Another "Achaemenid" Source: The Alexandrian Historians
Before beginning the final chapter, which is my account of the confrontation be-tM'een Darius III and Alexander, I would like to pause to synthesize and integrate the facts, interpretations, and theories that have been presented in the preceding chapters. The inquiry can also move forward because of the contributions of a “new” corpus —the ancient historians of Alexander. Thus far, we have deliberately limited use of them, except in the chapters in part 2 that are devoted to relatively stable aspects of the Persian tradition. We consider “stable” those things that constitute the very principles of royal Achaemenid ideology, whether it be royal virtue, representations of the imperial realm, or even the people and life of the court—all those aspects that the texts from the time of Darius III imply go back to “ancestral custom” {e. g., Diodorus XVII.34.6; 35.3; Quintus Curtins III.3.8; III.8.12; IV.13.26, etc.). Two examples may quickly clarify this point. (1) Quintus Curtius's famous description (III.3.8-25) of the royal procession before the battle of Issus is amazingly like the somewhat parallel descriptions provided by Xenophon (of “Cyrus”) and Herodotus (of Xerxes; see chap. 5/4 above). (2) Similarly, the description, again by Quintus Curtins (V. 1.17-23), of Alexander’s entry into Babylon could be integrated, at a stage before careful analysis, into a discussion of “royal entries,” which we have every reason to believe did not change significantly in either principle or organization. There is even one place where Quintus Curtius himself compares Darius III with Xerxes—in regard to the methods that the Great Kings used for counting and enumerating the contingents of the royal army (III.2.2). This example must not, however, lead us to imagine that royal customs were completely static. For one thing, Quintus Curtius’s comparison does not necessarily commit the modern historian to the same conclusion; for another, it does not imply a general paralysis of royal protocol, which, as we have seen, underwent several modifications over time, any more than the apparently repetitive character of the royal inscriptions should lead us to conclude that nothing changed between Cyrus and Darius III; we have observed, for example, that innovations were introduced in the times of Artaxerxes I and Artaxerxes II (chaps. 14/1, 15/8).
On the other hand, the sources going back to the time of Alexander, situated within the longue duree of the fourth century, are of decisive importance in our attempt to determine the state of the Empire at the time of the accession of Darius III. Of course, just like the Greek authors of the fourth century, the courtier-historians often transmitted a liiased view of tlie conquest and the conquered. We will come back to this point several times. We will see that in some cases the information offered by the Hellenistic writers must be taken with as much caution as is required for the writers of the fourth century.
For example, caution is called for w'hen they introduce us to the little-known peoples of the Zagros, whom they identify using the undifferentiated and reductive label of “savage brigands,” or more generally when they try to contrast, one final time, Achaemenid stasis with the innovations spurred by Alexander (work on the Babylonian canals and rivers). The primary reason for this is that the ideology promoted by Alexander’s Companions is homologous with that which runs through the writings of the fourth-century authors. But the responsibility also belongs to the historian who reads and makes use of them. In fact, many of the details reported by the ancients can only be understood when they are located in the longue diiree of Persian history. Here is how the Alexander histories constitute an "Achaemenid” source: they illuminate Achaemenid history, which in turn helps the historian to understand the sense and significance of the information they provide. To take but a single example, it is obvious that Arrian’s and Quintus Curtius’s descriptions of Alexander’s entries into Sardis and, later, Babylon take on their full historical meaning only when they are placed in the context of the “royal entries” well known from the Achaemenid period (primarily), and earlier periods as well. This Achaemenid perspective ha-s the effect of ruining the traditional interpretation of this information about the relationships that Alexander developed with the elites of the conquered covrntries.
Beyond these distortions (which the Achaemenid context allows us to examine and thus to correct), Alexander’s historians (used, each in their own fashion, by Plutarch, Arrian, Quintus Curtins, Diodorus, Justin, and several others) considerably modify the way we look at the Empire—for very simple reasons. First, following Alexander step by step, they carry us along the trail of Darius and lead us to discover the Upper Country, about which the Classical authors are all but silent, except for Cyrus’s march from Sardis to Babylon and the return of the Creek mercenaries from the Tigris Valley and the Black Sea by way of the Armenian mountains, Bithynia, and Paphlagonia. This time, (nearly) every satrapy is traversed. As a result, the Achaemenid world takes on a breadth and depth that we have been unable to examine since the time of Darius 1, because of an abundance and variety of evidence unequaled throughout the fifth and fourth centuries. It suffices to recall, for instance, that the Companions of Alexander were the first to provide written descriptions of Persepolis and Pasargadae. Furthermore, the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia are no longer terra incognita. Of course, the modern historian would prefer to have more detailed sources; it is nonetheless true that the information drawn from the fourth-century writers makes it possible for us to attempt a tour of the Great King’s entire domain from the geographical, ecological, and ethnographic points of view concurrently (even if, on this last point, Asia Minor once again takes pride of place). For the first time since Herodotus (VII-IX), because of these sources we can, for example, compile a Who’s Who of the imperial elite.
