Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History episode 28, which I’m going to call Epic Persian History, Part 1. I’m Scott Emmons.

In the last few episodes, we’ve been drawing closer to a turning point in Greek history — the great conflicts between Greece and Persia. For the Greeks, this was a defining moment and a matter of tremendous pride that a relatively small collection of Hellenic city-states stood up to the vast power of the Persian Empire and defended themselves successfully. They often framed it not just as a fight for freedom against slavery, but as a struggle between East and West — a mindset that I think has had ripple effects down to the present day. The story of the Persian Wars has been called a foundation myth of western civilization. The idea being that the victory over the Persians allowed Greece to continue evolving and reach the height of its cultural achievements… that if Persia had conquered Greece, we’d never have had the great tragedies of Sophocles or the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle. It’s debatable to what extent a Persian victory would have squelched the development of Greek culture, but on the whole, I think it’s likely that if the Persian Wars had turned out differently, European and American culture would look quite different today. 

So the Persian Wars are fundamental to Greek and, by extension, western history. To get a good understanding of them, we need to know something about who the Greeks were up against. Who were these Persians, and how did they come to power? What did their empire look like, and what interest did they have in expanding it to include Greece? To answer those questions, we need to look back to the beginning, to see how the Persian empire started and how it grew. It’s a huge topic with a lot of moving parts. So much so that, soon after I started working on this episode, I realized it needed to be a two-parter. So today we’ll look at developments in the Near East from the late Bronze Age collapse down to the conquests of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire. Then in the next episode, we’ll follow Cyrus’s successors up to the brink of the Persian Wars. 

To start with the back story… The Late Bronze Age collapse, starting around 1200 BCE, caused tremendous upheaval. We’ve seen how the whole Hittite empire was wiped out, so thoroughly that it was virtually lost to history until the 1800s. But in parts of the Near East, the collapse wasn’t quite as complete as it was in the Mycenaean palace culture of Greece. The great empires lost a lot of their possessions. But in Mesopotamia, Babylon was still there. It went through periods of foreign domination, but it wasn’t destroyed. Assyria was greatly reduced, but it still had its capital of Assur and its succession of kings. Perhaps most importantly, writing didn’t disappear here as the Linear B script did in Greece. Cuneiform writing continued, and that provided a crucial link to the past. Assyrians and Babylonians had records from centuries earlier, which meant their kings and nobles could look at their past glory and dream of regaining it.

The continuation of writing brings us to an important point about our sources for this topic. For long-form narrative history in prose, we still have to depend on Greek authors — primarily Herodotus, but there are others. A late fifth-century physician named Ctesias, who spent a lot of time at the Persian court, wrote a Persian history that’s now lost, but later authors drew on it heavily. The Athenian Xenophon wrote a highly romanticized account of the life and deeds of Cyrus the Great. All those authors were writing over a century after the facts, and inevitably their accounts include a lot of hearsay. But fortunately, we can fact check their writings against Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian documents. There’s a series of Babylonian Chronicles that list important events in a sort of bare bones format. They don’t provide the kind of lavish detail that we get in Greek historical works, but they’re much, much closer to the events they report than any of the Greek authors. Another important document is the Cyrus Cylinder, which Cyrus used to extol himself as the savior of Babylon after bringing it under Persian rule. Those Near Eastern documents sometimes give us a very different and more accurate picture than what we get in the Greek authors.

Well, as the Near East recovered from the Bronze Age collapse, the next great power that emerged was the Neo-Assyrian empire. In the 10th century BCE, Assyrian kings started to recover some of their lost territory. In the 9th century, the king Ashurnasirpal II conducted aggressive military campaigns and expanded far beyond the bounds of the earlier Assyrian empire. He established a new capital at Calhu, better known by its later name Nimrud, and built an enormous palace full of relief carvings showing him as a victorious warrior and a favorite of the gods.  

