In this lively and comprehensive new biography, Richard Stoneman shows how Xerxes, despite sympathetic treatment by the contemporary Greek writers Aeschylus and Herodotus, had his reputation destroyed by later Greek writers and by the propaganda of Alexander the Great. Stoneman draws on the latest research in Achaemenid studies and archaeology to present the ruler from the Persian perspective. This illuminating volume does not whitewash Xerxes’ failings but sets against them such triumphs as the architectural splendor of Persepolis and a consideration of Xerxes’ religious commitments. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a man who ruled a vast and multicultural empire which the Greek communities of the West saw as the antithesis of their own values.
In this lively and comprehensive new biography, Richard Stoneman shows how Xerxes, despite sympathetic treatment by the contemporary Greek writers Aeschylus and Herodotus, had his reputation destroyed by later Greek writers and by the propaganda of Alexander the Great. Stoneman draws on the latest research in Achaemenid studies and archaeology to present the ruler from the Persian perspective. This illuminating volume does not whitewash Xerxes’ failings but sets against them such triumphs as the architectural splendor of Persepolis and a consideration of Xerxes’ religious commitments. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a man who ruled a vast and multicultural empire which the Greek communities of the West saw as the antithesis of their own values.
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In this lively and comprehensive new biography, Richard Stoneman shows how Xerxes, despite sympathetic treatment by the contemporary Greek writers Aeschylus and Herodotus, had his reputation destroyed by later Greek writers and by the propaganda of Alexander the Great. Stoneman draws on the latest research in Achaemenid studies and archaeology to present the ruler from the Persian perspective. This illuminating volume does not whitewash Xerxes’ failings but sets against them such triumphs as the architectural splendor of Persepolis and a consideration of Xerxes’ religious commitments. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a man who ruled a vast and multicultural empire which the Greek communities of the West saw as the antithesis of their own values.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300216042 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Xerxes
A Persian Life
By Richard Stoneman
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Richard StonemanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21604-2
CHAPTER 1
Accession
Saith Xerxes the King: Other sons of Darius there were, (but) – thus unto Ahuramazda was the desire – Darius my father made me the greatest after himself. When my father Darius went away from the throne, by the will of Ahuramazda I became king on my father's throne. XPf 27–33
Your majesty, you're like the radiant sun
Bestowing light and life on everyone:
May greed and anger never touch your reign
And may your enemies live wracked with pain.
Monarch with whom no monarch can compete,
All other kings are dust beneath your feet.
Ferdowsi, Shahnameh (tr. D. Davis), 328: Rostam greets the new king
Kai Khosrow
Darius the Usurper; Xerxes the Heir
December is mild at Persepolis, though a little rain may fall to settle the scudding dust-devils of the plain of Marvdasht, and if heavy may make the land marshy. The nights are cold, and clouds often obscure the brilliant panorama of the stars; but the fogs that cloak the Zagros Mountains in winter do not affect this more low-lying region. Temperatures rarely fall below freezing, and snow is unusual. Nevertheless, the roses of Shiraz are improved by a period of winter cold. No roses grow now at Persepolis, where stunted pine, plane, poplar and tamarisk dominate the landscape, but in antiquity the plain was irrigated by the waters of the River Pulvar as it leaves its rocky gorge, and gardens blossomed below the platform on which the palace is built. In the nineteenth century, and probably for thousands of years before that, storks paced the riverbanks and gazelles scurried across the plain. At night hyenas could be heard in the hills, and in the day the hoopoe, the sacred bird of King Solomon, could sometimes be seen calling 'hoop-hoop' from a high perch.
It was to Persepolis, the autumn residence of the Persian kings, that Darius I (the Great) returned at the conclusion of his campaign against the Scythians. He made the usual sacrifices that marked the end of a successful campaign, and began his preparations for an attack on Greece, which he had been meditating ever since the defeat at Marathon in 490. Now Egypt, too, rose in revolt against Persia and made the matter more urgent. As soon as spring arrived to make the march feasible, the Persian army would set out. But before the preparations could advance very far, Darius fell ill, and 'after an illness of thirty days he passed away. He had lived for seventy-two years and reigned for thirty-one.' It was the beginning of December 486 BC.
As the king who spread the Persian Empire to its fullest extent and created many of its defining institutions, Darius can never have been out of Xerxes' mind. He was a model to emulate, but as Xerxes prepared for his accession he must have looked back at the difficulties his father had encountered on coming to the throne, and hoped that he would not have to face the problems associated with what was widely seen as a usurpation. The story of Darius' rise to power introduces many of the characteristic themes and tensions of Persian history, for its actors as well as for those who wrote – and write – about it.
