Darius I

Darius, son of Hystaspes (Old Persian Dārayavauš, "holding firm the good"), of a collateral Achaemenid line, came to the throne in 522 BCE by force and by argument, and reigned until 486. He is the central historical figure of this compendium's period and the author of its single most important text, the trilingual inscription cut into the cliff at Behistun. Cyrus had founded the empire and Cambyses had enlarged it, but it was Darius who gave it the shape it kept for two centuries, the administration, the coinage, the roads, the great capitals, and who fixed in stone the idea that the King of Kings ruled as the chosen agent of Ahura Mazdā and the enemy of the Lie. Because no Achaemenid ever wrote a chronicle, and because Darius's own monuments are self-justifying propaganda, this entry lets the carved words carry the weight and marks the seams where the record is thin or contested.

Parentage and the Achaemenid line

Darius was born, on Herodotus's reckoning, about 550 BCE, the eldest son of Hystaspes (Vištāspa), and before his accession he served Cambyses as a spear-bearer on the Egyptian campaign. He was not the obvious heir, and his monument works hard to establish that he was an heir at all. At the head of the Behistun text he sets out a pedigree that reaches back through his father to a founder shared with Cyrus:

"My father was Hystaspes; the father of Hystaspes was Arsames; the father of Arsames was Ariaramnes. Eight of my line were kings before me; I am the ninth. In two lines have we been kings." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §§3–4)^[1]

The "two lines" trace both Cyrus's branch and Darius's own back to an eponymous Achaemenes (Haxāmaniš); the effect is to make Darius not a usurper from a side-branch but the legitimate continuation of the royal house. Whether that genealogy is authentic or a construction of 522 is itself debated (Winckler suggested as early as 1889 that Darius had lied in claiming kinship with Cyrus), but Shahbazi notes the answer to the succession problem is prosaic: Cambyses and Bardiya had left no sons, Darius's aged grandfather Arsames could not take the field, and his father Hystaspes was tied down governing Parthia and Hyrcania, so the task of restoring the monarchy "thus fell to Darius." He was, on this reading, simply the ablest available Achaemenid, and his later marriages into Cyrus's family (to Bardiya's daughter and sisters, and to Cyrus's own daughter Atossa) bound the two lines together.

The contested accession

The founding narrative of the reign is also its deepest problem, and this compendium keeps it open (see the accession of Darius). By Darius's own account, when Cambyses died the throne had been seized by a magus, Gaumāta, who impersonated the dead prince Bardiya (Smerdis), a son of Cyrus secretly murdered years before by his brother Cambyses. Darius and six fellow nobles, the Seven, killed the impostor, and Darius took the crown by the grace of his god:

"By the grace of Ahuramazda am I king; Ahuramazda has granted me the kingdom." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §5)^[1]

The whole empire then rose against him, Elam, Babylon, Media, Persis, Parthia, Margiana and more, in a single terrible year, and in Darius's telling every rebel was another liar:

"The people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the land, even in Persia and Media, and in the other provinces." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §10)^[1]

He put the risings down in some nineteen battles and published, at Behistun and in copies sent across the empire, an exact record of the events with their cause: as the Old Persian text says at DB 4.34, Falsehood (drauga-) made the provinces rebellious. But because the impostor story is precisely what legitimises Darius's seizure of a throne he had no clear right to, it has been doubted since antiquity, and a serious strand of modern scholarship (Shahbazi lists Olmstead, Burn, Dandamayev, Balcer, Bickerman and Tadmor, Cook, Boyce, Wiesehöfer and others) holds that the man Darius killed was the real Bardiya and that the lying magus was Darius's own invention.^[2] Shahbazi himself, in the Iranica article, marshals a long rebuttal (the nine standard arguments for Darius's mendacity, answered one by one) and "subscribes to the former view" that Darius told the truth; but he concedes the case is a matter of judgement on a single interested source. The compendium treats it as genuinely unresolved.

The remaking of the empire

Whatever the truth of 522, Darius's achievement in the decades after is not in doubt, and it is the reason he, not Cyrus, is often called the empire's true founder. Cyrus and Cambyses had left a loose federation of autonomous provinces under irregular taxation, heavy with non-Persian officials and prone to the particularism that had exploded in 522. As the Iranica article puts it, quoting Cuyler Young, the accomplishment of Darius's first year was "the actual creation, for the first time, of a real empire."^[3] He organised it into some twenty tribute-paying satrapies, each under a satrap (Old Persian xšaçapāvan, "protector of the realm") with fixed annual dues, and the empire in his own texts is counted precisely as obedience and tribute:

"These are the countries which obeyed me; by the grace of Ahuramazda they were my subjects; they bore tribute to me." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §6)^[1]