There is obviously a flip side to this coin. By definition, the military historians follow the conqueror and exalt his memory. At best, Darius’s territorial dominion appears only as a chimera, in a context that often suggests it never represented more than a feeble bulwark against the victorious progress of the Macedonian armies. The descriptions are thus very uneven from one region to the next, in direct relationship to the obstacles encountered by Alexander. We glean only meager information on Cappadocia and Armenia, for example, which in large measure remained satrapies in partibus [barharorum], whereas the resistance encountered in the course of several weeks betu'een Susa and Persepolis yields valuable notes on Uxiana, the Uxians, and the Persian Gates. I'his is especially true for the Iranian Plateau, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley. When Alexander traversed Aria, Arachosia, Bactria, and Sogdiana, Darius III was dead, and the royal proclamation of Bessus had not aroused the Achaenienid loyalist sentiments that he had expected. And so the impression prevails that Persian dominion in these regions was light, and this in turn reinforces certain conclusions that have sometimes been drawn from the silence of the Classical sources. But was the sense of emergency felt in Bactria and Sogdiana when Alexander invaded a reflection of the situation that prevailed earlier? This example illustrates one of the major difficulties in using the Alexandrian sources: bringing Achaenienid conditions to light is a sometimes delicate problem, insofar as in each case we cannot assume complete continuity with the past.
In sum, the Hellenistic sources (Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, etc.), in comparison with the Greek sources of the fourth century, are exceptionally rich in Achaenienid data. To be sure, we have not one royal inscription, nor can we identify a single structure that can be attributed with certaint)' to Darius (not even the incomplete tomb at Persepolis; fig. 6-1, p. 735). But many texts and depictions from Asia Minor, Eg)'pt, and Samaria, ill addition to Babylonia—enlarge and enrich the corpus, anchoring it to a regional foundation. Without being paradoxical, we might even say that the reign of Darius III is particularly well documented. 'I'he devaluation (nearly a damnatio memoriae) to which the last representative of the Achaenienid dynasty was sub|ected is thus not simply a mechanical reflection of the poverty of our evidence; it is primarily due to the unbridled Al-exandrocentrisni that modern historiography has long fed on. This fixation arises not from imitation of the Macedonian conqueror's courtiers but from an excessive focus on just one of the protagonists —who thus appeared to travel through an empire that had no prior existence.
Methods and Aims
The problem is well known: Darius III is often presented as a weak king who controlled (badly) a decaying Empire, unable to rely on the faithfulness of his satraps or on an army worthy of the name or on the support of the subject populations, who endured an unbearable financial burden, which was then simply hoarded (hence the economic stagnation)-the totality of the interpretation tending to create the all-too-well-known “colossus with feet of clay.” Wc know that the image comes directly from the polemical Greek authors of the fourth century and that it was taken up and even magnified by the historiography of colonial Europe. We have already had several occasions to bring up the specific problem posed by the use of these documents, as well as their success in modern historiography. Though we must conclude that the Greek interpretation generally falsifies the landscape, the problem of tracing internal changes that the Aehaemenid imperial structure must have undergone from the time of Darius I on remains. This assessment is the burden of two chapters here (16-17), which parallel the chapters above that assess the Empire during the times of Darius and Xerxes (chaps. 5, 13). In between, partial assessments have been furnished, especially in the area of territorial dominion of the Great Kings. It is now appropriate to broaden them and extend them in different directions: the lands and populations (chap. 16) and the instruments of authority (chap. 17). Th is is a prospective assessment, for these varying approaches will be taken up again and discassed, in context, in the last chapter (18), which will attempt to understand more precisely why the Great King was conquered by Alexander. This intermediate assessment is absolutely indispensable if we wish to avoid the well-known vicious circle; the Empire was conquered because it was in a state of profound structural crisis (“Achae-menid decadence"), and this state of crisis is “confirmed” by the defeat.
World History
