Darius the Great: the organizer of an empire

Darius the Great was less a conqueror than a builder of empire. He came to power through a killing in a mountain fortress, spent his first year fighting rebels from Babylon to Central Asia, and then turned the largest state the world had yet seen into a working machine of provinces, tribute and roads. Britannica calls him one of the greatest rulers of the Achaemenid dynasty, noted for his administrative genius; the Encyclopaedia Iranica judges that he set the empire on foundations that lasted nearly two centuries. It was Darius, too, who first sent a Persian army across the Aegean, and met defeat at Marathon.²

Early life

Darius was born in 550 BC, the eldest son of Hystaspes (Vishtaspa in Old Persian), who governed Parthia for the Persian crown. In the opening lines of his great inscription at Behistun he traced his line back through his grandfather Arsames to Achaemenes, the founder after whom the royal house was named: "from antiquity has our dynasty been royal." He belonged, however, to a side branch of the family, not to the line of Cyrus the Great.³

According to Herodotus, Cyrus once suspected the young Darius of plotting against the throne. Whatever the truth of that story, Darius grew up close to power. Under Cambyses II, Cyrus's son, he served in Egypt as a member of the royal bodyguard, a spear bearer to the king.⁴

Seizing the throne

In March 522 BC, while Cambyses was still away, a man calling himself Bardiya, the king's brother, rose in revolt and was accepted as king across Persia and Media. Cambyses died that same year. In September Darius and six Persian nobles broke into the usurper's stronghold in Media and killed him. The Behistun inscription names Darius's companions, among them Otanes, Gobryas, Intaphernes, Hydarnes and Megabyzus; Herodotus gives a slightly different list.⁵

Who was killed is still argued over. Darius insisted that the real Bardiya had been murdered in secret by Cambyses, and that the man on the throne was an impostor, "Gaumata the Magian." Many historians accept his account. Others, Britannica notes, think he invented Gaumata to justify the murder of a genuine son of Cyrus; the Iranica entry sets out both cases and sides with Darius. What is certain is that Darius was not next in line: his father and grandfather were both alive when he took the crown.⁶

Herodotus adds two famous scenes. The conspirators first debated whether Persia should be ruled by the people, by a few or by one man, and Darius won the argument for monarchy. Then they agreed that the throne would go to the man whose horse neighed first after sunrise, and Darius's groom, Oebares, made sure it was his master's. The Iranica treats these as Greek stories layered over the official version.⁷

A year of nineteen battles

The killing did not bring peace. Across the empire, independent rulers rose in Elam (Susiana), Babylonia, Media, Sagartia, Margiana and elsewhere, most claiming descent from old royal houses. Babylon rebelled twice and Elam three times, and in Persia itself a second pretender, Vahyazdata, also claimed to be Bardiya. The risings were uncoordinated, and Darius and his generals put them down one by one with a small army.⁸

Darius led part of the fighting himself, including, by his own account, the march on Babylon, while his generals fought the other rebels. In the inscription he sums it up: "After I became king, I fought nineteen battles in a single year and by the grace of Ahuramazda I overthrew nine kings and I made them captive."⁹

To make the victory permanent he had it carved on the cliff at Behistun: a relief of the king with his foot on Gaumata and the captured rebel kings roped together before him, surrounded by the same text in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Its message was simple. Each rebel, it says, "lied" to the people; Darius ruled by the favor of Ahuramazda.¹⁰

The frontiers

With the core of the empire secure, Darius turned to its edges. A third revolt in Elam was put down by his general Gobryas, and around 519 BC Darius himself marched against the Scythians east of the Caspian Sea, captured their chief, Skunkha, and had his figure added to the end of the line of captives at Behistun. Egypt was brought back into order in a royal visit, in 518 according to Britannica, in the autumn of 517 according to the Iranica. Darius treated its gods and priests with respect and ordered its laws to be written down.¹¹

In the east he sent the Greek captain Scylax of Caryanda down the Indus to explore the sea route to Egypt, and then conquered the Indus lands. In the west, around 513 BC, he led his largest personal campaign: an army crossed the Bosporus on a bridge of boats built by the Samian engineer Mandrocles, marched up the Black Sea coast and crossed the Danube on a second bridge built by the Ionian fleet. The Scythians would not give battle. They retreated, wasting the country, and Darius, short of supplies and with autumn coming, had to turn back. The expedition still left Persia in control of Thrace, and Macedonia submitted soon after.¹²