Darius had become king of the Persian Empire by unorthodox means. As with so many of the key events of Achaemenid history, the sources are contradictory and probably reflect deliberate obfuscation by the participants. In his own words in his great inscription at Bisutun Darius states that he had to put down nine kings in order to secure his accession to the throne: Gaumata the Magus or Bardiya, whom the Greeks called Smerdis, as well as the kings of Elam, Babylon, Media, Sagartia, Margiana and Armenia, and two pretenders in Persia, one of whom also called himself Smerdis. First came the affair of Gaumata the Magus, starting on 11 March 522; and the series of further revolts preoccupied the king until at least July 521. Gaumata 'seized the kingship' from Cambyses, passing himself off as Cambyses' brother Bardiya (in Greek, Smerdis or Mardos):
There was no man, neither a Persian nor a Mede, nor anyone of our family, who could take away the kingship from that Gaumata the magus. The people were very much afraid of him, thinking that he would kill many people who had known Bardiya previously. ... [On 29 September 522] I, with a few men, killed Gaumata the Magus. ... The kingdom which had been taken away from our family, I re-established it, I put it back in its place. In accordance with what had been previously, I made the cult-centres, which Gaumata the Magus destroyed. I restored to the people, the pastures and herds, the household slaves and the houses/ domains, which Gaumata the Magus took away from them.
Darius' tale is one of a usurper who caused social and religious upheaval: the text could be interpreted as implying a redistribution of land and property as a populist move to please his supporters. This interpretation is supported by the Roman historian Justin (second century ad), who writes that this usurper 'Cometes' killed 'Mergis' and substituted his own brother 'Oropastes' as king. (This character does not occur in Darius' account, but is in that of the Greek historians, as will be seen in the next paragraph.) 'Then, in order to curry favour with the people, the magi lifted military and tribute obligations for three years, in order to consolidate, through indulgence and largesse, a kingship obtained by fraud.'
Herodotus tells a much more richly elaborated tale:11 Cambyses had a brother, Smerdis, and one night in a dream he saw Smerdis sitting on his throne as a usurper. So he decided to eliminate Smerdis, and sent an emissary, Prexaspes, to get rid of him, which he did either by taking him hunting or by drowning him in the sea. But now a magus, Patizeithes, decided to seize the kingship. His own brother, who by chance was also called Smerdis, looked extremely like the murdered Smerdis, and so Patizeithes put him forward as the legitimate successor. When Cambyses returned to Susa and found that his brother was apparently still alive, he summoned Prexaspes to account for himself; but Prexaspes cottoned on to what had happened. When he explained it to Cambyses, the latter understood the truth of his dream. Shortly after he wounded himself in a riding accident: he drove his own sword through his thigh as he was leaping onto his horse. Knowing that he was about to die, he summoned his Persian courtiers and urged them, 'in particular those of you here who are Achaemenids: do not allow power to pass back to the Medes!'
But when Cambyses died, leaving no heir, the magus, the false Smerdis (Bardiya) ruled for seven months and was much beloved by his subjects for his kindness, notably for remitting all tribute and military service for three years. But in the eighth month the magus was unmasked by a noble called Otanes, whose daughter Phaidymie had been one of the wives of Cambyses, all of whom had been taken over by Smerdis. It emerged that she had never seen her husband, and neither had any of the other wives, including Atossa. Clearly Persian kings preferred to make love in the dark. Otanes advised his daughter to feel for her husband's ears when he was asleep: if he had ears, he would be Cambyses' brother, but if not he would be the impostor Smerdis who was known to have had his ears cut off by Cyrus at some time in the past. When Otanes' daughter came to bed, she slipped her hands into the thick flowing curls of his carefully dressed hair ... Sure enough – no ears!
Otanes now got five other Persians on his side, and then a sixth, Darius, whose father Hystaspes was governor of Parthia. (Herodotus says Persia, but Darius' own information is surely right.) The group of seven concocted a plan. Gobryas expressed the view of all of them: 'My friends, when will there be a better time to take back power, or if we fail, to die? Seeing that we are Persians being ruled by a Mede, a magus – and he has not even got ears!'
The names of these seven are given by Herodotus as Otanes, Aspathines, Gobryas, Megabyxus, Intaphernes, Hydarnes and Darius. Six of these names correspond to Darius' own list: Vindafarna, Hutana, Gaubaruva, Vidarna, Bagabukhsha and Ardumanish. Only Ardumanish is clearly a different name from Aspathines.
