Unseen but all-seeing

In spite of the ceremony which surrounded Great King (see further below), he was a shadowy figure even to longstanding courtiers. Indeed, limited access to the person of the sovereign was actually the prerequisite of Achaemenid monarchy. Under Darius I, only six Persian dignitaries allegedly enjoyed freedom of access to the ruler, but otherwise the physical separation of the king from his courtiers permeated every aspect of royal life, including dinners and feasts, where only a few individuals were permitted to interact with the king (B1). Both Xenophon and Plutarch suggest that the king carefully manipulated seating prerogatives at the dinner table to highlight the social worth of a few honoured members of the court (B2; see also Chapter 4, D7). Because these favoured individuals were, presumably, able to address the king directly as they ate and drank, they were perceived by other courtiers to be in a position of favour and therefore of influence (this in turn could lead to envy and outright rivalry on the part of others; see Chapter 5). While some high-ranking courtiers no doubt often saw and spoke with the monarch (we can imagine that Parnaka, as head of the

Persepolis administration, had frequent occasion to converse with the king), for most members of court the king was inaccessible, and seeing and speaking to the sovereign were tightly controlled. Courtiers had to follow certain formulations of etiquette and most would not have dared to speak directly to their sovereign (the king, however, could permit a courtier to speak and express an opinion - see Nehemiah 2:1-6, 8).

This notion of an ‘invisible’ sovereign flies in the face of the ideology of monarchy that Norbert Elias (1983) understood to have been promoted at Versailles: Louis XIV was constantly on display to his court, whether he was dressing, eating, or praying (only sex and defecation were private acts for the Bourbon monarch), so in this respect Elias’ concept of court society is at loggerheads with the Achaemenid model. However, while Louis XIV was undoubtedly a great Christian king, his form of sacred kingship fell short of the ancient Near Eastern models of monarchy, or for that matter the form of kingship adopted in East Asia and the Middle East in later periods. These were all formatted on the idea of the hidden monarch’s inaccessibility. The Achaemenid kings followed a practice adopted by Mughal and Qing emperors, Safavid and Qajar shahs, Ottoman sultans, and a myriad of African rulers; as late as the 1940s the Japanese emperor was a hidden monarch, and even today His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand carefully rations his civic appearances, guards his public image with meticulous laws of lese-majeste, and strictly rules over a formal court stiff with ceremonial (Handley 2006).

Perhaps as a result of this region-wide courtly concept of royal invisibility, texts from across the ancient Near Eastern world speak of the ardent desire of courtiers to behold the faces of their kings. The Assyrian Bel-ibini, for instance, writes to his ruler, Ashurbanipal, stressing that ‘I long for the sight of the king my lord, that I might see the face of the king my lord’ (Tomes 2005: 82), while the governor of Calah addresses the same ruler imploring ‘Let an order be given to the Palace Overseers. . . . Let them allow me to see the face of the king, my lord, and may the king look at me’ (Tomes 2005: 82). These are nothing short of expressions of dependence on the king’s majesty, and they articulate clearly the desire (even desperation) felt by many courtiers to bask in their sovereign’s gaze. Most desperate of all is the plea of the courtier Barhalza, located some distance away from his lord and master Esarhaddon in a province far west of Nineveh: ‘Like sunshine, all countries are illuminated by your light. But I have been left in darkness; no one brings me to see the king’ (Tomes 2005: 81).

The smugness of individuals regularly admitted into the royal presence is just as palpable, as demonstrated by a tomb inscription of Ineni, a favoured courtier of the New Kingdom pharaoh Thutmose II:

I was a favourite of the king in his every place; greater was that which he did for me than for those who preceded (me). I attained the old age of the revered, I possessed the favour of seeing His Majesty every day.

(Breasted 1906: vol. ii, §117; see further Tomes 2005: 81)

Courtiers who regularly served in the royal presence were therefore to be congratulated:

Happy is the man whom you have chosen to approach you And to live in your court!

(Psalm 65:4)

Happy are they who live in your house,

Who are always praising you!

