A History of the World Read online

  Cyrus, Cross-dresser

  One man, and one man alone, was responsible for the Jews returning to Judah and thus for the development of their faith, and the faiths of Christianity and Islam that grew from it. He is the only Gentile given the honorific title of ‘Messiah’. On a pillar at the dusty remnants of his once great capital of Pasargadae in today’s Iran is carved what is believed to be his image. A bearded man with a bizarre crown and four wings stands dressed in a flowing gown. The inscription once above it read simply: ‘I, Cyrus the King, an Achaemenian’.

  But he is clearly a cultural cross-dresser. His gown is one of those worn by the Elamites, a people dwelling in the highlands of southwestern Iran. His crown is an Egyptian one, but with Assyrian and Phoenician twists. His wings are Persian.10 What message is he trying to send? A rather wordier message from Cyrus helps us out. It comes on the side-drum-shaped clay ‘Cyrus cylinder’ found at Babylon and now in the British Museum in London. It was made after he had captured Babylon (peacefully, he insists) and released the Jews from exile. Like the winged relief, this is propaganda. It is how Cyrus II wanted to be seen. It begins with the conventional ‘look at me’, top-dog rhetoric: ‘I am Cyrus, King of the globe, great king, mighty king, King of Babylon, king of the land of Sumer and Akad . . . king of the four quarters of the earth . . .’

  So far, so standard. But the next thing Cyrus wants us to know is that this champion of the god of the Jews also favours the Babylonians’ god Marduk – ‘and I sought daily to worship him’. Along with freeing slaves and rebuilding houses he had restored sanctuaries, and not only for Marduk but for many other lesser gods across his new empire ‘beyond the Tigris river, whose sanctuaries had been in ruins over a long period[;] the gods whose abode is in the midst of them, I returned to their places and housed them in lasting abodes’.

  The Greeks, who were fascinated by Cyrus and his descendants, believed that the Persians were simply more open than other people to foreign influences. There are suggestions that, because they were originally nomadic barbarians, they advanced in civilization by taking in and digesting the architecture, clothes, war technologies and gods of longer-settled people. But history offers plenty of examples of barbarian invaders who simply burn, oppress, and move on. The Greeks were trying to understand one of the mysteries of Iron Age history – how it was that an obscure tribal people suddenly erupted across Asia and built, and sustained, the greatest empire yet known. However, unlike the Jews, the Greeks misunderstood Cyrus.

  Well aware that his Persians were a small minority taking power over many ancient and once-powerful civilizations, Cyrus had found a new way of governing. Under him, so long as you did not rebel, you had freedom of worship and custom. This was the first multicultural empire. But that did not make it less warlike or ruthless in repressing its enemies. Cyrus II was almost constantly at war with someone, and though he built a famously lovely capital, with huge, carefully planted gardens called paradeiza (hence our ‘paradise’), most accounts say he died as he had lived, fighting. The most colourful account says he was fighting a fierce tribe led by a female ruler called Tomyris, in today’s Kazakhstan; he had won one battle by tricking them into getting drunk on unfamiliar alcohol, but Tomyris had her revenge, leading her troops for a second attack in one of the fiercest fights of ancient times, after which Cyrus was decapitated. His body was returned to Pasar-gadae, where his impressively stark limestone tomb still stands.

  This story comes from the ‘father of history’, also labelled ‘the father of lies’ by later jealous rivals, Herodotus. He probably visited Babylon, searching for information about his life’s work, the history of the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians. A gripping writer and a great storyteller, Herodotus tried his best to get first-hand information, and certainly travelled widely in the ancient world, but he also had the fatal journalist’s enthusiasm for a ripping yarn. He never even tried to be drily factual. He lived in a world which was god-haunted, superstitious and credulous – even more so than ours – at a time of oracles and vengeful deities. He may not tell us what really happened, and he is famously useless on causation; but Herodotus does tell us what the people on the street, and in the villages, thought had happened, and why.

  Herodotus says Cyrus was the grandson of the King of the Medes, Astyages, which is probably true. He also says that Grandpa Astyages had a dream in which his daughter ‘made water in such enormous quantities that it filled his city and swamped the whole of Asia’.11 This somewhat indecorous behaviour was interpreted to mean that there was trouble ahead, so Astyages married her off to a quiet, dull man called Cambyses. She became pregnant. Old Astyages had another dream, this time that a huge vine grew out of his daughter’s vagina and spread across Asia. Dr Freud being unavailable, the Magi interpreted this as meaning that Astyages’ grandson would usurp the throne. So orders were given to have the baby boy taken away and killed.

  The servant could not face doing this, and passed the job to a poor herdsman and his wife, who brought the boy up as their own. When he was ten, Cyrus was playing a game called ‘kings’ in a village street with other boys, and his behaviour was so noble that the trick was suspected. The servant who had failed to kill off the baby was rewarded by having his own son casseroled and served up to him. On the advice of the Magi, Astyages spared Cyrus; Cyrus then led a revolt by Persian soldiers against the king, and though Astyages impaled the Magi for getting things so wrong (quite rightly, it has to be said), he was duly overthrown.

