Persian Fire (32 page)

But that is not to say it was no concern at all. The Great King's memory was capacious and his reach global. Not a crisis on a far-distant border but he would be kept closely informed of it. Staggering as the distances within his dominion were, so was the ingenuity with which his servants worked to shrink them. No one could fail to be dazzled by the speed of the Persians' communications. Fire beacons, flaring from lookout to lookout, might keep the Great King abreast of an incident almost as it brewed. In the more mountainous regions of the empire, and particularly in Persia itself, where the valleys offered excellent acoustics, more detailed information might be brought by aural relay. The Persians, schooled 'in the arts of breath control, and the effective use of their lungs',
²⁷
were well known to have the loudest voices in the world; many a message, echoing from cliffs and ravines, had been brought within the day over terrain that a man on foot would have struggled to cover within a month. As the Persians understood to a degree never before rivalled, information was dominance. Master information, and master all the world.

The ultimate basis of Persian greatness, then, was not its bureaucracy, nor even its armies, but its roads. Precious filaments of dust and packed dirt, these provided the immensity of the empire's body with its nervous system, along which news was perpetually flowing, from synapse to synapse, to and from the brain. The distances which had so appalled Cleomenes were routinely annihilated by royal couriers. Every evening, after a hard day's ride, the messenger would find a posting station waiting for him, equipped with a bed, provisions and a fresh horse for the morning. A truly urgent message, one brought at a gallop through storms and the dead of night, might arrive in Persepolis from the Aegean in under two weeks. This was an incredible, almost magical, degree of speed. Nothing to equal it had ever been known before. No wonder that the Great King's control of such a service — the original information superhighway — should so have overawed his subjects, and struck them as the surest gauge and manifestation of Persian power.

Access to it was ferociously restricted. No one could set foot upon the king's roads without a pass, a
'viyataka’
Since every travel document was issued either directly from Persepolis or by a satrap's office, mere possession of one spelt prestige. Indeed, it was in the
'viyataka'
that those twin manias of Persian imperialism, for shuffling forms and for rigid social stratification, most perfectly met and fused. There was no better way for an official to discover his precise place in the imperial pecking order than to arrive at a posting station for the night, hand over his
viyataka
to the manager, and count out the rations that it brought him in return. If he were one of the greatest men of the kingdom — one of Darius' six co-conspirators, say — then he and his retinue might receive up to a hundred quarts of wine. If he ranked at the bottom of the food chain, then he might find himself, humiliatingly, on a lower wine ration than a particularly favoured horse. So satisfying did the Persians find the
viyataka
as a basis for ordering the world that not only officials and soldiers but women and children, and even birds, found themselves definitively fixed within the imperial scheme of things by ration chits. A duck, for instance, if it were being fattened for the royal table, could look forward to downing a quart of wine every day. A young girl, by comparison, might have to rub by on one a week.

Men, women, children, horses, waterfowl: none could elude the meticulous prescriptions of Darius' bureaucrats. It was not only within the satrapal courts that the Great King had his 'eyes', forever watching, scanning, tracking. Every transaction carried out within a posting station required a form to be stamped by both manager and recipient, and then forwarded to a central archive in Persepolis. So tightly controlled were the itineraries of travellers on the royal roads that those who dawdled on the way and failed to arrive at a given destination on an allotted date could expect to forfeit their rations for the night. Those who travelled on the roads without a
viyataka
at all would not merely go hungry but very quickly be hunted down and killed. Even mail, if it were sent without royal or satrapal approval, would be destroyed. Only the most cunning could hope to evade the vigilance of the highway patrols. Histiaeus, for instance, back in 499
bc,
desperate to communicate with his nephew in far-off Miletus about his plans for revolt, had shaved the head of his most trustworthy slave, tattooed a message on the gleaming scalp, and patiently waited for the hair to grow back. 'Then, once the slave had a full head again, Histiaeus sent him to Miletus with orders to do nothing except tell Aristagoras to shave him, and inspect what stood revealed.'
²⁸
Such was the inventiveness required of those without a
viyataka.

How, then, were enemies of the Great King ever to compete with all Darius' prodigious resources of intelligence? Not very well, was the answer. The Ionian rebels, for instance, pinned on the outermost rim of Asia, had only ever had the haziest notions of Persian troop movements and intentions — a failure set into stark relief by the startling ability of Darius, 1500 miles from the theatre of war, to track events almost as though he were on the spot. It was he, for instance, in the early weeks of494
BC,
who had personally drawn up plans for the final offensive that a few months later would result in the great Persian victory at Lade and the sacking of Miletus. Darius' information on that occasion had been particularly precise and detailed, for his leading military specialist on Greek affairs, a general by the name of Datis, had travelled directly by express service from Ionia to keep him abreast of the latest news from the front. Nothing could better have indicated the supreme importance attached to intelligence by the Great King than that a man of Datis' stature should have made the long journey to Persepolis in person. Datis — like Harpagus, the original conqueror of Ionia — was a Mede; but he was also, in the competitive world of ration chits and security passes, quite as weighty a player as any Persian grandee. His daily wine ration was seventy quarts: a drinking allowance at which a sister of the King would not have turned up her nose. Due reward for an exceptional military ability and record.