The Neo-Assyrian approach to empire building came down to overwhelming force in battle and a tight rein on the conquered territories. They sent Assyrian governors to rule their subject cities rather than relying on client kings. And their chief method for keeping their subjects in line was the threat of extreme brutality. Relief carvings from the Neo-Assyrian empire show the kings savagely killing and mutilating their enemies. A famous inscription of Ashurnasirpal describes his treatment of rebels after putting down an uprising. As translated by Albert T. Olmstead, quote: 

Many captives from among them I burned with fire. From some I cut off their hands and their fingers, and from others I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers; of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. Their young men and maidens I burned in the fire. Unquote. 

The message was unmistakable. If you go up against the Assyrian king, he’s going to bring the pain — a lot of it — and then death.

At its height, the Assyrian Empire covered most of the Near East, including Babylon. On the eastern fringes of the empire were the Zagros mountains, which formed a natural frontier. Those mountains and points south were home to two related peoples who identified as Aryan. Now, “Aryan” is a word that was unfortunately coopted as early as the 19th century by proponents of pseudoscientific theories making Indo-European people out to be a superior race. But to ancient Indo-Iranian people, it was a cultural and linguistic term that they used to distinguish themselves from non-Aryans. The word itself is etymologically connected with “Iranian.” In any case, the two Aryan groups I’m talking about are the Medes and the Persians. They saw themselves as two distinct peoples, although they were closely related and there was always a lot of interaction between them. The Greeks tended to lump the two together and often casually referred to the Persians as Medes. And in fact, during the Persian Wars, the standard term for defecting to the Persian side was “Medizing.” 

Well, in the 8th and much of the 7th century BCE, the Assyrians considered both the Medes and the Persians subject peoples. But they were out on the frontier, and they weren’t fully integrated into the empire. The Persians were a bit farther away to the south, and relatively few Assyrian texts of this time mention them. The Medes were more of a problem. They were well established in the western Iranian plateau and in mountain villages, right next to Assyrian territory. And they were formidable fighters. Local chiefs had a great deal of autonomy, and at different times they might choose to fight or to pay tribute. One advantage the Medes had was that their territory included plains that were excellent for horse breeding, and their horses were considered some of the best in the known world. So it was natural that in Median and also Persian culture, horsemanship was a highly prized skill. Any man of the aristocratic class was expected to be an expert rider.

 But as tough as the Medes were, as long as they were in scattered villages without much central organization, they didn’t pose any great threat to Assyrian power. That began to change around the beginning of the 7th century BCE, when — at least according to our Greek sources — a highly respected nobleman by the name of Deioces managed to acquire enough power to make himself king of the Medes. One of his first acts as king was to build a capital with a grand palace at a place called Ecbatana. Herodotus gives us a vivid description of the complex, saying it had seven concentric walls, each one of a different color, with the innermost wall decorated in gold. If that sounds like a tall tale, it almost certainly is. The Assyrian texts really don’t support the story of such an elaborate palace or even a powerful, centralized monarchy in the early 7th century, although some texts do refer to an important figure named Da-a-a-uk-ku, who may be the man the Greeks called Deioces. The whole early history of the Median kingdom is very murky. But however it happened, a kingdom did arise, and over the course of the 7th century, it came to dominate the Persians and became more of a problem for the Assyrians.

 Meanwhile, there was internal trouble brewing in the Assyrian empire. Its last great king was Ashurbanipal, who was renowned for being not only a great warrior king but a scholar. He amassed the great library in his palace at Nineveh, which contained thousands of the clay tablets that provide so much of our knowledge about ancient Mesopotamia. But even in Ashurbanipal’s reign, cracks were starting to appear. He had to fight a long civil war against his brother, who’d been his client king in Babylon. And after his death, those civil wars continued as his sons competed for power. That continued to weaken Assyria until in 612 BCE, the Median king Cyaxares teamed up with Babylon and launched a campaign that destroyed Nineveh. That effectively decapitated the Assyrian empire, leaving the Babylonians and the Medes to divide up the spoils.

