana. . . . Ahura-Mazda was my strong support; under the protection of Ahura-Mazda my army utterly smote the rebellious army, and they seized Citrankakhara and brought him to me. Then I cut off his nose and ears and put out his eyes. He was kept in chains at my court; all the people saw him. Afterwards I crucified him." The murders retailed in Plutarch's life of Artaxerxes II offer a sanguinary specimen of the morals of the later courts. Traitors were dealt with without sentiment: they and their leaders were crucified, their followers were sold as slaves, their towns were pillaged, their boys were castrated, their girls were sold into harems. But it would be unfair to judge the people from their kings; virtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history. Even the kings showed on occasion a fine generosity, and were known among the faithless Greeks for their fidelity; a treaty made with them could be relied upon, and it was their boast that they never broke their word. It is a testimony to the character of the Persians that whereas any one could hire Greeks to fight Greeks, it was rare indeed that a Persian could be hired to fight Persians. When the Persians fought Alexander at Granicus practically all the "Persian" infantry were Greek mercenaries. At the battle of Issus 30,000 Greek mercenaries formed the center of the Persian line.
Manners were milder than the blood and iron of history would suggest. The Persians were free and open in speech, generous, warm-hearted and hospitable. Etiquette was almost as punctilious among them as with the Chinese. When equals met they embraced, and kissed each other on the lips; to persons of higher rank they made a deep obeisance; to those of lower rank they offered the cheek; to commoners they bowed. They thought it unbecoming to eat or drink anything in the street, or publicly to spit or blow the nose. Until the reign of Xerxes the people were abstemious in food and drink, eating only one meal per day, and drinking nothing but water. Cleanliness was rated as the greatest good after life itself. Good works done with dirty hands were worthless; "for while one doth not utterly destroy corruption" ("germs"?), "there is no coming of the angels to his body." Severe penalties were decreed for those who spread contagious diseases. On festal occasions the people gathered together all clothed in white. The Avestan code, like the Brahman and the Mosaic, heaped up ceremonial precautions and ablutions; great arid tracts of the Zoroastrian Scriptures are given over to wearisome formulas for cleansing the body and the soul. Parings of nails, cuttings of hair and exhalations of the breath were marked out as unclean things, which the wise Persian would avoid unless they had been purified.
The code was again Judaically stern against the sins of the flesh. Onanism was to be punished with flogging; and men and women guilty of sexual promiscuity or prostitution "ought to be slain even more than gliding serpents, than howling wolves." That practice kept its usual distance from precept appears from an item in Herodotus: "To carry off women by violence the Persians think is the act of wicked men; but to trouble one's self about avenging them when so carried off is the act of foolish men; and to pay no regard to them when carried off is the act of wise men; for it is clear that if they had not been willing, they could not have been carried off." He adds, elsewhere, that the Persians "have learnt from the Greeks a passion for boys"; and though we cannot always trust this supreme reporter, we scent some corroboration of him in the intensity with which the Avesta excoriates sodomy; for that deed, it says again and again, there is no forgiveness; "nothing can wash it away."
Virgins and bachelors were not encouraged by the code, but polygamy and concubinage were allowed; a military society has use for many children. "The man who has a wife," says the Avesta, "is far above him who lives in continence; he who keeps a house is far above him who has none; he who has children is far above him who has none; he who has riches is far above him who has none"; m these are criteria of social standing fairly common among the nations. The family is ranked as the holiest of all institutions. "O Maker of the material world," Zarathustra asks Ahura-Mazda, "thou Holy One, which is the second place where the earth feels most happy?" And Ahura-Mazda answers him: "It is the place whereon one of the faithful erects a house with a priest within, with cattle, with a wife, with children, and good herds within; and wherein afterwards the cattle continue to thrive, the wife to thrive, the child to thrive, the fire to thrive, and every blessing of life to thrive." The animal- above all others the dog- was an integral part of the family, as in the last commandment given to Moses. The nearest family was enjoined to take in and care for any homeless pregnant beast. Severe penalties were prescribed for those who fed unfit food to dogs, or served them their food too hot; and fourteen hundred stripes were the punishment for "smiting a * which has been covered by three dogs. The bull was honored for his procreative powers, and prayer and sacrifice were offered to the cow.
Matches were arranged by the parents on the arrival of their children at puberty. The range of choice was wide, for we hear of the marriage of brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son. Concubines were for the most part a luxury of the rich; the aristocracy never went to war without them. In the later days of the empire the king's harem contained from 329 to 360 concubines, for it had become a custom that no woman might share the royal couch twice unless she was overwhelmingly beautiful.
In the time of the Prophet the position of woman in Persia was high, as ancient manners went: she moved in public freely and unveiled; she owned and managed property, and could, like most modern women, direct the affairs of her husband in his name, or through his pen. After Darius her status declined, especially among the rich. The poorer women retained their freedom of movement, because they had to work; but in other cases the seclusion always enforced in the menstrual periods was extended to the whole social life of woman, and laid thfc foundations of the Moslem institution of purdah. Upper-class women could not venture out except in curtained litters, and were not permitted to mingle publicly with men; married women were forbidden to see even their nearest male relatives, such as their fathers or brothers. Women are never mentioned or represented in the public inscriptions and monuments of ancient Persia. Concubines had greater freedom, since they were employed to entertain their masters' guests. Even in the later reigns women were powerful at the court, rivaling the eunuchs in the persistence of their plotting and the kings in the refinements of their cruelty.
Children as well as marriage were indispensable to respectability. Sons were highly valued as economic assets to their parents and military assets to the king; girls were regretted, for they had to be brought up for some other man's home and profit. "Men do not pray for daughters," said the Persians, "and angels do not reckon them among their gifts to mankind."
Statira was a model queen to Artaxerxes II; but his mother, Parysatis, poisoned her out of jealousy, encouraged the king to marry his own daughter Atossa, played dice with him for the life of a eunuch, and, winning, had him flayed alive. When Airtaxerxes ordered the execution of a Carian soldier, Parysatis bettered his instructions by
Comments
"Nor is it natural that nations diverse in language, religion, morals and traditions should long remain united; there is nothing organic in such a union, and compulsion must repeatedly be applied to maintain the artificial bond."
I realize that this is speaking of an 'empire' comprised of many nations per se, but it still applies to a singular nation IMHO.
Nice read!