(Psalm 84:5)

Kings were hard to see and difficult to access. Herodotus, in his (essentially fantastical) ‘Median history’, attributes the creation of this kind of ‘invisible monarchy’ to the Medes (B3). Clearly he is wrong but, regardless of historical accuracy, Herodotus seems to understand well enough what motivates a monarch to opt for this sort of rule, as well as realising the effects of royal detachment: Deioces opted to be inaccessible to his nobles to enhance the place of the monarchy in society. Ctesias, however, disagrees with Herodotus and not only advocates an earlier formulation of the practice, in Assyria, but proposes that Ninyas wished to be secluded from the whole population of his realm and not just his courtiers (B4). Of course, it is impossible to give a historical date to either Deioces or Ninyas (given that they are, at best, merely amalgamations of genuine historical figures) and thus Giovanni Lanfranchi’s careful analysis of this discrepancy concludes by noting:

The descriptions given by Herodotus and by Ctesias of the invention of the first shaping of royal inaccessibility or invisibility are the exemplary models of the etiquette that they believed, or pretended to be current at the Persian (or better ‘Oriental’) court. Either of Median or of Assyrian origin, this was the character which they wished to stress in their picture of the royal court etiquette in Persia. (Lanfranchi 2010: 52)

So, should we believe the Greek sources on the inaccessibility of the Great King? We probably should, while nevertheless recognising that the Greek fascination with the image of the invisible king served a negative agenda: the remoteness of the ruler helped sanction the Hellenic stereotype of the degenerate Oriental despot. Thus the anonymous Greek author known to us as Pseudo-Aristotle envisaged the Great King as a luxury-loving demi-god hidden away in the depths of his court and he conceived of the royal palace itself as a series of thresholds, with the palace gate, walls, towers, guards, and multiple doors functioning as a sequence of barriers between the outer world and the inner sanctum of the royal chamber, where the divine king sat unseen but all-seeing (B5).

Interestingly, from at least Herodotus onwards, there is something in the Greek discourse on the nature of the Persian Empire which is fixated on the Great King’s ability to control his own public visibility as well as the sight of others (Llewellyn-Jones forthcoming a). Cyrus the Great, at least as portrayed by Xenophon, modelled his kingship on the premise that ‘the good ruler [has] eyes for men, [so that] he is able not only to give commandments but also to see the transgressor and punish him’ (Cyropaedia 8.1.22), although, on a less positive note, Xenophon also evokes the image of a somewhat paranoid Great King policing his realm by utilising a tight network of spies, the ‘Faithful’ (pistoi), throughout the length and breadth of the Empire, to report back to the central authority any hint of threat or rebellion in the satrapies (Cyropaedia 8.2.10-12; see also Briant 2002: 344). A court official bearing the (curious) title of ‘King’s Eye’ (Old Persian Spasaka?) - beautifully lampooned by Aristophanes in his comedy Acharnians of 425 BCE (lines 61-129) - was in charge of intelligence-gathering and reported directly, and perhaps even daily, to the king (Herodotus 1.114; Ctesias F20: 12).

Greek sources emphasise how the Persian king had power over the sight of others, so much so, indeed, that he put out the eyes and directly managed the gaze of his subjects. In Ctesias’ Persica the gouging out of eyes is not infrequently cited as the punishment for treason: the rebellious eunuch Petisacas, for instance, had his eyes gouged out prior to his crucifixion (F9 §6 and F9a) and the braggart Mithridates was deprived of his eyes before molten lead was poured in his ears (F26 §7). Ctesias also recounts the cruel practice of pricking the eyeballs of tortured prisoners (F26 §4 = Plutarch, Artaxerxes 14-17). Xenophon likewise recalls that, as he marched through the Persian Empire, he often saw along the roads people who had lost eyes because of some crime against the Great King’s law (Anabasis 1.9.11-12; on imperial punishments see Rollinger 2010).

The Greek authors are correct to identify this particular form of punishment, for there is good evidence for this practice of blinding rebellious traitors from Old Persian sources too. In the Bisitun inscription, Darius boasts of how the Median pretender Phraortes (Fravartish) ‘was captured and brought to me. I cut off his nose, his ears, and his tongue, and I tore out one eye, and he was kept in fetters at my palace entrance, and all the people beheld him’ (DB II §32). The same fate is reserved for the traitor Tritantaechmes (Cicantakhma) the Sagartian (DB II §33). In this, Darius is consistent with a general Near Eastern practice, since successive civilisations regarded blindness as the lowest type of degradation that could be inflicted upon an individual. Of particular interest in the Bisitun inscription, however, is Darius’ report that the mutilated heads of the rebellious prisoners were placed on display - probably at the gates of the royal palace in Ecbatana. This was a standard practice, since the public display of rebels - either as mutilated corpses or as living prisoners still awaiting the final death blow - signified the serious nature of rebellion and acted as a warning to other subject peoples. That ‘all the people beheld him’ highlights the notion of the active gaze of the population, who must look and learn from the decapitated head with the hollow eye sockets, and underscores the paradox of the seeing and unseeing eye, as well as the powerful image of the palace in royal propaganda.