 So suddenly, the Medes had not only a kingdom, but an empire. After wiping out Nineveh, Cyaxares kept expanding Median power, and after a couple of decades we find him moving west into territory that’s more familiar to this podcast. In 585 BCE, he made war on the kingdom of Lydia in what’s now western Turkey. The Lydian king at this time was Alyattes, and he mounted a strong defense. The two armies fought a fierce battle with both sides fighting bravely, until it ended with… wait for it… a total solar eclipse. This is an unusual case where we know exactly when an ancient battle occurred, because astronomical calculations can pinpoint the date. The Greeks proudly recorded that the Milesian philosopher Thales had predicted a solar eclipse in that year. Well, science or no science, an eclipse was a sign from the gods. And both sides agreed that it meant they should make peace. The kings made a pact that from that point on, the Halys river would be the border between the Lydian and Median empires. They sealed the deal with a marriage alliance. The Lydian king Alyattes gave his daughter in marriage to Cyaxares’ son and heir, the prince Astyages.

 So far, so good. But unlike the Assyrian empire, the Median power wasn’t destined to last for centuries. Back in their home territory, their subject people, the Persians, were soon to turn the tables.

 And that will take us to our first break. As always, not for ads or promos. Believe it or not, friends, I didn’t start this podcast for the money. But I am very grateful to those who help with the costs of webhosting, recording equipment, research materials, and everything it takes to produce the podcast. If you’d like to make a small contribution, the one way to do that is by going to the website at www.epicgreekhistory.com, hitting that “Support” button, and choosing a contribution level starting at just three dollars a month. As always, big thanks to those who have helped keep the podcast going. And with that, let’s break for…

 [SFX: A Moment of Greek!]

 In the last few decades, there’s been a healthy trend toward trying to understand ancient Persia on its own terms rather than looking at it just through a Greek lens. But there are some conventions that are hard for us westerners to break away from. A case in point… When English speakers talk about individual Medes or Persians, many of us, myself included, use the Greek versions of their names, often with Latinized spelling and then anglicized pronunciation. For example, the name of the king who founded the Persian empire was something like “Koo-rush” in Old Persian. The Greeks didn’t have the “sh” sound, so it came over into Greek as “Κûρος,” which in Latin was spelled C-y-r-u-s, and so in English it becomes “Cyrus.” I mentioned the first Median king, Deioces, whose name can be approximately reconstructed as “Duh-yoo-kah.” I’ve tried looking up the Median pronunciation of Cyaxares, which is tough enough in Greek, so I’m not even going to attempt it here. And that’s today’s moment of Greek.

 [SFX]

 In the mid-6th century BCE, Cyrus the Great led the Persians in a rebellion and overthrew their Median overlords. The Medes had enormous resources and what looked like a decisive military advantage, so how did Cyrus pull it off? For that, we have a few historical facts and a lot of legend. Herodotus prefaces his account with an intriguing statement. As translated by Andrea Purvis, quote:

I shall write this account using as my sources certain Persians who do not intend to magnify the deeds of Cyrus but rather to tell what really happened, although I know of three other ways in which the story of Cyrus is told. Unquote.

 Herodotus is well aware that events from a century earlier in a faraway place get distorted in the telling and retelling. But the stories are all he has to work with. So the version he presents is the one he considers the most trustworthy. There’s not much in it that a modern historian would accept as fact. But the stories themselves are artifacts of ancient Greece, and they reflect the ways the Greeks thought about the world. In that sense, they’re a part of history. So I’m going to start with what Herodotus tells us, and then we can use those Near Eastern documents to help us reconstruct historical events.

