Cyrus: Building an Empire

During the time of Cyrus, Persia went from being a regional national kingdom to being an international empire. Cyrus was not the first king of Persia, and he was not even the first Persian king with that name: although often cited as simply 'Cyrus,' he was more accurately Cyrus II. He was named after his grandfather, Cyrus I. The generation between Cyrus I and Cyrus II was Cambyses: Cambyses was the son of Cyrus I and the father of Cyrus II. Historian John Lee writes that Cyrus accomplished much in

a brief but crucial era of four decades, from 560 to 522 B.C., during which time the Persian kings Cyrus and Cambyses assembled a world-spanning empire. Scholars and others often ask what causes historical change: Do great men and women shape history, or are deeper societal processes and currents responsible, including the lives of those who may have shaped history but are not recorded by it? The likely answer is that we need to combine these perspectives to gain a true understanding of the past.

Cyrus came from Anshan, a city, or city-state, in southwestern Persia, on the coast of the Persian Gulf. Anshan was part of a larger region, Elam, which extended along the Persian Gulf from Anshan to Susa.

The founder of the Persian Empire was Cyrus of Anshan, who came to the throne in 559 B.C. Anshan was a kingdom of Elamite origin that lay in the modern province of Fars in southern Iran.

Many accounts refer to Cyrus's empire as the "Empire of the Persians and the Medes." To which extent was this was a willing merger of equals? Or did the Persians dominate the Medes? Culturally and linguistically, the Medes and the Persians, while distinct, were also similar, and for many historical purposes, we can tolerate conflation and continue to use the concept of "Medes and Persians" without precisely untangling them. In some segments of time, the two groups were largely geographically coextensive. The Zagros Mountains run parallel to the coastline of the Persian Gulf, a few miles inland.

The first stages of Cyrus's reign are difficult to recover. Possibly his first move was to reconquer the old Elamite city of Susa. That victory may brought him into conflict with the Medes in the central Zagros. Babylonian chronicles record wars between the Medes and Anshan in the later 550s.

Cyrus was a political genius, inasmuch as he knew how to accumulate the cooperation and even loyalty of those whom he had conquered. Ecbatana lies northwest of Susa; by making Ecbatana one of Persia's capitals, Cyrus gave the Medes a sense of ownership in the larger empire.

Cyrus ultimately conquered the Medes but then made sure to present himself as a legitimate Median king. He honored the former Median king, Astyages, and perhaps married one of his daughters. Ecbatana, along with Susa, became an important Persian administrative center.

The western extreme of Cyrus's empire was Turkey, also known as Anatolia or Asia Minor. By advancing westward across the Halys River, also known as the Kızılırmak River, Cyrus planted Persian outposts in Ionia, which is the western coast of Turkey. The Halys is roughly in the middle of Anatolia. Here the Persians encountered both Greeks, who'd formed colony cities in Ionia, and Lydians. Lydia was a region just to the east of Ionia, and it was ruled by King Croesus from his city of Sardis.

In 546 B.C., Croesus sent his powerful army eastward across the Halys River, where the Lydians ran into Cyrus. The initial fight was a draw, and because winter was approaching, Croesus withdrew to Sardis, likely planning to return in the spring.

The Persian army was known for its many successes and few failures during Cyrus's reign; its experience in Asia Minor would be no exception.

Instead of hunkering down for the winter, the Persians marched on Sardis. Croesus led his troops out to meet Cyrus, but according to Herodotus, the scent and appearance of Persian camels arrayed on the front line spooked the Lydian horses. After a hard fight, the Persians trapped the Lydians in Sardis.

The fall of Sardis was recorded by Herodotus, who is the source for many details about Cyrus and his empire. Professor John Lee continues:

The walled city of Sardis was formidable, but Cyrus announced that the first man to scale the wall would be rewarded. A Persian named Hyroeades led an assault party up a path he had observed being used by a Lydian; the city fell and Croesus was taken alive.

The expansion to the west would be a source of revenue for the Persians. Both cash and produce could be expected from Anatolian colonies.

Cyrus was generous with Croesus, retaining him in the royal entourage. The Persian king put a garrison in Sardis and sent Lydian gold east to fill his own coffers.

An early revolt foreshadowed more significant challenges which the Persians would face in Turkey. Cyrus managed to maintain his control there; his successors - Darius and Xerxes - would face similar challenges.

Cyrus then hurried back east, but the Lydian governor he left behind almost immediately rebelled, with the help of some Ionian Greek cities. Cyrus sent troops back to Lydia and Ionia. The Persians managed to quell the revolt, but the conquest of Ionia wasn't yet complete.

After expanding westward into Asia Minor, Cyrus turned his attention to other possible acquisitions. After exploring opportunities to the north and east, he looked to Mesopotamia:

Cyrus spent much of the rest of the 540s expanding his empire in central Asia, but the real prize lay in the Tigris and Euphrates valley: the ancient city of Babylon.

By the time Cyrus moved on Babylon, that city was past its prime: the glories of Nebuchadnezzar were merely a memory. Babylon's king, Nabonidus was not particularly popular among his people (he restricted religious freedom among them by discouraging the worship of the Babylonian god Marduk), or among the Jews then held captive in the city. It was easy for Cyrus to win the people's favor by restoring the Marduk religion and by freeing the Jews.