The organizer of empire

Darius's real monument was the state he built. Herodotus writes that he set up twenty provinces, which the Persians called satrapies, and fixed the yearly tribute each must pay, a change from the irregular gifts of Cyrus's and Cambyses's time.¹³

He standardized coinage, weights and measures. The gold daric, which the Greeks believed was named after him, and the silver siglos became the money of the empire. He improved the roads and way stations; Herodotus describes the royal stations and guard posts along the road from Sardis to Susa. In Egypt he completed a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea.¹⁴

He was also the greatest builder of his dynasty. He raised palaces and an audience hall at Susa and founded Persepolis in his homeland of Persis, with its fortifications, audience hall, council hall and treasury, though he did not live to see it finished. Like Cyrus he respected local religions: he supported the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and endowed Egyptian temples.¹⁵

The war with Greece

By about 500 BC the Greek cities of Asia Minor were ruled by tyrants answerable to Darius. In 499 they revolted, led by Aristagoras of Miletus, and Athens and Eretria sent ships to help; together they burned Sardis, the seat of the Persian governor. The revolt was crushed, but Darius now had a reason to strike at the mainland.¹⁶

The first expedition, under his son-in-law Mardonius, ended in 492 BC when a storm wrecked the fleet off Mount Athos. The second sailed across the Aegean in 490 under Datis the Mede, guided by Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens. It took and burned Eretria, enslaving its people, and landed at Marathon in Attica, where the Athenian hoplites under Miltiades defeated it. Darius did not command there in person; for him it was a setback on a far frontier, for the Greeks it became a founding legend.¹⁷ › Battle of Marathon, 490 BC

Command style

Darius was a soldier king who knew when to fight in person and when to delegate. In the crisis of 522 and 521 he led the decisive march on Babylon himself while trusted Persian nobles fought the other rebels at the same time, which is how nineteen battles could fit into a single year. He campaigned in person against the Scythians twice, in Central Asia and beyond the Danube, but left the later wars in the west to his generals and satraps: Megabyzus in Thrace, Mardonius and Datis against Greece.¹⁸

His strength was preparation and logistics more than tactics. Bridges of boats over the Bosporus and the Danube, fleets built and crewed by subject peoples, and roads with supply stations let Persian armies move across enormous distances. The Scythian campaign showed the limit: against an enemy who would not stand and fight and simply emptied the land, supply decided the outcome. On his tomb he described himself as a trained warrior: "As a horseman, I am a good horseman. As a bowman, I am a good bowman, both on foot and on horseback."¹⁹

Later life and death

After Marathon, Darius resolved to lead a new expedition against Greece himself. A revolt in Egypt delayed the preparations, and he died in 486 BC, after a reign of thirty-six years, before they were complete. He had already named as his heir Xerxes, his son by Atossa, a daughter of Cyrus, so the crown passed back to Cyrus's bloodline.²⁰

He was buried in a tomb cut high into the cliff at Naqsh-e Rustam, a few miles from Persepolis; its inscriptions declare it to be the tomb of Darius, son of Hystaspes. On the facade the king stands before a fire altar on a throne platform held up by thirty figures representing the peoples of the empire. Three later kings were buried beside him in the same pattern.²¹

Legacy and memory

The state Darius organized held together until Alexander the Great overthrew the last of his line, Darius III, more than a century and a half later. To the Greeks he remained the king of Marathon; to modern historians he is above all the administrator who turned Cyrus's conquests into an empire.²² › Cyrus the Great vs Alexander the Great

His words outlived his empire in an unexpected way. Between 1835 and 1847 the British officer Henry Rawlinson copied the Behistun inscription, and his translation of the Old Persian text, published from 1846, opened the way to reading Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform. The Iranica compares its importance for the ancient Near East with that of the Rosetta Stone for Egypt.²³

Meet his son Xerxes I and his predecessors Cyrus the Great and Cambyses II, or explore the other great commanders of the Persian Empire and the greatest battles of the Persian Empire.