 Herodotus’ account begins when the last of the Median kings, Astyages, has a dream. And in this dream, his daughter Mandane urinates with such volume that she fills the city floods all of Asia. It’s an alarming vision, so he calls in the Magi to interpret it. Herodotus tells us in another passage that the Magi were one of six Median clans or tribes. They were thought to have a special connection to the supernatural, and so they served as diviners, dream interpreters, and experts on signs and omens. It’s no accident that our word “magic” derives ultimately from the Magi. Well, the dream interpreters tell him that if Mandane has a child, it could be bad news for Astyages and his empire. The king decides to neutralize the threat by marrying his daughter off to a Persian nobleman. Because if she’s married to a mere Persian, no son of hers will have the kind of power he’d need to overthrow him. 

 It’s a good try. But soon after the wedding, Astyages has another dream. This time a vine sprouts from between Mandane’s legs and grows until it covers all Asia. The Magi tell him this is really serious, and he needs to nip it in the bud. So he summons his daughter from Persia, and when she arrives at the palace, she’s pregnant. More bad news for Astyages. He decides the child can’t be allowed to live. So, when she gives birth to a son, Astyages calls in a relative of his, a very trustworthy man by the name of Harpagos, and orders him to take the baby away and kill him. 

 Harpagos is now in a bind. He can’t disobey the king, but at the same time, this is a royal child. If he kills him and then Astyages has regrets, Harpagos could lose his own head. So he hands the baby over to one of the king’s herdsmen and orders him to do the deed. He tells him, “I’ll be back in a day or two, and I’m going to need to see a dead kid, so don’t get any ideas.” Well, it so happens that this herdsman’s wife is pregnant, and she’s due to give birth. When he goes home with the baby he’s been ordered to kill, his wife tells him, “I had our baby, but he was stillborn.” You can see where this is going. They decide to switch the babies. Harpagos comes and collects the dead child, and they raise the healthy child as their own. What could possibly go wrong?

 Well, ten years go by. The boy who lived, Cyrus, is playing with some other boys, both Medes and Persians. They play a game where they make Cyrus their king. So he starts ordering them around and they act like obedient subjects, but one highborn Median kid refuses to obey his commands. Cyrus does what a king would do. He orders the disobedient kid to be taken away and whipped. Of course, that’s a major insult. The boy runs off to Daddy, who’s a very high-ranking noble and is close to the king. Astyages summons Cyrus and asks him, “What did you mean by having such a noble Mede whipped?”  Cyrus calmly answers him, saying, “I was the king, so I was right to punish him when he disobeyed me.” Astyages is struck by the boy’s noble, even kingly bearing. When he looks closer, he can see a family resemblance. He’s starting to smell a rat.

 Continuing his investigation, he summons the herdsman for questioning, then he calls in Harpagos, and the truth comes out. Harpagos has to admit that he passed the buck and gave the child to the herdsman to kill. Astyages is furious, but he doesn’t let on. He says, “To be honest, I’m relieved — overjoyed, in fact — to learn that my grandson is alive! Let’s celebrate with a feast at the palace. And why don’t you send for your own son, so he can meet Cyrus?” Harpagos graciously accepts the invitation.

 When the boy arrives at the palace, Astyages has him killed, butchered and roasted. At the banquet, the other guests are served lamb, but Harpagos gets choice cuts of his own son. At the end of the meal, the king asks, “How did you like your meat?” “Delicious,” Harpagos says. Astyages says, “You’re welcome to more. Take what you’d like.” At that moment, the servants approach Harpagos with a covered dish and lift the lid to reveal the boy’s head and hands on a platter. There’s nothing Harpagos can do but tamp down his emotions and thank the king for a magnificent meal.

 In the meantime, Astyages has consulted the Magi again, and now they tell him he has nothing to worry about. Dream interpretation is tricky. When the boys made Cyrus their king in their game, that was what the dream predicted. Now that he’s already been “king,” the danger has passed. So Astyages can now send Cyrus back to his biological parents in Persia. But of course, Harpagos carries a grudge against Astyages. He stays in touch with Cyrus while he’s growing up, sends him gifts, and does everything he can to build a strong friendship. At the same time, he goes around to the Median chiefs, who’ve been chafing under Astyages’ harsh reign, to stir up resentments. When Cyrus is grown and the time is right, Harpagos convinces him to lead a rebellion. 