  Cyrus treated his murderous grandfather with great consideration and allowed him to stay at court until he died. Though clearly a mixture of prurient gossip and traditional mythic storytelling, Herodotus’ account points to a truth about the historical Cyrus, or at least how he was perceived in the markets and byways where the historian listened and took notes. Cyrus was a strange mix of the ruthless and the tolerant, who came from an old line of warrior-rulers and for whom both lineage and authority were problematical. As a fighter, he combined troops from different peoples, introducing tactical innovations from across Asia to win spectacular victories.

  One of the most famous was over King Croesus of Lydia, in what is today western Turkey. The Lydians were well known to the Greeks; Herodotus says they invented gold and silver coinage. It was certainly reliable. In Lydia, the river that contained substantial amounts of ore still runs past the archaeological remains of a very early mint, where the metal was refined and the coins stamped. Lydian-style coins, whose great merit was that their weight, purity and therefore value were accepted far beyond the small state itself, provided a monetary system imported by Cyrus into his empire. Currency became current in Asia thanks to Cyrus’s war.

  Herodotus also says that Solon, who composed the first unified law system for classical Athens, visited Lydia and warned Croesus that he could not be called happy until he was dead, because one never knew what might happen next. When Croesus was waiting to be executed on a pyre of wood, he told the Persian king about Solon’s words. Cyrus thought of his own case, and relented, keeping Croesus as a prisoner and adviser. When he asked the defeated Lydian whether he had actively wanted war, Croesus replied with perhaps the most famous sentence Herodotus ever scratched down: ‘No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.’

  Herodotus’ interest in Persian culture, shared by other Greek writers, was practical and urgent. Had Cyrus, and the great kings who followed him, solved the problem of how to rule well? They had created an empire linked by fast, straight roads and governed by local administrators, or satraps; their tolerance of local religious customs allowed them to rule without an oppressively large force, and they seemed remarkably open to other people’s ideas. Their armies were huge and composed of many different peoples; their main cities were impressive.

  Herodotus notes that the people kiss when they meet in the street, rather than speaking, and he admires the custom whereby even the king refrains
from putting someone to death for a single offence. They abhor lies and debt. They never pollute rivers ‘with urine or spittle’, or even wash their hands in the water they use to drink. They have an interesting way of taking decisions:

  If any important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house . . . submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.

  This system too has lasted: it is widely practised in the British democracy at Westminster. The Persians were clearly an impressive people, to be learned from as well as feared.

  The Greek Miracle

  We last left the Greek world itself scattered and emigrant, settlers amid the ruins of their first civilization, listening to Homeric tales of the age of heroes. Between about 800 and 550 BC the Greek story was one of gradual revival, based on their distinctive communities called poleis (singular: polis, which we normally translate as city-state). These varied greatly in size. Athens was a rare example of a survival from the Bronze Age, which had lost her hegemony over the surrounding area but regained it to become the largest of these city-states. Most examples of the polis tended to involve one easily defended high point, or acropolis, with a town around it and then villages and agricultural land around that. Other rural Greeks remained in their ethnos, or clan.

  The earliest towns were hardly defended; later, stone walls and fortified gates appeared, to protect them not against Persians but against other Greeks. Up to nine in ten ancient Greeks were farmers, working relatively poor soil and struggling with the early effects of deforestation. They relied on wood and charcoal for fuel, and timber for house-beams and ships, but from early on, having hacked back the relatively sparse forests climbing the mountains of their archipelago, they had to import from the Black Sea and Asia. They ate little meat, keeping goats and sheep mainly for clothing and milk, and depended heavily on barley, wheat, olives, grapes and figs: beer-drinkers, like the Egyptians, were regarded as rather odd. The Mediterranean diet was established early.

  The geography of Greece was crucial to the development of this civilization. Lots of sharp-ridged ranges running down to the sea created separate city-states growing independent of one another, likely to experiment in different ways of running their affairs. These early states were not egalitarian, like the first Anatolian towns. Most had developed from semi-tribal groups run by warrior-aristocrats, who owned most of the land and wealth. This continued even when the Greeks became more urban and republican in their government; as late as the golden age of Athens, the state was riven by deep class conflicts, wealthy nobles being resented by the rest.

  However – to simplify a much more complicated story – the aristocrats steadily lost political ground as urban life became more important. They lost out first to ‘tyrants’, an Asian word which really meant ‘usurpers’, taking over sole control of a state. Then they started to lose ground to group decisions made by ordinary citizens, often meeting as families or tribes. By the seventh–sixth century BC, the Greeks had a complicated religious pantheon comprising both the ‘family’ of Olympian gods that had probably been brought down by the first Aryan invaders, and local cults. They shared a language, though found it hard to understand some of the rival dialects. They were also divided by culture, the Greeks who lived on the Asian coast being richer and perhaps softer than the western Greeks of the Peloponnese.

