The above observations immediately reveal the great difficulty faced by anyone who intends to write an analytical synthesis of the Achaemenid Empire. It must embrace a diachronic approach, a synchronic vision, and regional distinctions all at the same time. Though a single entity, the Empire had multiple manifestations because of its longevity and because of the great variety of the lands and cultures it comprised. Thus the tyranny of the document reemerges. How can one compose a global history of the longue duree, when the most significant evidence is limited to a few decades and/or a few areas? For the same reasons, where, how, and with what justification can we establish chronological divisions that express an endogenous, ascertainable, and verifiable development? There is no reason to overlook the breaks marked by the death of a king and the accession of his successor, but one cannot attribute to them a determinative explanatory value because, whatever the recognized central position of the Great King, the pulse and breath of the history of the Empire over the longue duree cannot be reduced to incidents
Of dynastic history. Consequently, it is necessary to interrupt the chronological thread with thematic chapters.
Despite the inauspicious distribution of the evidence, I have taken the risk of writing a general history in all of the aspects that I have listed. Risk is a bit pretentious because I have defined the several parts of the book mostly according to the distribution in time and space of all of the different kinds of evidence. What I am trying to say is that I have attempted to restore a full measure of importance to the fourth century, whose development is too often misunderstood and treated superficially at the expense of surrendering the power of memory to the Greek polemicists and so rendering the end of the story unintelligible. I do not claim that the history in the chapters below (particularly chapter 15) is not primarily political, military, and diplomatic. It might be considered hard, even tedious, reading. But, on the one hand, to reprise a formula that I will repeat many times, historians cannot choose their sources. On the other hand, I hold as do others that there are no minor genres of history; in a history of a state built and destroyed by conquest, it would be unreasonable not to devote sustained attention to armies and military expeditions. In the end, the study of war cannot be reduced to the caricature sometimes made of it with the pejorative label “battle-history.” War is especially revealing of the workings of a state, even if it only reveals, for example, the scale of mobilization of human, material, and technological means of production that it both presupposes and imposes.
In order to highlight diachronic development more clearly, I have periodically provided an overview of the Empire, taken in its regional or even microregional components (chapters 13/6-7; 14/8; 15/7). I have also drawn up some more general assessments at three key points. The first is at the death of Cambyses (522), to distinguish what is attributed to the first two kings from what must be attributed to Darius (chapter 2). I have also made an assessment, which is meant to be exhaustive, at the end of the reign of Darius. Several long chapters (6-12) will perhaps provoke some criticism because of the use of later sources for the early fifth century, but I try to explain on several occasions the reasons for my choice. The third general assessment occurs toward the beginning of the reign of Darius III, and it includes the entire fourth century. Its purpose is to take stock before the appearance of Alexander and better to assess what we have fallen into the unfortunate habit of calling “Achaemenid decadence (decline).” The reader will find there an overview of the peoples and countries of the Empire that is as complete as possible, without claiming to have exhausted the literature. This inventory is not confined to an analysis of the administrative organization; the longest passages are devoted to the analysis of intercultural relations (chapter 16). The assessment is filled out by a dynamic analysis of the central state apparatus (chapter 17). For reasons I will set forth in the proper place, in the introduction to part 4, such an assessment allows us to approach the last phase of Achaemenid history on a more solid basis: strictly speaking, the last chapter (18) is not about the conquest of Alexander but about the wars waged by Darius and tire Empire against Macedonian aggression and about the response of the imperial elite to the general challenge of the Macedonian conquest. Conquest, resistance, and defection in turn eloquently reveal the state of the Empire when Darius perished in a conspiracy in the summer of 330.
World History