 When Astyages hears rumblings of an uprising, he summons Cyrus to the Median palace at Ecbatana. Cyrus sends a messenger back, saying, “I’ll be there sooner than you’d like.” This, of course, means war. Astyages sends out his army, and as the general in charge of the expedition, he chooses none other than Harpagos, the man he tricked into eating his own son. Herodotus adds a comment that the gods must have scrambled his brain. So, when the two sides join in battle, Harpagos and his co-conspirators desert or deliberately don’t put up much of a fight, so the Median army collapses. Cyrus marches on to take Ecbatana, and the Median empire is at an end.

So that’s what Herodotus considers the most trustworthy version of the story. Obviously, it’s packed with legend and folktale elements. Tales of royal babies being condemned to death and then raised in secret are a dime a dozen. I think you can even see Herodotus or whatever source he’s following patching up plot holes here and there. Why would Astyages allow the young Cyrus to live and join his family in Persia? Oh yeah, the Magi reinterpreted the dream and assured him he had nothing to fear. But in spite of all that, there are a few historical kernels that we can corroborate and some things we can correct using Near Eastern sources.

 For one thing, Herodotus’ story makes Cyrus out to be a man of good family in Persia but not a king. His source narrative may very well have had a Median bias, since it suggests that there was no royal line in Persia and that Cyrus must have had Median ancestry to be a legitimate king. But cuneiform texts make it clear that he came from a royal family in Persia and inherited the kingship, so he started out as a client king under the Median empire. He came from the Achaemenid clan, which was considered the most prestigious in Persia, and so the empire he founded is often called the Achaemenid empire. 

 As for Cyrus’s rebellion against the Medes, Herodotus seems to be a bit closer to the facts. An important source here is the Nabonidus Chronicle, named after the last independent king of Babylon. It supports Herodotus’s narrative that the Median army turned against Astyages. Harpagos was a real person, and although I don’t think we can believe the story that Astyages fed his son to him, it’s quite plausible that he defected to the Persian side and encouraged the Median troops to mutiny. 

 Another piece of Herodotus’s narrative that’s probably genuine is that after defeating Astyages, Cyrus allowed him to live and treated him with dignity. That kind of behavior was typical of Cyrus. Even though he often comes across in the stories as quick to anger, his general approach was to offer mercy when possible. If a defeated king was treated honorably, he could become a valuable adviser when it came to ruling the conquered territory. It’s a very sharp contrast with the Neo-Assyrian kings, whose standard M.O. was to bring pain and death to all enemies. 

 Well, once Cyrus had defeated the Medes and taken Ecbatana, he didn’t have to build an empire from scratch. He took over the existing Median empire and set out to expand it. And this is where this episode finally links up with events we’ve touched on earlier, because within just a few years, we find Cyrus in conflict with Lydia, where our old friend Croesus is now on the throne. Now, remember, under Croesus’s predecessor, Lydia had made a treaty with the Medes, fixing the Halys river as the boundary between them. The marriage alliance that had sealed the deal meant that Croesus was the brother-in-law of Astyages, the defeated king. If he could win a victory over the Persians, he had a chance of putting Astyages back on the throne and restoring the alliance. Even apart from that, I imagine he must have been alarmed at the growth of Persian power.

 Which brings us to the classic story I told in the episode on Delphi. Croesus asked the oracle if he should go on the offensive against the Persians. The oracle answered that if he attacked the Persians, he would destroy a great empire. Croesus never stopped to ask which empire would be destroyed. Elated at the answer he received, he crossed the Halys into the region of Cappadocia with his army of Lydians and subject peoples, including Ionian Greeks. There he sacked a city called Pteria, but after that initial success, Cyrus moved in with his army. The two sides fought a battle that lasted all day, and by nightfall, there was no clear winner. 