  The most important early development came about through their method of fighting. In the seventh century BC the Greeks had mastered the skill of fighting on foot in tightly organized phalanxes of soldiers, each carrying a large shield to protect the man to his left, and charging with spears, switching to swords for close fighting. From this two things followed. First, it required general discipline and mutual trust, virtues developed in the polis. Second, it meant that anyone who could afford the basic equipment – a bronze helmet, greaves, shield and spear – was a useful fighter. This included small-time farmers as well as craftsmen and tradesmen. The old dominance of small numbers of aristocratic cavalry, all set to protect their patch, was trumped by common men fighting together. The political implications hardly need to be spelled out: one historian says that, without this development, ‘nobody would have dared kill off their community’s main fighting force, the nobility’.12

  Why did it happen? Greek terrain, with its narrow valleys and mountainous gorges, was not particularly suited to horse warfare, and certainly not to the fleets of chariots favoured in Asia. You could hardly even start a charge across Attica without instantly tumbling head over heels or losing your wheels. It was not a landscape made for emperors, any more than is Switzerland or Afghanistan. Later, a similar extension of people-power would emerge at sea, as the Greek states developed navies of war galleys that needed to be rowed by disciplined and experienced men working in perfect unison. This time the recruits came from those too poor to kit themselves out as hoplite warriors on land. So a common feeling stemming from a shared headquarters and familiar geography was fortified by the act of fighting together – and, soon, by a common enemy. Solidarity started in warfare.

  Apart from religious ideas and languages, not to mention the Homeric stories, the Greeks shared an enthusiasm for athletics, prepared for naked in gymnasiums. All-Greece games, contests in music and fighting as well as racing, were an early way of binding Greeks together. Since each city-state had a different calendar including different start times for each year, the games became a crucial way of measuring dates and timespans: the names of the winners of every Olympic Games since (allegedly) 776 BC became their version of our numerical counting of ‘2012’ or ‘1945’. The gymnasia, where men went oiled and naked, produced a strong culture of homosexual admiration, and love affairs between boys and older men.

  These are the early distinctive signs of Greek culture, but they emphatically did not lead to all these city-states developing a single answer to ruling and to the problem of power. Political competition turned the Greeks into historians and philosophers. One of the more extreme political systems, and a challenge to other states, was that of the Spartans. Though Pheidon of Argos is supposed to have introduced the tactic of phalanx fighting around 670 BC, it did not become a Spartan obsession until they had been beaten in battle by the men of Argos. The Spartans were already a warrior people, who had subdued a semi-enslaved landscape of farmers and helots (or serfs), as well as subsidiary villages who produced the food that allowed them to concentrate on their overriding hobby and interest – war.

  The Spartans developed a state, with pre-echoes of Samurai Japan, or Facism, which self-consciously rejected the nurturing of the gentler arts being enjoyed in other Greek states. Babies judged weak-looking were left out to die. Boys and girls were separated at the age of seven. Boys were brought up in military-style training camps and later sent out to steal and kill food for themselves. Girls, too, were made to run and wrestle naked; later on, any one of them might provide a wife to be shared by several Spartan-citizen brothers. Spartans who fought and lost often killed themselves. The Spartans had two kings at any one time and a senior council of men aged sixty and over, who would put their proposals to all-male meetings of citizens.

  Alongside this ‘balance of powers’ constitution, which allowed the city-state to avoid tyranny while giving its fighters an equal say, the Spartans shunned modernizations such as money, or walling their villages, and relied on their terrifyingly well organized semi-permanent army. The result was a dominant military state, which made other Greek states nervous but which could be engaged by them to topple tyrants or confront enemies.

  Sparta rose to its greatest fame when it led the federated Greeks against the Persians. When Cyrus defeated Croesus in 546 BC it was the Spartans who sent a message ordering him to back off, and who forty-seven years later would rally the western Greeks against Persia in t
he Ionian revolt. And in the twenty-five years that followed, it was the Spartans above all who kept the epic fight going. Yet other Greeks, particularly the Athenians, laughed at the Spartans for their uncouth ways, seeing them as long-haired, unwashed, uncultured killers.

  Athens, Sparta’s great rival, was also a slave state, which gave extensive voting and other rights to its male citizens. Its original tyranny had been toppled with Spartan help in 510 BC. Two years later, Athens’s ruler Cleisthenes proposed a radical new system of voting and representation, based on local parish- or village-level elections and on larger ‘demes’. The deme was a territorial division, which could be as large as a small town and which would now replace the family name as the main badge of belonging. This was an important shift. Himself the grandson of an Athenian tyrant, Cleisthenes believed that the rivalry and power struggles between families had led inexorably to breakdown and tyranny. Only by ending the obsession with family or ‘gene’ could order be restored.

  Crucially, his complex plan led to a single assembly of citizens, all men aged over thirty, who would take the biggest decisions. This was too large to be practical, since there were around twenty-five thousand such people, but these elected a council of five hundred who ruled Athens day by day. The full assembly would meet too, generally around six thousand Athenians traipsing into the city most weeks to listen and vote. This was ‘democracy’ in action, the one thing almost everyone knows about ancient Athens. It proved surprisingly robust because of its relative moderation. Instead of being executed, those who threatened the system could be ‘ostracised’, or sent packing after a vote – conducted with pieces of broken pottery – of the assembly. Many were allowed back from exile after doing their time.