I he ways and means of Darius’s accession to power—to the extent that we can reconstruct them—are a testimony to the new king’s energy and decisiveness. Darius was undeniably an exceptional personality, but he also proved to have organizational ability. During the same time that he was reorganizing the entire tribute system, other projects were carried out in various regions: construction of new capitals, the conquest of Samos, expeditions from the Indus to the Nile; in 518 he also commissioned the satrap Aryandes to gather Egyptian sages to collect the “Egyptian laws"; other measures affecting Jerusalem were effected at the same time.
What is striking is the care with which the king planned for the long term. Darius wanted above all to create a new lineage. To this end, he manipulated dynastic circumstances with a great deal of skill. The redefinition he imposed on the word Achaemenid allowed him to exclude those who belonged to the clan of the same name from the line of succession. Henceforth, power could only be transmitted from father to son in one restricted family, which was placed under the blessing and protection of a founder-hero, Achaemenes, invented out of whole cloth. Darius and his counselors were able to carry out political and ideological rethinking that was no less remarkable. From early on, the king was preoccupied with providing an ideological base for his authority and his lineage. Beginning in the late 520s, Achaemenid monarchic ideology was articulated around rules and justifications where politics and religion were fused into a whole of rare consistency. The authority of the king and the rights of his family were henceforth under the protection of Ahura-Mazda, who was invoked as the great god of the king and the Empire. The concept of arta ('truth') —in relation to its antithetical corollary drauga (‘the Lie’) —was the true linchpin of this ideological structure. This is the program we see at work in the new residences in Susa and Persepolis as well as on the royal tomb at Naqs-i Rustam.
Without in the least deprecating the work accomplished by his predecessors (chap. 2), we may thus assert that the advent of Darius marks the foundation of a new dynastic and imperial order. In this regard, the first years of his reign definitely represent a decisive period in Achaemenid history. But at the same time, Darius took care to entrench his reign in the longue duree. The projects he undertook at Pasargadae are another testimony to his ambition to place the upheaval he created within the continuity of Persian history. Contrary to what has long been thought, Darius actually never sought to inflict a damnatio memoriae on the founder of the Empire. On the contrary, he intended to promote skillful propaganda at Pasargadae that would allow him to establish a fictitious link with Cyrus, just as he did with his matrimonial policy.
Diachrony and Synchrony
I should mention in passing that Darius’s activity is attested in numerous domains and in numerous regions of the Empire. But it is impossible to offer an absolutely continuous story from the 520s until 486. I am thus led first to analyze each successive conquest by the new king individually, because it was these that permitted the Achaemenid Empire to achieve its greatest extent (chap. 4). The other aspects of his immense accomplishment will be treated in the course of thematic and regional chapters (chaps. 5-12); these studies will help us better to appreciate as a whole what the Empire was at the death of the Great King and will also lead us to understand better the particular accomplishment of Xerxes (chap. 13).
World History
