Travels with Herodotus (16 page)

I do not know if Herodotus realized what he was writing. Did he think about those words? Because at that time, in the sixth century, Babylon had at least two to three hundred thousand inhabitants. It follows, then, that tens of thousands of women were condemned to strangulation—wives, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, lovers.

Our Greek says nothing more about this mass execution. Whose decision was it? That of the Popular Assembly? Of the Municipal Government? Of the Committee for the Defense of Babylon? Was there some discussion of the matter? Did anyone protest? Who decided on the method of execution—that these women would be strangled? Were there other suggestions? That they be pierced by spears, for example? Or cut down with swords? Or burned on pyres? Or thrown into the Euphrates, which coursed through the city?

There are more questions still. Could the women, who had been waiting in their homes for the men to return from the meeting during which sentence was pronounced upon them, discern something in their men’s faces? Indecision? Shame? Pain? Madness? The little girls of course suspected nothing. But the older ones? Wouldn’t instinct tell them something? Did all the men observe the agreed silence? Didn’t conscience strike any of them? Did none of them experience an attack of hysteria? Run screaming through the streets?

And later? Later, they gathered them all together and strangled them. There must have been a meeting place, where everyone had to report and where the selection took place. Those who were to live to one side. And the others? Were there municipal guards of some sort who strangled one by one the girls and women brought to them? Or did the husbands and fathers have to strangle them themselves, in the presence of judges appointed to supervise the
executions? Was there silence? Or were there moans, and pleading for the lives of infants, daughters, sisters? How were the bodies disposed of, the tens of thousands of them? Because a decent burial of the dead is a condition for the continued peace of the living; without it, the spirit of the departed returns by night and torments the survivors. Did Babylon’s nights terrify its men from that moment onward? Did they wake in panic? Did nightmares haunt them? Were they unable to fall asleep? Did they feel demons seizing them by the throat?

To conserve supplies
. Yes, because the Babylonians were preparing for a long siege. They understood the value of Babylon, a rich and flowering metropolis, a city of hanging gardens and gilded temples, and knew that Darius would not readily retreat but would do his utmost to continue their subjugation, if not by the sword, then by siege of hunger.

The king of the Persians did not waste a moment. As soon as news of the rebellion reached him,
he mustered his army in full strength and marched against them. Once he reached Babylon he began to besiege the city, but the inhabitants were not in the slightest bit concerned. They used to climb up to the bastions of the city wall and strut about there, taunting Darius and his army. Once one of them called out, “What are you doing sitting there, men of Persia? Why don’t you just go away? Babylon will fall into your hands only when mules start bearing young.”
(And mules, as we are meant to know, are usually infertile.)

They jeered at Darius and his army.

Let us imagine this scene. The world’s largest army has arrived at the gates of Babylon. It has made camp around the city, which is encircled by massive walls of clay brick. The city wall is several meters high and so wide that a wagon drawn by four horses all in a row can be driven along its top. There are eight great gates,
and the whole thing is additionally protected by a deep moat. In the face of this monumental fortification, Darius’s army is helpless. It will be twelve hundred more years before gunpowder makes its appearance in this part of the world. Firearms won’t be invented for another two thousand years. There aren’t even any siege machines—the Persians do not possess battering rams, catapults. So the Babylonians feel invincible, able to behave with impunity—nothing can happen to them. It is no wonder, therefore, that standing atop their wall, they
were taunting Darius and his army
. Taunting the greatest army in the world!

The distance between both sides is so small that the besieged and the besiegers can converse, the former cursing the latter’s names. If Darius happens to ride close to the walls, he can hear the worst invectives and terms of abuse hurled his way. It is quite humiliating, all the more so because the siege has lasted so long already:
A year and seven months passed, and Darius and his men were getting frustrated with their inability to overcome the Babylonians
.

And then something changes.
In the twentieth month a remarkable thing happened to Zopyrus … : one of his packmules gave birth
.