Quickly the seven made their way to the palace, were admitted without demur by the guards, overpowered the eunuchs in the inner court and entered the men's quarters where the two magi were in discussion. There was a fierce fight and then Darius and Gobryas entered the innermost sanctum; in the dark Darius was lucky enough to strike the magus and not his ally Gobryas. They displayed the heads of the two magi on poles, and a bloodbath followed in which the Persians struck down any of the magi they came across. In later times, according to Herodotus, a regular festival was celebrated called 'The Murder of the Magi' to commemorate this moment when Persian royal power was reasserted against the Median clan.
Darius himself describes the conspiracy when he appears as a ghost in Aeschylus' Persians, written some decades before the Histories. He lists the successive kings but names as his predecessor simply Mardos (i.e. Bardiya, Smerdis), 'a disgrace to his country and to his ancestral throne'. There is no mention of Gaumata.
Ctesias, writing a century later than Herodotus and claiming to 'correct Herodotus' errors', gives a rather different version. In this Cambyses' brother is killed long before Cambyses' death but before the Egyptian campaign. The names of the protagonists also differ. Cambyses' brother is called Tanyoxarces: this brother punished a magus, Sphendadates, for some crime with a flogging, and the magus then started making accusations against Tanyoxarces to Cambyses. Eventually Sphendadates convinced Cambyses of the justice of his complaints, and persuaded Cambyses to have his brother Tanyoxarces put to death. But because Sphendadates closely resembled Tanyoxarces, he suggested that he take his place and the brother be executed on the pretence that he was the unpopular magus. The motive was apparently to avoid upsetting Amytis, the mother of Cambyses and Tanyoxarces. When she discovered how she had been tricked, Amytis demanded Sphendadates be handed over to her for punishment; when Cambyses refused, she drank bull's blood and died. Later, when Cambyses died after accidentally inflicting a mortal wound on himself while carving wood, the magus was able to succeed him as king.
The names of the conspirators also differ in Ctesias. The only one that corresponds to the list in Darius or Herodotus, apart from Darius himself, is Idernes (i.e. Hydarnes). The others are Onophas, Norondobates, Mardonius, Barisses and Ataphernes (who might be Intaphernes). However, as Amélie Kuhrt points out, Mardonius was the son of Gobryas and Onophas the son of Otanes, so Ctesias might be abbreviating a list of names that included the conspirators' sons.
Did Gaumata Exist?
Clearly variant versions of the whole story were circulating in the fifth and fourth centuries bc. The variants are so great that some scholars have preferred to regard the whole story as fiction. Gore Vidal's Xerxes expresses it succinctly: 'There was no Magian. There was only the Great King [sc. Mardos] and Darius killed him.' That is the train of events implied by Aeschylus, and it is the explanation favoured by Kuhrt. Gaumata did not exist and the whole story is made up to conceal the fact that Darius' claim to the throne was tenuous in the extreme: he was a descendant of Teispes, the father of Cyrus, but no closer than that to the royal line. Later legend put Darius' father back in to direct descent from Cyrus (Kai Khosrow) of course: the sequence runs Kai Khosrow – Lohrasp – Gushtasp (see Introduction).
If Darius did simply murder Mardos/Smerdis/Bardiya, the legitimate king, Vidal has a nice explanation for the role of Atossa (the mother of Xerxes) in the whole affair. Atossa, having been married to Mardos, who was also her brother, knows that Darius has killed him – and also Cambyses. Darius protests that he had indeed killed her husband, yet Mardos was not her brother but the impostor Gaumata. Atossa replies: 'You are the usurper, Darius, son of Hystaspes; and one word from me to the clans, and all of Persia will go into rebellion.' Atossa has Darius in the palm of her hand, forces him to marry her and to make her son Xerxes his designated successor.
The plot is neat, but can Gaumata be so easily explained away? He is, after all, the subject of a 'portrait', prostrate under Darius' foot, on the cliff face at Bisutun. The information about his social revolution also seems circumstantial, if hardly extensive. Accepting Gaumata's existence need not entail accepting the folk tale about the magus' close resemblance to the murdered Bardiya, and the ears. Few will have seen the king in full view, and a cynic might remark that Persian kings, with their long carefully dressed locks, magnificent beards and heavy make-up, all look remarkably alike anyway.
