A general and member of the royal court, Hystaspes was also the satrap of Bactria under Cyrus the Great and his son Cambyses. Darius was known to Cyrus who, according to legend, had a dream shortly before his death in BC. He saw a vision of Darius ruling the world and feared that the young nobleman had ambitions to seize the throne. He sent Hystaspes back to Persia to keep a close eye on his son.
However, Darius served loyally and even became the personal spear-carrier of Cambyses. Later, Darius claims that his family could trace their lineage back to Achaemenes, the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty.
Darius was a cousin of Cambyses, which he believed legitimized his bid for the throne. According to the Behistun inscription , a revolt broke out while Cambyses and Darius were in Egypt. A usurper called Gaumata tricked the Persian people into declaring him as their leader.
Darius then says that Cambyses had secretly murdered Bardiya and hid this from the people. Cambyses hurried back to Persia to counter the revolt, but on the journey, he suffered a wound after falling off his horse. The wound became infected and killed him. Darius and six other Persian nobles then formed an alliance to overthrow Bardiya. They traveled to Media and assassinated the usurper.
After overthrowing Bardiya, the conspirators gathered to decide who would be King and how to proceed with ruling the empire. While some advocated an oligarchy or a republic, Darius pushed for a monarchy and won his conspirators over. To choose the new King, they all agreed to a contest.
At dawn the next morning, each man would sit on his horse. The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that Darius ordered his servant to rub his hand on the genitals of a mare. With his victory accompanied by thunder and lightning, none of his fellow contenders disputed his claim, and Darius the Great ascended to the throne.
Several satraps refused to accept Darius as their king and rose in rebellion. Rival kings sprang up across the empire, taking advantage of the lingering support for Bardiya. A rebel king named Assina rose up in Elam. Darius and his forces roamed across the empire, tackling each insurrection individually. With a small but loyal army alongside his 10, Immortals and the support of several nobles, Darius crushed the opposition.
His inscription at Bisitun proclaims that he fought 19 battles against nine rivals and won. After quashing the rebellions across Persia, Darius sent forces east into India. He took control of the Indus Valley and extended Persian territory into the Punjab region. The Persian fleet was levied in the same manner as the army, but since the Mediterranean maritime peoples all copied from each other, there was little problem of diversity. The fleet's weakness was that, being raised entirely from among subject peoples, it had no real loyalty.
Darius, himself a firm supporter of Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god, said in the Behistun inscription that Ahura Mazda "gave" him his kingdoms, and with him Zoroastrianism became something like the national religion of the Persians. For the empire, however, he continued Cyrus's policy of toleration of local cults, and this mildness became and remained, except perhaps under Xerxes, a distinctive feature of Persian rule.
Darius's first European campaign, about , was aimed not at Greece but north toward the Danube. Herodotus recorded that Darius intended to conquer the complete circuit of the Black Sea and that he was turned back north of the Danube by the native Scythians' scorched-earth policy.
This may be, or it may be that Darius never intended any permanent conquest north of the Danube and that Herodotus turned a limited success into a grandiose failure in order to make all Persian operations in Europe at least partly unsuccessful.
Darius did secure the approaches to Greece and the control of the grain route through the Bosporus. The next act in the Greco-Persian drama was the so-called lonian Revolt , an uprising against Persia of most of the Greeks of Asia Minor headed by the Ionians, and particularly by the city of Miletus.
Though the revolt was put down by Darius's generals, its seriousness is indicated by its length and by the fact that the Ionians' appeal to the Greek homeland was answered, at least in part, by Athens and Eretria. Darius had to take the Greek matter seriously. Not only did he have the duty of avenging the burning of his city of Sardis during the revolt, but he must have become convinced that to ensure the quiet of his Greek subjects in Asia Minor he would have to extend his rule also over their brothers across the Aegean.
After the collapse of the revolt, the attempt of Darius's son-in-law, Mandonius, to carry the war into Greece itself ended when the Persian fleet was wrecked in a storm off Mt.
Athos Perhaps Mardonius's ill-fated venture was really an attempt to conquer all Greece; the next effort certainly was not. Darius sent a naval expedition—he himself never set eyes on Greece—against only Athens and Eretria The attack was perfectly well known to becoming, but the Greeks had their customary difficulties of cooperation, and Eretria, unsupported, fell and was burned in revenge for Sardis. Athens appealed to the Grecian states, but only 1, men from little Plataea reached Athens.
The Persians landed on the small plain of Marathon northeast of Athens, and the Greeks took up station in easily defendable nearby hills out of reach of the Persian cavalry.
After some days' waiting, the Persians began to reembark, perhaps for a dash on Athens. The Greeks, led by Miltiades, were forced to attack, which they did with a lengthened front to avoid encirclement by the more numerous Persians.
The English translation of these verses is deceptively readable and cannot be seen as loyal to the complexities of the original Hebrew text. Until the development of effective optical telegraph systems at the end of the 18th century, messengers on horseback, riding over a good road system, remained the fastest method of sending a message overland. Image Source: en. Finger Reckoning and Computus in the Eighth Century. Norman [email protected].
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