Young Zopyrus is the son of the Persian noble Megabyzus and belongs to the small elite of the Persian empire. He is excited by the news that his mule has produced offspring. He sees a sign from the gods in this, their signal that Babylon can indeed be conquered. He goes to Darius, recounts everything, and asks how important the capture of Babylon is to him.

Very, Darius replies. But the Persians have been laying siege to the city for almost two years, they have already tried countless methods, stratagems, and subterfuges, none of which have made even the slightest dent in the walls of Babylon. Darius is discouraged and doesn’t know what to do: to withdraw covered in shame, and, moreover, losing the empire’s most important satrapy; to
press on, the prospects for conquering the city looking impossibly slim.

Doubts, dilemmas, hesitations. Seeing the king so dejected, Zopyrus tried
to find a way whereby he could be the one to bring about the fall of Babylon, as his own achievement
. After giving it some thought, he takes up an iron or brass knife, cuts off his own nose and ears, shaves his head (as criminals are shorn), and has himself flogged. Thus mutilated, wounded, streaming with blood, he presents himself to Darius. At the sight of Zopyrus’s injuries, Darius goes into shock.
He jumped up from his throne with a cry and asked who it was who had disfigured him and why
.

The wound where his nose had been, the damaged bone, must have been horribly painful, and the upper lip, cheeks, and the rest of his face were surely grotesquely swollen, his eyes bloodied, and yet Zopyrus manages to answer:

“No one did it to me, my lord; after all, you are the only person who could. I did it to myself, because I think it’s dreadful to have Assyrians mocking Persians.”

To which Darius replies:

“No, that won’t do at all. To claim that you have given yourself these permanent injuries as a way of doing something about the people we are besieging is to gloss over the utter vileness of your deed. It’s just stupid to think that your injuries might hasten our opponents’ surrender. You must be out of your mind to have disfigured yourself like this.”

In Zopyrus’s preceding statement Herodotus presents to us a mind-set that had manifested itself in this culture thousands of years before—namely, that a man whose dignity was undermined, who felt himself humiliated, could free himself from the burning sensation of shame and disgrace only by an act of self-destruction. I feel that I have been scarred, and being thus scarred, I cannot live. Death is preferable to a life with the mark of shame burning into my face. Zopyrus wants to liberate himself from just
such a feeling. And he does this by altering his face, changing that ignominious Persian physiognomy which the Babylonians mocked into a more dreadful and terrifying version of itself.

It is noteworthy that Zopyrus does not consider the Babylonians’ affront as an individual act of injustice, directed against him alone. He does not say, They insulted me; he says, They insulted us—all us Persians. Yet he does not see exhorting all Persians to war as the way out of this degrading predicament and chooses instead a singular, individual act of self-destruction (or self-mutilation), which for him is a liberation.

It is true that Darius condemns Zopyrus’s action as irresponsible and reckless, but he will soon take advantage of it, seizing upon it as a last resort, a way to save the nation, the empire, the majesty of monarchical power from disgrace.

He accepts Zopyrus’s plan, which is as follows: Zopyrus will go to the Babylonians, pretending that he is fleeing from persecutions and tortures inflicted upon him by Darius. And what better proof of this than his wounds! He is certain that he will convince the Babylonians, that he will gain their confidence, and that they will give him command of the army. And then he will let the Persians into Babylon.

One day, from atop their wall, the Babylonians notice a bloodied human figure dressed in rags dragging itself toward their city-fortress. The wretch keeps looking over his shoulder, checking to be sure he is not being pursued.
The look-outs posted on the towers spotted him, ran down, opened one of the gates a crack, and asked him who he was and what he had come for. He answered that he was Zopyrus and that he was deserting to their side. At this, the gatekeepers took him to the Babylonian council, where he stood forth and complained to them about his sufferings. He blamed Darius for his self-inflicted injuries … He said, “…. He will certainly not get away with mutilating me like this.”

