The First Clash (8 page)

Egypt was ruled by the pharaoh Amasis, who, after seizing the throne by force, ruled for forty-four years. He was an old soldier himself and must have made a realistic appraisal of the situation. As long as the Persians lacked a fleet, Amasis likely felt secure with the unforgiving Sinai desert between Egypt and the Persian army. However, after Babylon’s fall, the
greatest seafarers of the ancient world, the Phoenicians, transferred their allegiance to Cyrus and placed their fleets under Persian suzerainty. Cambyses could now launch an amphibious attack from Phoenicia, or if he marched overland, he would have a fleet in constant contact from which to draw supplies. To counter this, Amasis strengthened the Egyptian fleet and secured a number of alliances with the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. In return for Egyptian gold, these island kingdoms were to send their fleets to Egypt to counter the Persian threat.

Unfortunately for Amasis, as soon as the Persian forces moved, these arrangements collapsed. Fearing Persia’s growing power, Egypt’s allies looked first to their own interests. Rather than assist Egypt, they sent their fleets to assist Cambyses. In this regard, the example of Samos is informative. In 525 BC, the island was ruled by Polycrates, who had seized power with his two brothers. After murdering one brother and exiling the other, he had become sole ruler. Taking advantage of Ionia’s slow recovery after the Persian conquests, Samos became the Aegean’s foremost trading power. As the island grew rich, Polycrates fortified his capital city and its harbor. He also invested in a fleet of over one hundred vessels, which he used both for state-sponsored piracy and to enforce Samos’s trading dominance. According to Herodotus, Polycrates had, in exchange for gifts, forged an alliance with Amasis. However, when the Persians began to march, Polycrates offered a substantial portion of his fleet to Cambyses. When the attack on Egypt began, he outfitted forty ships for war and then, trying to kill two birds with one stone, manned them with those Samians he considered most likely to cause his regime future problems. To Cambyses he sent a secret message that the Samian crews should not return from the campaign, though one must assume he would welcome the return of the ships.

The Samians departed, thought better of it, and sailed back to attack Samos. Defeated by Polycrates, the Samian exiles made their way to Sparta and pleaded for assistance to help them overthrow Polycrates. The Spartans had strong ties to many of the Samians in the defeated party, but as always they were reluctant to send any substantial force far from Sparta. However, Sparta’s Peloponnesian ally Corinth, probably as a result of trading rivalries, was keen to participate in an assault on Samos and convinced the Spartans to cooperate.

The expedition was a fiasco. After forty days, the Spartans gave up the siege and sailed away. Herodotus brands as scandalous lies rumors that Polycrates bribed the Spartan commander to depart. However, he was getting
his information from the direct descendants of these Spartans. As for Polycrates, his arrogance and power eventually proved an irritation to Persia. Later, the Persian satrap of Sardis, Oroites, tricked him into visiting the mainland, where he was captured and put to death in a manner Herodotus considered “too disgusting to relate.” In death, he was left for viewing impaled on a stake.

As Samos dealt with its internal problems and fending off the Spartans, Cambyses’ preparations went forward. In this, he was ably assisted by a deserter from Amasis’s cause, the commander of the pharaoh’s Greek mercenaries, Phanes. After some undisclosed disagreement with Amasis, the Greek soldier escaped, but in his haste he was forced to leave his two sons behind. Phanes brought with him invaluable information about the condition of Amasis’s forces and plans for the defense of Egypt. He also strongly advocated that Cambyses ally himself with the Nabataeans, as they were familiar with the desert and would ease the army’s passage through the Sinai.