 At that point, Croesus could see that he didn’t have a strong enough force to win a decisive victory. So he decided that was it for this campaigning season. He’d march back to his capital at Sardis and prepare for a much bigger invasion the following year. He could call in favors from allies in Egypt, Babylon, and other places, and then he’d try again. But Cyrus surprised him by following him into Lydian territory and marching all the way to Sardis. The way Herodotus tells it, the Lydians were taken by surprise when the Persian army suddenly showed up on their doorstep. They mounted a hasty defense, and again, both sides fought bravely. The turning point came when the Mede Harpagos, now Cyrus’s right-hand man, advised him to take camels from the baggage train and have them face off against the Lydian cavalry. The Lydian horses had never seen camels before, and that made them skittish, which gave the Persians an edge. They routed the Lydians and drove them to take refuge inside the city walls. The siege lasted for a while, until the Persians discovered a weakness in the fortifications and got their army inside. So they took Sardis, and that was the end of Lydia as an independent kingdom.

 But here again, Cyrus spared Croesus’ life and treated him with respect. At this point, I’m going to switch from history to legend again. Herodotus’ account is such a classic, it needs to be included. The story goes that Cyrus was going to have Croesus executed. He had him seated on top of a great pyre to be burned alive. When the attendant lit the kindling and the wood started to burn, Croesus remembered the words of the wise Athenian, Solon, who’d warned him about the impermanence of wealth and power. He cried out the name, “Solon!” three times, which piqued Cyrus’ curiosity. He had a slave run up and ask Croesus what he was shouting about, and when Cyrus heard the story, he had a change of heart. He ordered the slaves to put out the fire. But by this time, the fire was raging out of control. Croesus prayed to Apollo, who took pity on him and sent a rainstorm to extinguish the flames.  

 It’s really no wonder that colorful legends grew up around Croesus and the end of his reign. His fall must have stunned the Greek world. Here was this magnificent monarch, renowned for his wealth and splendor, and all of that was gone in a flash. Croesus became a symbol of the unpredictable nature of human fortune. But the fall of Lydia also changed the larger dynamic between Greece and the Near East. Lydia had functioned as a kind of buffer zone between the Greeks and empires like the Median and Babylonian. The Ionian Greeks may not have liked submitting to Lydian rule, but Croesus didn’t rule harshly, and he was local. Leaders of the Ionian cities might even get an audience with him if they had important matters to discuss. Now that buffer zone was gone, and the Greeks were facing a vast empire whose monarch had his headquarters far off to the east. It was a different world.

 But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take our second break, and then we’ll look at the immediate Greek response to the conquest of Lydia. For now, it’s time for…

 [SFX: Random facts!]

 The story of Croesus made an enormous impression on the Greeks. One of the best proofs of that is a famous Athenian red figure amphora from the early fifth century BCE, now in the Louvre museum in Paris. It shows Croesus seated on his throne on top of the pyre as the attendant is starting to light it. Croesus doesn’t look at all frightened or anguished. He has a serene, self-possessed expression, and he calmly pours a libation. It’s almost as if he’s performing a sacrificial ritual with himself as the victim. The painting includes tiny lettering identifying Croesus and naming Euthymos, the man lighting the fire. Euthymos isn’t mentioned in Herodotus’ account, which suggests that the painter was drawing on a different version of the story. I’ve posted a photo of the painting on my Substack page, epicgreekhistory.substack.com — or it will pop up immediately if you just do a Google image search on Croesus. And that’s today’s random fact!