The council believes these words and gives him an army, so that he can exact his vengeance. That is precisely what Zopyrus was waiting for. As prearranged, on the tenth day after Zopyrus’s pretend flight to Babylon, Darius sends one thousand of his weakest troops toward one of the besieged city’s gates. The Babylonians burst out from the gate and cut down the Persians to the last man. Seven days later, once again as Darius and Zopyrus have prearranged, the Persian king sends another contingent of inferior soldiers to Babylon’s gate, two thousand of them this time, and the Babylonians, under Zopyrus’s command, decimate these as well. Zopyrus’s fame among the Babylonians grows: they consider him a hero and a savior. Twenty days pass and in accordance with the plan Darius sends out another four thousand soldiers. The Babylonians annihilate them, too, and then gratefully appoint Zopyrus their commander in chief and defender of the city.

Zopyrus is now in possession of the keys to all the gates. On the appointed day, Darius storms Babylon from all sides, and Zopyrus opens the gates. The city is conquered.
Now that the Babylonians were in his power, Darius demolished the city wall and tore down all its gates … and he also had about three thousand of the most prominent men impaled on stakes
.

Once again Herodotus treats these catastrophic events in a most offhanded fashion. Let’s skip the demolishing of the walls—although this must have been a gargantuan undertaking. But impaling three thousand men on the stake? How was this done? Was one stake set, as the men of Babylon stood in a line, awaiting their turn? Did each look on as the man in front of him was impaled? Were they bound to prevent their escape? Or were they simply paralyzed with fear? Babylon was the center of world learning, a city of the world’s preeminent mathematicians and astronomers. Were they also impaled? If so, then for how many generations, centuries even, did this retribution stunt the growth of human knowledge?

But at the same time Darius was thinking about the future of that metropolis and its inhabitants.
He returned the city to the remaining Babylonians and let them live there. As was explained earlier, the Babylonians had strangled their wives to ensure that they had enough to eat; so in order to make sure that they would have enough women to have offspring, Darius ordered all the nearby peoples to send women to Babylon, and gave each a quota, which resulted in a grand total of fifty thousand women congregating there. Today’s Babylonians are descended from these women
.

As a reward, he gave Zopyrus command over Babylon for the rest of his life. But
it is said that Darius often expressed the opinion that he would prefer to see Zopyrus without his injuries than gain twenty more Babylons
.

T
he king of Persia concludes one conquest and immediately embarks on another:
After the capture of Babylon, the next military expedition commanded by Darius in person was against the Scythians
.

Consider where Babylon lay in relation to Scythian territories. To get from one to the other, one had to traverse easily half of the known world in Herodotus’s time. The march must have lasted months. It took a month in those days for an army to cover five or six hundred kilometers, and here we are proposing a distance several times greater.

This enterprise surely took its toll even on hardy Darius. Yes, he rode in a royal carriage, but one can easily imagine that in those days even such a conveyance must have lurched and rattled horribly. Springs and suspensions were unknown, as were tires or even rubber rings. Furthermore, over long stretches of the journey there would have been no roads at all.

The ambition must therefore have been powerful enough to overrule all feelings of discomfort, fatigue, physical pain. In Darius’s
case it was to expand his empire, and by doing so to increase his sway over the world. It is interesting to ponder what people in those times understood by “the world.” There were still no adequate maps, atlases, or globes. Ptolemy would not be born for another four centuries, Mercator not for another two millennia. It was impossible to gaze down on our planet taking a bird’s-eye view (could there even have been such a concept?). One acquired geographical knowledge by becoming aware of a neighbor not of one’s own people, and one passed on that knowledge orally:

We are called the Giligamae. Our neighbors are the Asbystae. And you, Asbystae, whom do you share a border with? We Giligamae? We share one with the Auschisae. And the Auschisae with the Nasamones. And you, Nasamones? To the south, with the Garamantes, and to the west, with the Macae. And these Macae—whom do they adjoin? The Macae abut the Gindanes. And you? We share a border with the Lotus-eaters. And they? With the Ausees. And who lives beyond that, truly far, far away? The Ammonians. And beyond them? The Atlantes. And beyond the Atlantes? No one knows, and no one even attempts to imagine.