Cambyses proved just as ready to heed Phanes’ advice as his father had been to take that of Harpagos against Lydia and of Gobryas against Babylon. By arrangement, a massive Nabataean camel train loaded with water met the Persians en route and escorted them across the desert. After a two-week passage, the Persian army approached the gateway to Egypt, Pelusium, at the mouth of the Nile. There, they learned that Amasis had died and his son Psammenitos (Psamatik II) commanded the Greek mercenaries guarding the city. When the mercenaries saw that Phanes was leading the Persian army, and thus had betrayed them, they paraded his sons to where he could witness their execution. They then cut the sons’ throats, caught their blood in a large bowl, and mixed it with water and wine. Each of the mercenaries then sipped from the bowl to taste the blood of Phanes’ sons. By this profane act, the mercenaries declared that the coming battle would be to the death, with no quarter asked or expected.

Nothing is known of the ensuing battle except what Herodotus reports:

Herodotus also reports that he could still see the bleached bones of the combatants littering the desert floor when he passed through the area forty years later. The routed Egyptian mercenaries did not halt their retreat
until they reached Memphis, where they sealed themselves up in the city. Cambyses, hoping to avoid a siege, sent a Mytilenian ship with a Persian herald with surrender terms to Memphis. But the enraged mercenaries “destroyed the ship and tore the crew limb from limb.”
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After a short siege the city surrendered, and Cambyses ordered two thousand Egyptian notables (ten for each man aboard the Mytilenian ship) put to death, including the son of the new pharaoh. Cambyses permitted Psammenitos to live, at least until the Persians discovered him plotting a revolt, after which he was immediately executed.

Cambyses spent the next three years consolidating Persian rule in Egypt, during which time he conducted two further military expeditions. In the first, Herodotus tells of a fifty-thousand-man army sent to the Siwa Oasis either to seize it for future operations or to destroy it. Reportedly, the entire army was lost in a sudden sandstorm. As there are no other sources to confirm this event, historians have long doubted it occurred. But recently, geologists searching for oil found the remains of what appears to be a Persian military force near Siwa. There is speculation that these remains are at least a portion of Cambyses’ lost army.
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The second expedition was an invasion of Ethiopia, supposedly led by Cambyses himself. Herodotus reports that this expedition too met with disaster, as the Persians had made no preparations prior to setting out and starvation soon decimated the army. Given the meticulous preparations Cambyses had made for the invasion of Egypt, it seems odd that he would conduct a second major invasion without any preparation. The fact that Nubia (northern Ethiopia) became part of the Persian Empire during this period makes Herodotus’s report of defeat followed by a humiliating retreat seem improbable.

Moreover, the power of the Persian army does not seem to have suffered during this period. In fact, Cambyses’ veterans became the indispensable core of the army his successor, Darius, would use to crush a series of revolts to his rule the following year. If it had been decimated in ill-considered campaigns on the Egyptian frontier, the Persian Empire would not have lasted another two years, never mind two hundred. The most likely interpretation of the evidence is that Cambyses sent out a strong reconnaissance, far short of fifty thousand men, to Siwa and this force was probably lost. As for Ethiopia, Cambyses did make a strong incursion into that country and made some gains. After heavy fighting and likely some supply problems, he settled for Nubia and brought his army back to Memphis. It is also quite possible that Cambyses retreated from Ethiopia because
he was receiving the first news of revolts, or at least serious unrest, in the heart of the empire that demanded his immediate attention.

Whatever happened, Cambyses and his veteran army were soon on the march back to Persia. Along the way, he was informed that a revolt had indeed taken place and a Median usurper claiming to be his brother, Smerdis, had seized the throne. Herodotus states that soon after hearing the news, Cambyses was accidentally cut by his own sword while mounting his horse. The wound festered, and he died a short while later, but not before imploring his nobles not to let a Mede gain supremacy of the empire.

The revolt of the false Smerdis was the greatest crisis the Persian Empire faced until Alexander’s invasion two hundred years later. It was also one of the great unresolved scandals of the ancient world. The evidence for the course of events comes from two main sources—the Behistun inscription and Herodotus—both in general agreement. It is also clear that Herodotus drew his description of events from the official story that Darius put forth after he secured the throne for himself. That Darius, the author of the Behistun inscription, was keen for the entire empire to know his version of events is clear from papyrus fragments of the inscription that archaeologists have discovered in various ruins throughout the empire. Both sources agree that Smerdis was an impostor and that Cambyses had sent an assassin to kill his brother, the real Smerdis, prior to this revolt. Where they disagree is whether Cambyses ordered this execution before leaving for Egypt (Darius’s version) or after he was already in Egypt (Herodotus’s version).