 [SFX]

 In the run-up to the confrontation between the Persians and the Lydians, Cyrus sent envoys to the Greek cities in that area, urging them to turn against Croesus. That put the Greeks in a difficult position, because the outcome was uncertain. If they defected and Croesus won, he’d be sure to come down hard on them. So they stayed loyal and fought for what turned out to be the losing side. After Sardis fell, they sent envoys to Cyrus offering to surrender if they could get the same terms they’d had under Croesus. Cyrus sent messengers back, saying essentially, “You had your chance.” Now he was coming for them.

 So they started shoring up their defenses, and meanwhile, they considered their options. The Ionians met at a common shrine called the Panionion on the coast, just across from the island of Samos. There they decided to send a delegation to Sparta to ask for help. In typical Spartan fashion, they declined to commit to a military operation so far from home, but we’re told that they sent a small delegation to Sardis to confront Cyrus and tell him the Spartans wouldn’t tolerate violence against Greek cities. If the story is true, it must have given Cyrus a good laugh. Here was one little Greek city issuing a warning to this world conqueror. He showed his contempt by asking, “Who are the Spartans?” and he sent them packing.

Well, Cyrus himself wasn’t going to bother picking off all those little Greek cities. He had bigger fish to fry, bigger conquests to make, so he delegated. And the task of reducing the Greek cities ultimately fell to his loyal vassal, Harpagos. He was especially skilled in siege craft, and he became famous for the massive siege mounds he built to get his forces over defensive walls. So Harpagos proceeded to pick off one Greek city after another.

 In this crisis, the Greeks had to make some tough decisions. One option was to leave home and settle somewhere else. In the episode on the polis, I cited some fragments of early Greek poets expressing the view that what really made a polis was the people, not the locale or the buildings. Of course, the citizens were very attached to their ancestral lands where their gods had their sanctuaries, but in extreme circumstances, a community could uproot itself and start over somewhere else. That’s what the cities of Phocaea and Teos decided to do. Herodotus’ account of the Phocaean resettlement shows just how difficult that was. They tried settling in Corsica and a few other places before they finally established the city of Elea in southern Italy.

 Herodotus also reports a couple of other proposals floated by two of those wise men known as the seven sages of Greece. Bias of Priene proposed that the Ionians from all the cities sail off to Sardinia and start one big, new city there. Thales of Miletus suggested that the Ionian cities should synoecize and become somewhat like Athens. They could make Teos the main city because of its central location, and all the other cities would become demes. I’m sure the Ionians debated all kinds of solutions, but the long and short of it is that they never unified, and Harpagos took their cities one by one. 

 As much anguish as I’m sure that caused, I don’t see that the Greeks really had it much worse under Cyrus than under Croesus. Cyrus was not an Assyrian-style king who’d torture his defeated enemies to death just to show who was boss. The Persians typically demanded three things from their subject states: a vow of loyalty, payment of tribute, and military service when needed. Beyond that, they weren’t much interested in micromanaging. The policy they eventually landed on for the Greek states was that they’d be ruled by Greek tyrants. Essentially dictators who would keep order in their cities and serve as the main points of contact with the Persian authorities. 

 Well, while Harpagos brought the Greek cities and some of the smaller kingdoms under the Persian yoke, Cyrus went on to conquer virtually all of the Near East. To keep this episode from getting as big as the empire itself, I’m just going to touch on one high point. The next big prize to go after was Babylon. As we saw earlier, when the Medes finished off the Neo-Assyrian empire, they more or less split its territories with the Neo-Babylonian empire. And although that empire lasted only about 75 years, it certainly made its mark on history. Most famously, King Nebuchadnezzar II conquered the kingdom of Judah and deported much of its population to Babylon, beginning the period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian captivity. One of the best-known passages from the Hebrew scriptures is the opening of Psalm 137, expressing the anguish of the exiles. I think the King James version is probably the most familiar. Quote: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Unquote.