A complex but attractive theory elaborated by Abolala Soudavar represents the conflict between Darius and Gaumata as one between two rival clans with hereditary priestly roles: the magi, represented by Gaumata (and his brother) and the parsas, represented by Darius. The expression in DNa para 2, 'I Darius ... son of Vishtaspa the Achemenid, a parsa, son of parsa, an Aryan', is usually translated as 'a Persian'; Soudavar argues persuasively that the word actually has a religious designation, since it is also used to caption images of Darius and Xerxes facing a fire altar on their tomb facades. Herodotus says of the Persian tribes 'of these the Pasargadai are the most noble, of whom also the Achaimenidai are a clan'. Darius has a hereditary role as a parsa, who seems to be a keeper of the sacred fire.
If this is accepted, many things fall into place. The magi represent a rival clan claiming the right to kingship; their representative Gaumata overturns religious establishments which Darius has to set right; and Darius is a true son of his father Hystaspes, who is known traditionally as the patron of Zoroaster, the introducer of the form of religion that characterised the Achaemenid kings from Darius onwards but not, apparently, Cyrus (see further, Chapter 4). Clan rivalry, social revolution and religious schism are all part of the mix in Darius' rise to power. Vidal has a place for Hystaspes in the drama too:
'Did Hystaspes know?' I asked.
'Oh yes. He knew. He was horrified. He hoped that by devoting himself to Zoroaster he could expiate the crime of Darius. But that's not possible, is it?'
The seven conspirators now drew lots to decide which of them should be king – by a horse-oracle, according to Ctesias – and the lot fell upon Darius. Darius, the son of Hystaspes, thus became king of the Persian Empire. Like Cambyses, but unlike his successors, he had numerous wives, including the daughter of Gobryas, the daughter of Bardiya, and two sisters, Artystone and Atossa, both daughters of Cyrus; he also married his own niece Phratagyne, who bore him two sons. No brothers are named in the sources, but Darius had at least four sisters: one of them married Otanes and became the mother of Amestris, Xerxes' wife; a third married Teaspes; and a fourth married Gobryas and became the mother of the general Mardonius.
Xerxes Becomes King
Xerxes' accession, in the end, was a much more straightforward affair than his father's, and rival claims were weak. Xerxes was the son of Atossa and was the first of Darius' sons to be born while he was on the throne of Persia. When Darius died, according to Herodotus, a dispute arose as to who was to be his successor. The eldest son was Artobarzanes (Herodotus) or Ariaramnes (Justin), but Xerxes argued that this brother had been born when Darius was still a private citizen, and not yet king, and therefore had a lesser claim to the throne. (Artobarzanes, if that was his name, must therefore have been close to forty years old.) Furthermore, Xerxes' mother, Atossa, was the daughter of Cyrus, while Darius' first wife was also not of royal blood. As Darius had at least three other wives, including another daughter of Cyrus, Artystone, there must have been a considerable number of potential claimants to the throne. Justin and Herodotus have different accounts of how the dispute was resolved. For both of them there are only two brothers who come into question. According to Justin, they went to Darius' brother Artaphernes and asked him to adjudicate, and he gave the preference to Xerxes. 'The princes maintained a completely fraternal attitude throughout the dispute; neither did the victor display haughtiness nor the vanquished resentment. Even during their quarrel, they sent each other presents and invited each other to feasts, where trust just as much as conviviality reigned.' Herodotus has a different story: according to him, the reigning king must appoint his successor before he goes on campaign, so the matter had all been sorted out before Darius' death. He makes the arbiter the exiled king Demaratus of Sparta, who had recently arrived in Susa and advised Xerxes to push his case with his father. 'However,' Herodotus concludes, 'I think that even without this advice, Xerxes would have become king: for Atossa was all-powerful.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Xerxes by Richard Stoneman. Copyright © 2015 Richard Stoneman. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations, vi,Preface, viii,
Introduction, 1,
1 Accession, 17,
2 The Persian Empire, 35,
3 The Image of a King, 69,
4 The Religion of Xerxes, 88,
5 Invasion (I): The Cornerstone of Greek Freedom, 109,
6 Invasion (II): The Wooden Walls, 139,
7 Persepolis, 160,
8 Family Romances, 181,
9 Assassination, 195,
Conclusion, 210,
Appendix 1 Xerxes in Opera and Drama, 219,
Appendix 2 The Birth of Persian Kings, 223,
Appendix 3 The Chronology of Xerxes' Advance through Greece, 226,
Abbreviations, 229,
Notes, 230,
Bibliography, 258,
Index, 268,