Among historians, there remains a school of thought that claims that Cambyses never killed his brother and that it was the actual Smerdis who seized the throne during Cambyses’ absence. In this telling of events, Darius, who apparently took command of the army after Cambyses’ death, created the fiction of a false Smerdis to better justify his own usurpation of royal power. This version of events, where Cambyses did not commit fratricide, has a lot to commend it, particularly as it explains why so many were ready to believe the pretender was the actual Smerdis. It also explains how the murder of the real Smerdis could have been hidden from the Persian people and the nobles.

In this version of events, rather than being murdered, as would be the expected fate of any possible challenger to the throne, Smerdis was left behind as regent. However, this new tale has its own problems. Unfortunately for those holding this position, there is no ancient evidence extant
that even alludes to this being the case. It is also likely that if any persons actually believed it was the real Smerdis whom Darius deposed, their version of events would have to have come to Herodotus’s ears. And since this would have proven Darius’s duplicity and illegitimacy, it would have been just the kind of story his audience would have welcomed. Therefore, with no evidence to the contrary available, it would be unwise not to accept the essence of what the existing sources present us.

The pretend Smerdis, probably with the help of his brother, a Magian priest whom Cambyses had left in charge of his household, seized the throne in March 522 BC. Garnering support by declaring a peace policy to a war-weary population brought the brothers some initial support. Further popularity was bought by declaring a three-year moratorium on what must have been ruinous war taxes for the bulk of the population. In April, Babylon accepted him as its ruler, and by early July, most of the empire had accepted him as the legitimate ruler of the empire.
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However, there are indications that almost from the start there was a growing resentment of his rule among the powerful Persian nobles and even some Median nobles and Magi priests.
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The reason for this discontent is not clear. Nevertheless, some assumptions can be made. First, the nobility could not have been happy to see its power being usurped by the priests. Furthermore, it could not have taken long for Smerdis to discover that governing was impossible without a constant stream of tax revenues. Unable to retract his three-year tax holiday for the masses, Smerdis would have had only one other source of sizable revenue: forced exactions from the accumulated wealth of the nobles and temples, a sure means of alienating his most powerful subjects.

As the high and mighty of the empire began turning away from Smerdis and his brother, the new leadership of Cambyses’ army bided their time. With Cambyses dead, seven Persian nobles had come together to take command of the army and plot the overthrow of the pretender. According to Herodotus, the Persian nobles were Otanes, Gobryas, Intaphrenes, Hydarnes, Megabyzus, Aspathines, and a late joiner, Darius.
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All were young men who possessed substantial constituencies within the empire. In Darius’s case, for instance, both his father and grandfather were still alive, and probably both were serving as satraps with powerful local forces under their command. When Darius eventually assumed the throne, it was to these young nobles and co-conspirators he most often turned for help in running the empire, and with one exception, they all maintained substantial power throughout his reign.
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At the conclusion of
his Behistun inscription, Darius went so far as to commend each of his successors’ honor and assist the families of these men in perpetuity.

Unsure of their position or how much support they had at home, the seven nobles did nothing for the moment. When the pretender’s heralds eventually arrived to order the army to abandon its leaders and swear allegiance to Smerdis, they were met with silence. The army, which was probably mostly Persians at this point, rejected the pretender and remained loyal to Darius and his noble friends. This was not surprising, as armies at this time were prone to identify themselves with their commanders and not with any central state. This was particularly true if those commanders were promising them great rewards, as the seven nobles most assuredly were. It is also worth noting that these soldiers were probably aware that after declaring a three-year tax holiday, Smerdis would have little with which to reward them.