 When they weren’t deporting whole populations, the neo-Babylonians were great builders. Nebuchadnezzar II pursued an ambitious program to give Babylon a facelift and also to refurbish important temples in his territories. It’s doubtful whether Herodotus ever visited Babylon, but whatever his sources were, he tells us that no other city matched it for sheer magnificence.

 But no matter how magnificent the capital, the Neo-Babylonian empire was no match for a conqueror like Cyrus. Its last king, Nabonidus, had a weakness that Cyrus could exploit. Nabonidus had come to power, apparently somewhat unexpectedly, after the assassination of the previous king. And he attributed his rise to the favor of the moon god, Sin. Now, traditionally, Marduk had always been the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon. But Nabonidus seems to have tried to diminish Marduk’s prestige in favor of Sin. 

 A case in point is that Marduk had a very important annual New Year festival that the king was expected to participate in. There was a private ceremony where the priest would deprive the king of his scepter and other royal insignia, slap him in the face, drag him by the ears, and force him to bow down before the image of Marduk. Then there was a public procession where the king would take the hand of Marduk — in other words he’d hold hands with his statue — to show harmony between the king and the god. Well, Nabonidus, who was much more beholden to the moon god Sin, seems to have left Babylon for ten years and neglected the New Year festival. It’s not even clear whether it took place during his absence.

 All of this gave Cyrus a ready-made charm offensive. He let it be known that he would be honored to take the hand of Marduk in the annual ceremony. He still had to fight a battle, of course, but after routing the Babylonian army, he took the city. And in the document known as the Cyrus Cylinder, we can see how he used religion as a propaganda tool. He presented himself as Marduk’s chosen one to bring order back to Babylon. He also boasted of returning gods to their homes — because in the run-up to the war, Nabonidus had brought cult statues from outlying areas into the city for safe keeping. Most famously for those of us in the Judaeo-Christian world, he allowed the Jewish exiles to return to their homes and rebuild their temple. Just as he presented himself to the Babylonians as the agent of Marduk, he could now present himself to the Jews as the agent of Yahweh. That comes through loud and clear in the book of Ezra, chapter 1, verse 2. In the New Revised Standard Version, quote:

 Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Let any of those among you who are of his people — may their God be with them! — go up to Jerusalem in Judah, and rebuild the house of the LORD, the God of Israel. Unquote.

 Honoring local gods and religious practices was a key Persian policy for keeping peace in all its subject territories.

 In 530 BCE, Cyrus died. The circumstances aren’t quite clear. Most historians seem to accept the nuts and bolts of Herodotus’ account — that he died fighting against a people called the Massagetae on the northeastern frontier of the empire. It’s hard pin down exactly where that was. Herodotus says he invaded the territory of the Massagetae by crossing a river called the Araxes, but there’s some debate over what river he means. A good candidate is the Syr Darya, which flows through parts of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. But with a larger-than-life figure like Cyrus, it was inevitable that a lot of legends would spring up. Herodotus acknowledges that he’s heard many different accounts of Cyrus’s death. Ctesias has him meet his end in battle against a different tribal confederation, and Xenophon even has him die peacefully at home. However it happened, a great tomb was built for him in his capital city of Pasargadae. The Greek travel writer Strabo tells how Alexander the Great made a point of visiting it after conquering the Persian Empire. Today, there’s a well-preserved mausoleum in that area that may very well be the tomb of Cyrus, although that’s not 100% certain.

 Cyrus had built an empire that stretched from central Asia all the way to the Mediterranean, making it the biggest the world had seen up to that point. But at the time of his death, there was still one great prize to conquer — the kingdom of Egypt. That task fell to his son and heir Cambyses. And that’s where we’ll pick up in Part 2, coming up in two weeks. The history of the Persian Empire is a little outside my wheelhouse, but I’ve had a great time learning more about it, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. If you have comments, questions, corrections, or anything to add, by all means get in touch. My email is scott@epicgreekhistory.com, and you can always leave a comment on Instagram or Facebook. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and produced by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.