The tribute was assessed by a commission of trusted men sent to evaluate each district's revenues, paid in silver by the Babylonian talent and in gold by the Euboic; Herodotus preserves the list (3.90–97) and reckons the yearly total at something under fifteen thousand silver talents. Each satrap was checked by a royal secretary, a treasurer and a garrison commander answerable directly to the king, and by travelling inspectors, the "eyes and ears of the king." Darius standardised weights and measures and, before 500 BCE, introduced a bimetallic coinage: a silver siglos and, above it, the gold coin the Greeks called the dareikós, the daric, probably named after Darius himself and the purest gold struck in the ancient world. He improved the roads and way-stations, so that a traveller bearing an authorisation from king or satrap could draw rations at each daily stage; Herodotus marvelled at the mounted relay that carried the King's word:

"There is nothing mortal which accomplishes a journey with more speed than these messengers." (Herodotus 8.98, on the Royal Road)^[4]

Aramaic was kept as the chancery language of the whole empire, spreading from India to Ionia, while a new cuneiform script was devised for Old Persian itself, used only for the monumental inscriptions, what Darius called the "Aryan" script (DB 4.88–89). He cut a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, and recorded it on stelae along its course:

"I ordered to dig this canal from the Nile, which flows in Egypt, to the sea which goes from Persia; afterwards this canal was dug as I commanded, and ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, as was my desire." (Darius I, the Suez canal stelae)^[5]

And he raised new dynastic capitals at Susa and Persepolis, whose foundation charter turns the building itself into an image of the empire: every people at one labour, every land sending its treasure. The famous passage names the workmen and their materials:

"The cedar came from Lebanon, the gold from Sardis and Bactria, the lapis from Sogdiana, the ivory from Nubia and India, and by the favour of the Wise Lord, I built it." (Darius I, Susa foundation charter, DSf)^[5]

The wars: Scythia, Ionia, Marathon

Darius's reign was as much conquest as consolidation. Early on he suppressed a fresh Elamite revolt and executed Oroetes, the over-mighty satrap of Sardis who had murdered Polycrates of Samos and a fellow governor, the archetype of the servant grown too great and cut down by the King's reach, a shadow that falls across this whole compendium. He campaigned against the Pointed-Hat Scythians of Central Asia, captured their king Skunkha, and added the victory to the Behistun relief. About 513 he led a great expedition across the Bosporus into Europe against the Scythians of the Ukrainian steppe, marching over a pontoon bridge built by his Samian engineer Mandrocles; the Scythians refused battle and wasted the country as they withdrew, and Darius, harried and short of supply, broke off with his frontier forts unfinished, but far enough advanced, the sources say, to cow them. His generals then reduced Thrace and Macedonia, adding new satrapies "beyond the sea." The great rupture came in the west. In 499 the Greek cities of Ionia rose in revolt under Aristagoras of Miletus, supported by Athens and Eretria, who helped burn Sardis; six years of war ended with the Persians retaking the coast, after which Darius's brother Artaphernes reorganised Ionia's tribute. In reprisal for Athenian and Eretrian aid Darius sent a first expedition under his son-in-law Mardonius, wrecked by storm off Mount Athos, and then in 490 a second under Datis the Mede, which took Eretria and landed at Marathon in Attica, where, in the late summer, the heavily armed Athenian infantry under Miltiades defeated it. Marathon was a check, not a catastrophe; Darius resolved on a punitive campaign in person, but a revolt in Egypt and failing health prevented it, and the reckoning with Greece passed to his son. The Greeks who told the story read the whole arc of Persian overreach through the mouth of Darius's own ghost, raised on the Athenian stage a generation later:

"Why then was Darius in his time, leader beloved to the men of Susa, so scatheless a lord of the bow unto his people?" (Aeschylus, The Persians 555–557, the chorus at Susa)^[6]

The king as soldier and judge

Darius's tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam carries the inscription DNb, the fullest statement of the kingly ideal to survive from any Achaemenid, not a record of deeds but a portrait of the man the king wished to be seen as. It measures him first as a warrior, in the very skills a Persian boy was reared to:

"As a horseman I am a good horseman; as a bowman I am a good bowman, both afoot and on horseback; as a spearman I am a good spearman, both afoot and on horseback." (Darius I, tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb)^[7]

But its heart is justice, conceived as an even hand that holds the powerful and the weak alike to their due:

"I am a friend to the right; I am no friend to the wrong. It is not my wish that the mighty should do wrong to the weak, nor that the weak should do wrong to the mighty." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8)^[7]

He binds it to due process (no charge believed until both sides are heard) and to self-mastery, the temper governed before the realm is governed:

"What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until I hear the testimony of both." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8)^[7]

"I am not hot-tempered. What things develop in my anger, I hold firmly under control by my thinking power." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8)^[7]

And he states the whole logic of royal favour and punishment as a compact of desert: "The man who serves, him I reward according to his service; the man who does harm, him I punish according to the harm" (DNb §8). This is the ethical core of Achaemenid kingship as its own propaganda presents it, and, read against the Greek tales of intrigue, blinding and the King's silent reckoning, an ideal the practice did not always meet.

