Persian Fire by Tom Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

to Sicily or the Italian peninsula. One city, Phocaea, evacuated its entire population, 'women, children, moveable property, everything, in fact. . . leaving the Persians to take possession of nothing but an empty shell'. 21 A dark shadow had been cast over the Ionian imagination, and the memory of Harpagus' coming would long serve to blacken even the most intimate moments of joy:
     
     
    'Variations of the word 'Ionian' were used as a generic term for 'Greek' throughout the Near East. See, for instance, Genesis 10.2, where one of the sons of Japheth is called 'Javan'. The Greeks themselves counted the island cities of Chios and Samos as Ionian, so, in total, there were reckoned to be twelve cities of Ionia.
In winter, as you lie on a soft couch by the fire,
Full of good food, munching on nuts and drinking sweet wine,
Then you must ask questions such as these:
'Where do you come from? Tell me, what is your age?
How old were you when the Mede came?' 12
     
    Not, it might be noted, 'How old were you when the Persian came?' — for such was the impact of Harpagus upon the Ionians that it left them perplexed, even as they submitted to their new masters, as to who precisely these were. Ever after, when referring to the Persians, the Greeks would invariably say, 'the Medes'. Such confusion was hardly surprising. What were the ethnic complexities of the Zagros to a people so far distant from them? That cities on the western sea should find themselves subject to a people they had barely heard of suggested the dawn of a new and unsettling age. The world seemed suddenly shrunken. Never before had one man's reach extended quite so far. Cyrus, however, far from glorying in his achievements, remained restless and anxious for more. For all the scale of his victories in Lydia, he dreaded the danger that be imagined lurking in his rear. Back from Sardis, he turned his gaze towards the eastern horizon. Ignore what lay beyond that and even the most brilliant conqueror might find that his greatness had been raised on shifting sand. No kingdom could reckon itself wholly secure while it still feared the depredations of migrant tribes and the thunder of hoofbeats across the plains of Iran. Who better to appreciate that than a Persian, himself a descendant of nomads?
    So it was that Cyrus, disdaining to stamp out the revolt in Lydia in person, had instead taken the opposite route from Ecbatana, following the Khorasan Highway as it wound ever east. 23 This, for Persians and Medes alike, was to journey back into their past, towards the legendary homelands of their ancestors, 'rich in pastures and waters . . . the abode of cattle', 24 where everything seemed on a more heroic scale, the plains much vaster, the mountains touching the sky. Fighting his way into the uplands, gazing at last towards the Hindu
    Kush, Cyrus would have been able to watch the dawning of the sun over the peaks of Central Asia - 'the undying, swift-horsed sun; who, foremost in a golden array, takes hold of the beautiful summits, and from them looks over the abode of the Aryans with a beneficent eye'. 25 This same 'abode of the Aryans', long after the Persians had emigrated from it, had remained the fiefdom of swaggering noblemen, backward in comparison to their cousins in the Zagros, perhaps, but rich, and hulking, and addicted to war. Once Cyrus had succeeded in forcing their submission, they were to provide him with formidable new resources of manpower and wealth. The badlands would never entirely lose their turbid character, for their new master, chameleon-like as ever, was careful to portray himself as the heir of the region's traditions, leaving the local noblemen to continue in their rumbustious ways — but in the cause, henceforward, of the Persian king. Loose though it was, the order imposed by Cyrus was subtly calibrated to meet his needs: not only troops and gold, but a buffer zone. The establishment of an immense arc of provinces, stretching from the Hindu Kush to the