INSPECCIÓN VISUAL DE LA SOLDADURA

Before the flaws became serious Dareios I and his successor Xerxes determined to expand the realm. After dealing successfully with several uprisings in various parts of the empire and, perhaps, initi-ating administrative reforms, Dareios turned to further expansion in Skythia and Thrace and, possibly, also in the Indos River region by means of naval exploration from the Persian Gulf into the waters of the Gulf of Oman. In 499, he was forced to deal with another revolt, this time by the Greek states in western Anatolia. With the assistance of two mainland Greek states – Athens and Eretria on the island of Euboia – the insurgents succeeded in taking Sardis. Unable or unwilling to press on with military action, the Greeks were defeated and returned to Persian control by 494. The circumstances of the revolt, however, drew Persian attention to the pesky world of the Greek mainland, a world divided by hundreds of constantly quarreling independent states. Dareios organized two retaliatory actions against the mainland participants in the revolt: the first, in 492, was a maritime expedition into the northern Aegean. Although Thrace and Macedon submitted to Persian pressure, a large portion of the fleet was sunk in a gale off the eastern peninsula of the

Chalkidike with a great loss of men. By 490 the fleet was restored.

Sailing through the Cycladic islands, it made for the strait between Euboia and the mainland of Attica to deal with the mainland con-tributors to the earlier Ionian Revolt. After Eretria was taken, its sanctuaries were burned and its people deported to the heartland of the Persian Empire. Then the Persians turned their attention to the second offender, disembarking on the plain at Marathon in eastern Attica, where 10,000 Athenians with a contingent from the small state of Plataia in central Greece had mustered to contend against a far larger force. To everyone’s surprise the Persian effort at Marathon was defeated.

Dareios made no third attempt; revolt in Egypt claimed his immediate attention. In fact, the former satrapy was not yet restored to Persian control when Dareios died in 486 and his son Xerxes succeeded to the kingship. Only in the second year of the new king’s reign was Egypt returned to satrapal status. It is important to note that its new “satrap” was a brother of Xerxes rather than a member of another aristocratic line. We will consider the signifi-cance of this change in policy later.

It was now possible for Xerxes to turn his attention to the un-finished business with Greece. Xerxes mounted a massive campaign to add the mainland of Greece to the Persian realm. A force ap-proximately 250,000 strong, according to modern calculations, was assembled while preparations for the joint venture by land and sea were carefully made. A massive double bridge was erected across the Hellespont for men, animals, and provisions to make an easy cross-ing; food depots were established along the route; many Greek states were persuaded to ally themselves with the Persians or promised, if not formal alliance, at least neutrality. Xerxes was successful initially:

the Macedonian king became a virtual vassal, with the northern kingdom serving as a staging ground for the southward thrust. The Greek forces holding the crucial pass at Thermopylai were defeated and, soon afterward, Athens was destroyed. Despite these victories, however, the Greeks prevailed by sea at Salamis in the Saronic Gulf, persuading Xerxes that he should return to his capital, and in the next year the Greek forces defeated the Persian land force left

behind at Plataia. On that same day, or not too distant from it, the Greek fleet won a decisive battle over the Persian fleet off the coast of Asia Minor. A dozen years later, a coalition of Greek states under Athenian hegemony dealt another defeat to the Persian fleet off the southern coast of Anatolia. This Greek success marked the finale in an attempt to free the Greek states of Asia Minor from Persian control and, therefore, reduce the extent of the Persian realm. Their victory would be remembered not only by the Greeks but also by the Macedonians, who had been drawn into the attempted west-ward Persian expansion.

While these losses did not collapse the bonds of empire, or deplete the treasury, they demonstrated that ongoing expansion so distant from the heart of the empire was unwise. Babylon again rose in revolt and military reinforcements were set in place in Asia Minor in the 470 s. More widespread uprisings began in the next decade, although Xerxes did not live to confront them. His death, however, demonstrates two other serious faults in the structure of the Persian state. He was murdered by the important noble official Artabanos with the assistance of the eunuch of the bedside; Artabanos’ goal, though not fulfilled, seems to have been to become king in his own right. There were other candidates in the persons of Xerxes’ three legitimate sons: Dareios, Hystaspes, and Artaxerxes in order of their age. It was customary for the eldest son of the king to succeed, but in this case Artaxerxes murdered Dareios. Artabanos then attempted to kill Artaxerxes, but was himself murdered. Artaxerxes took the throne, but became secure only after he met the challenge of his surviving brother Hystaspes, who marched with troops from his satrapy in Bactria to contest the throne, only to be killed in battle.

To anticipate, the murder of a reigning king and the struggle among would-be successors would come to mark much of the remaining history of the Achaemenid dynasty. It hardly needs mentioning that insecurity at the pinnacle of absolute power disrupts the entire structure of control.

After his rough drive for power, Artaxerxes ruled for 40 years, from 465 to 424. Rather than expanding the empire, he was pre-occupied with retaining the territory unified by his predecessors.

The pesky Greeks continued their attacks on Persia by sending a large expedition to Egypt to remove Persian control from that once-independent kingdom. Dispatched in 461, the force enjoyed some initial success and the Greeks were not defeated until 454. A treaty of peace was made between Persia and Athens five years later. In the meantime, Greeks were also active in stirring up problems in Asia Minor. To manage the unstable situation, Artaxerxes sent one of his sons, Kyros, with the rank of karanos, or superior commander, to the region. In addition, one Megabyzos revolted in Syria with the aid of Greek mercenaries, and there seem to have been hostil-ities in Judah. Other problems surfaced on the periphery of the empire; there was trouble in Bactria, and in Cyprus the native king Evagoras, though nominally subservient to the Persian Great King, had ambitions of his own to add to the territory under his control.