Religion and the royal ideology

Darius is the fullest voice of Achaemenid royal religion, and his inscriptions everywhere ground his power in Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord who made him king. The standard royal formula opens by naming the god as creator, and on his tomb it runs into the making of the king himself: the god who created the earth, the sky, mankind and human happiness is the same god "who made Darius king, one king of many, one lord of many" (DNa). Kingship is the god's remedy for a world in disorder:

"When Ahuramazda saw this earth in commotion, thereafter he bestowed it upon me; he made me king. I am king." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNa)^[7]

The politics follow from the theology. Because the throne is the Wise Lord's gift, the king's enemies are the enemies of the god's order, followers of the Lie, and the king's own defence is that he kept faith with the Truth:

"Ahuramazda brought me help, because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a despot; I have ruled according to righteousness." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §63)^[1]

And the king's deepest prayer is that the god keep his land from the three faces of disorder: the enemy, the dearth, the falsehood:

"May the Wise Lord protect this land from the hostile army, from famine, and from the Lie." (Darius I, Persepolis, DPd)^[5]

The Iranica article is characteristically brief here ("Little need be said about Darius's religion") and reads his Ahura-Mazdā piety, echoing (in Hinz's phrase) Zoroaster's own utterances, alongside the "characteristic Achaemenid tolerance": Darius funded the restoration of the Jewish temple that Cyrus had decreed (Ezra 6), rebuked a satrap who taxed the gardeners of a Greek god's grove (the disputed letter to Gadatas), observed the Egyptian rites of kingship, and supported Elamite priests, so long as the peoples who held those faiths stayed peaceable. Whether this Mazdā-worship makes Darius a Zoroastrian in any strict sense is the long-debated question treated on the Ahura Mazdā entry; his texts name neither Zarathustra nor the characteristic Avestan vocabulary, and the compendium leaves the relationship open.

The address to posterity

Alone among the kings, Darius speaks past his own age to those who will read his monuments, insisting on the truth of his record and pressing his creed on all who come after. At Behistun he warns:

"Thou who shalt behold this inscription hereafter, let it not seem false to thee; believe it to be the truth." (Darius I, Behistun, col. IV)^[1]

The insistence is double-edged, for it is exactly a record that most needs to be believed which most invites doubt; whose truth survives is the question the whole compendium turns on. On his tomb the address becomes a testament, binding arta and obedience into a single command to the future:

"O man, that which is the command of Ahuramazda, let this not seem repugnant to you; do not leave the right path; do not rise in rebellion!" (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb)^[7]

Reputation: the huckster and the lawgiver

The Persians' own memory of Darius, Herodotus reports, was of the great organiser: they called Cyrus the father and Cambyses the master, but Darius "the huckster" or shopkeeper (kápēlos), because he set the empire on a fixed and profitable fiscal footing (3.89), a folk-judgement affectionate and faintly mocking at once, the king as the man who counted and priced the world. The Greek philosophical tradition was kinder: Plato ranked Darius among the seven who divided the realm and praised him as the lawgiver who "fixed the tribute Cyrus had promised" and bound the realm together with measured generosity (Laws 3.695), and Diodorus counted him with Cyrus among the rulers who "originally in a private station, obtained thrones by merit." The darker Greek reading, again, is Aeschylus's: the just and beloved Darius set against the disastrous overreach of his son Xerxes, so that the father becomes the standard against which the tragedy of 480 is measured. Between the huckster and the lawgiver, the ambitious spear-bearer and the servant of the Truth, the sources leave a figure large enough to hold all these readings, which is itself a measure of how much of the empire he made.

The end of the reign

Darius died in October 486, with a revolt in Egypt still unquelled, and was entombed in the rock-cut sepulchre he had prepared at Naqsh-e Rostam, its façade carved with the king at prayer before the fire, borne up on a throne-platform by the figures of thirty subject peoples. He had already named as his successor Xerxes, his eldest son by Atossa, and so, through her, the throne returned to the line of Cyrus. Herodotus records that the choice was contested by an elder half-brother on the old principle that "the eldest should have the rule" (7.2), and that Atossa's weight settled it: "For Atossa was all-powerful" (7.3). Xerxes carried his father's creed forward almost unchanged, praying on his own tomb-model of a text that whoever keeps "the law the Wise Lord has established, and worships him and arta," shall be "happy in life, and blessed in death" (XPh). The empire Darius had made would endure, in the shape he gave it, until Alexander.