True, the Persian intelligence services did not always have things their own way; nor was Darius' eye for talent necessarily infallible. One of the worst debacles had occurred a couple of years before Datis' arrival in Persepolis, when the Great King, in a startling display of misjudgement, had sent Histiaeus back to Sardis as his personal agent. Appalled at having to welcome the slippery Milesian to his headquarters but reluctant to offend his brother, Artaphernes had pointedly-revealed to Histiaeus the full scale of his suspicions, hoping thereby to intimidate his unwelcome guest into openly going over to the enemy. '"Let's not beat about the bush,'" the Satrap had menaced. '"Aristagoras may have worn the shoe, but you were the one who made it.'' Histiaeus, turning pale, had got the message, but flight from Sardis that very night had hardly ended his capacity for mischief. Fishing in the murky waters of espionage circles with consummate skill, revealing himself first to one side then to the other as a double-agent, he had sought to turn Artaphernes' more underhand methods back against their perpetrator, daring even to foment rebellion within the satrapal court itself. Greeks, it appeared, were not the only people who could be set against one another: the crisis briefly appeared so threatening that Artaphernes, struggling frantically to maintain his authority, had been forced into a wholesale purge of his countrymen. Such ruthlessness, fortunately for the satrap, had been just sufficient to prevent a disintegration of the Persian provincial command — and, of course, from that moment on, Histiaeus had been a marked man. No episode in the entire quashing of the Ionians' revolt can have given Artaphernes greater pleasure than the capture, a year after the victory at Lade, of his brother's treacherous former favourite. Hauled to Sardis in chains, the irrepressible Histiaeus had coolly insisted that he be returned to the Great King - a demand which Artaphernes had duly met by impaling him, and then sending his severed head, pickled and packed in salt, by express post to Susa.

The execution of Histiaeus, and the parallel escape of Miltiades to Athens, had marked the effective end ot Ionian resistance. Not of Artaphernes' labours, however. Having won the war, it was now his equally arduous task to win the peace. Ionia had been trampled underfoot by six summers of savage warfare. Fields lay uncultivated, ships rotted idly in stagnant harbours, roads had vanished beneath grass, villages and whole cities stood abandoned in blackened ruin. As the Ionians starved, so, inevitably, they began to scrap desperately over the few fields not lost to nettles and brambles; and, bled of nearly all their energy and manpower though they were, they reached for their weapons again. Artaphernes, having none of it, stepped in at once. Representatives of the various Ionian states were summoned to Sardis and briskly ordered to swear an oath of perpetual amity. Henceforward, all border disputes were to be settled not by the armed squabbling that was traditional among the Greeks but by arbitration, backed up directly by the sanction of Persian force. As even the Ionians themselves acknowledged, this was a development 'not entirely to their disadvantage'.
³⁰
To protect his subjects from their own worst instincts, to promote stability, to facilitate a regular flow of tribute: this, as it had always been, remained the satrap's default policy. Terror having served its purpose, Artaphernes could now return with a sigh of relief to the winning of his subjects' hearts and minds. Having been made all too aware of the Ionians' distaste for tyranny, he was even prepared to indulge in certain circumstances their preference for democracies. After all, just as long as the king's peace was kept, it scarcely mattered how the Greeks chose to rule themselves.

This indulgence was not extended, of course, to those who remained in arms. Even as Artaphernes applied to bleeding Ionia the balm of a settlement long remembered afterwards as a model of fairness and justice, so the continued defiance of the Athenians remained an open wound. A standing menace too. The longer that the punishment of Athens was delayed, the greater was the risk that terrorist states might proliferate throughout the mountainous and inaccessible wilds of Greece: a nightmare prospect for any Persian strategist. Geopolitics, however, was far from the only prompting at the back of the Great King's mind. Not for nothing had Ahura Mazda delivered the world into his hands. No more sacred duty had been laid upon him than the obligation to storm, wherever they might fester, the strongholds of the Lie. Athens was a nest of rebels, to be sure — but the city also stood revealed, far more sinisterly, as the home of demons,
'daiva',
false gods who had chosen the path of rebellion against the Lord Mazda, 'following the course of Wrath, sickening the lives of men'.
³¹
Only fire, of the kind that had already cleansed and purged the shrines of the Ionians, could possibly redeem Athens and her temples from the Lie. For the spiritual good of the universe, as well as the future stability of Ionia, the entire Aegean would have to be transformed into a Persian lake - and without delay. Staging post in a thrilling new phase of imperial expansion and holy war: the burning of Athens promised to be both.

But how best to achieve it? Two policies suggested themselves: to complete the conquest of the land approaches along the coast of the north Aegean; and simultaneously to menace the cities of Greece into surrender. In pursuance of the first goal, a fleet and a fresh army were dispatched to Thrace in the spring of 492
bc
, with orders to extend Persian dominance ever further westwards, into Macedonia and perhaps beyond. Their commander, a dashing young nobleman by the name of Mardonius, arrived on the western front already bathed in the golden glow of natural charisma. The son of Gobryas, Darius' closest friend among the Seven, his intimacy with the royal household had been confirmed by his marriage to the Great King's daughter. But Mardonius was not merely prodigiously well connected; he was also a general of authentic elan and flair. Alexander, the King of Macedon, quickly bowed to the inevitable: Macedonia was formally absorbed into the dominions of the Great King, whose remit now extended to the foothills of Mount Olympus. True, the victory was slightly tarnished when Mardonius' entire fleet was shipwrecked in a storm off Mount Athos, and Mardonius himself, launching an over exuberant assault on a troublesome mountain tribe, was badly wounded — but these setbacks were hardly severe enough to undermine Persian prestige. Macedonia, certainly, remained solid for the Great King; Alexander, practised weather-vane that he was, could still tell precisely which way the wind was blowing.