A sign of deeper changes within the imperial structure is the surrender of his private name (perhaps Arshu) in exchange for the adoption of a throne name by the ruling Achaemenid. Artaxerxes means “power through the deity Arta.” The development reveals a subtle change in the nature of kingship: while use of his personal name emphasizes the ability of a king to rule by his own qualities, adoption of a throne name stresses the inherited prestige of the posi-tion. Another reminder of kingly power was given by their images now found on Persian coins. Both developments suggest the further institutionalization of the Persian governance.

Artaxerxes I died a natural death, something few of his succes-sors would experience. In fact, his legitimate son and successor, Xerxes, was murdered after a 45-day reign by one of the mate sons of Artaxerxes, Sogdianos. Another of Artaxerxes’ illegiti-mate sons, Okhos, raised an army in his Caspian satrapy and was joined in his contest for the throne by the satrap of Egypt. Yet another serious problem was that the commander of the household cavalry for Sogdianos had made the mistake of alienating the palace troops. Sogdianos surrendered and was allowed to live for some six months before being put to death. Okhos became king, taking the throne name of Dareios II. His reign to 404 was not peaceful. After

facing the revolt of his full brother, Arsites, he contended with rebel-lions in Media and Anatolia and by a group of people, the Kadousioi, living south of the Caspian. Equally problematic was the involvement of Persia in Greek affairs: a vacillating policy of support for Sparta and its allies and then for Athens was costly in financial expense as well as in prompting different policies among the satraps most concerned with Greece, namely those of Anatolia.

On his death – a natural end, it seems – Dareios II was succeeded in 405 or 404 by his elder son Arses, who took the throne name of Artaxerxes II. Early in his reign, the new king had to deal with his brother Kyros, who was attempting to unseat him. In exercis-ing the military role in Anatolia assigned to him by his father, Kyros had raised a large force, which he now directed against his brother.

As we know from one of the participants, the Athenian Xenophon, who describes the expedition in his famous Anabasis, some 13,000 of that army were Greek mercenaries who from 401 marched west-ward through the empire to do battle with Artaxerxes’ force at Cunaxa, north of Babylon. The outcome was decided by the death of Kyros, allowing Artaxerxes to rule until 359. Those decades were marred with revolts and rebellion. Egypt, which had been inde-pendent for sixty years until it had been returned to at least partial Persian control between 404 and 400, revolted. Some fifteen years elapsed before a Persian force was assembled to regain control; that effort failed. The Achaemenid king was occupied elsewhere. Unrest occurred in many parts of Asia Minor due both to internal dissat-isfaction and to the military activity of Sparta in the region. The Greek king Evagoras of Cyprus was also extending his activity, taking Tyre in Phoenicia, an event that fostered revolt in southern Anatolia. What is known as the King’s Peace of 386 can be seen in light of controlling the Greek interference in Persian territ-ory, by declaring that the cities in Asia as well as the islands of Clazomenai and Cyprus belonged to the Great King and that all larger associations of Greek states should be ended. This Peace was not successful: in the 360s many of the western satraps were in revolt against the king, a condition that continued into the 350 s.

Even relations within his own family were conflicted: his eldest son, the crown prince, was executed after conspiring against him;

another legitimate son committed suicide; a favored illegitimate son was murdered. His surviving legitimate son, Okhos, succeeded to the throne as Artaxerxes III. Testimony from a writer of the first century ce suggests that he was concerned about his own ability to survive threats from family members: to prevent at least some of the attempts, he buried alive the woman who was both his stepmother and his sister, and had his uncle and more than one hundred of his own sons and grandsons locked in a courtyard where they were killed by volleys of arrows.

Thus he lived to rule for 21 years, during which his major success was retaking Egypt in 342. To manage the situation in Anatolia, he ordered the western satraps to disband the private armies that they had raised. That some centralized control was re-established is demonstrated by the decision of the satrap of Phrygia, Artabazos, to seek refuge for himself and his family beyond the reach of Artaxerxes, namely at the court of Philip II in Pella. Revolt in Cyprus was smothered without great difficulty. His commanders even managed to end the revolt of the Kadousioi that had been raging since the reign of Dareios II.

The end of Artaxerxes III was similar to that of most of his pred-ecessors as well as that of his successor, Artaxerxes IV. He was mur-dered in 338 by his own sons with the assistance of one of his most influential officials, the eunuch Bagoas. After ruling for two years, Artaxerxes IV and his sons were purged, again on the plotting of Bagoas. Few successors remained alive. The most eligible candidate was one of the commanders of the campaign against the Kadousioi, a cousin of the king, who had been made satrap in Armenia. Thus he was out of harm’s way during the purge and when invited to assume the kingship, first forced Bagoas to consume the liquid of a poisoned cup intended for his own consumption.

Thus, Kodomannos became the last of the Achaemenid line in 336 under the throne name of Dareios III. By that year, Philip of Macedon had formed the League of Corinth and announced the

League’s declaration of war against Persia. In fact, he had begun to establish forward bases before he was assassinated in 336, leaving the Macedonian kingship to Alexander III. Dareios would thus have little time to set his empire in order before dealing with the Macedonians on Persian soil.

Comparison of the Persian Empire with the