At the time, King Nabonidus ruled Babylon, but some of his subjects allied with Cyrus, including the governor Gobryas. Nabonidus had a strong army and held out against Cyrus for several years. At last, on October 12, 539 B.C., a Persian army under Gobryas entered Babylon; Cyrus himself arrived soon after, and Nabonidus was taken alive.

Cyrus, who was no gentle soul, goes down in history finally as a liberator. Although perhaps unearned, this reputation was cemented by his liberating the Hebrews to return to their homeland, resume their worship, and build a temple. In many ways, Cyrus was an oppressor, an aggressive empire builder, who did not shy away from unprovoked attacks or from massive loss of human life. His personal morality would have been equally dubious - he had concubines in addition to multiple wives, and lived only a generation or two removed from his ancestral practice of human sacrifice. Yet his clear mark in history is as an emancipator:

Cyrus allowed the people of Israel and others who'd been deported to Babylon to return home. To the Hebrew people, he allowed the right of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem.

Cyrus took Persia from one kingdom among many and made it the dominate empire in the world during his time. It would remain in that status under his successors for several generations.

The Origins of the Modern German Nation-State

As a territorial nation-state, Germany is one of the youngest countries in Europe. Germanic culture and language go back thousands of years in history, but it was only in 1871 that the independent kingdoms and city-states were formally joined together in a political process. German unification had been discussed since the time of Napoleon - and even earlier - but a number of obstacles prevented it from happening. One question was about whether there would be a Großdeutch or a Kleindeutsch unification - a 'Greater Germany' including Austria, or a 'Little-German' Empire without it.

The earliest hopes for German unification came from the political left, but it would finally be accomplished by the political right. Historian Herbert Schnädelbach writes:

The subsequent foundation, by Bismarck in 1871 and under Prussian leadership, of a 'Little-German' Empire (that is, one which excluded the Germans of Austria) was preceded by a long period of reaction to 1848, marked by the imposed constitution of 1850 in Prussia and neo-absolutism in Austria, and by the period of what Prussian official history described as 'wars of unification' - the conflicts with Denmark (1864), with Austria and its allied South German states (1866) and with France (1870-1). As a result, Bismarck was able to have the Prussian King proclaimed as German Emperor in Versailles and without participation by the bourgeoisie. German unity was not established in the sense of the political demands of the years before 1848. The German national state was a result of a policy imposed from above, a policy, in Bismarck's words, of 'blood and iron', and this was also one reason for the rejection by many intellectuals of this solution of the national question. For the most part, the bourgeoisie made its peace with this 'Little-German' or Prussian Empire, which represented, constitutionally speaking, a compromise between absolute monarchy and the principle of popular sovereignty: the Imperial constitution was more democratic in several respects than the constitutions of the German Confederation, for instance in regard to universal suffrage.

The uneasy cooperation from the political left ended with World War One, and the Prussian monarchy was no longer in charge of the Empire, which then became a republic. As the left tolerated the Empire until 1918, the right tolerated the Weimar Republic until 1933. This internal tension was exploited by Hitler and the Nazis, who were neither traditional imperial conservatives nor Weimar-style leftists. Detested by both the right and the left, Hitler promised enough to both sides: "German nationalism" to the right, "Worker Socialism" to the left. The official name of the party reveals this insincere and internally contradictory set of parallel promises: "the National Socialist German Workers Party" - notice how 'national' and 'German' alternate with 'socialist' and 'worker' - a stew of rightist and leftist vocabulary. Both sides thought that perhaps uneasy cooperation would again be the best path. Both sides came quickly to understand that they had been duped - but too late.

Hitler's government ruthlessly stamped out any sense of a private sphere. In any meaningful sense, there were, after 1933, no private schools or private medical practices. The government either owned or extensively regulated industrial and banking enterprises. The freedoms which had been preserved under uncomfortable compromises - the imperial era and the Weimar era - were gone.

Voltaire contra Atheism

Like many thinkers during the Enlightenment era, Voltaire held beliefs which were nuanced and complex. Such beliefs are commensurate with his powerful intellect, but have the disadvantage of being easily misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately misunderstood.

Voltaire was a constant and sharp critic of the Roman Catholic church, and of organized religion in general. He ridiculed some religious leaders as hypocrites, and others as simply stupid. He believed that the Bible - the Old and New Testaments - was a flawed book.

Consistent in his critique of all forms of organized religion, Voltaire's play Mahomet is his rendering of an episode in the life of Muhammad. He shows him to be "the founder of a false and barbarous sect," and the plot reveals "the cruelty and errors of a false prophet." The play is primarily an evaluation of Islam, but secondarily an estimation of all institutional religion.

But Voltaire was no atheist. Many readers have mistakenly assumed that his antipathy toward spiritual traditions implied atheism, and many scholars have fostered that misunderstanding by suppressing portions of Voltaire's own writings. British philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer notes:

Voltaire was not himself an atheist but a deist. He thought that he had rational grounds for the belief that there is a necessary eternal supreme intelligent being, by whom the universe is governed. He did not consider it demonstrable that there is such a being, but he thought it vastly more probable than the alternative hypothesis that the order which is discernible in the world and the intelligence and sensitivity which are exhibited not only by human beings but also by many species of animals, are the product of an ultimately fortuitous collection of material atoms. In short, he accepted what is most commonly known as the argument from design.

Voltaire saw belief in God, not as a result of tradition, nor as the result of a divine revelation, but rather as the reasonable conclusion. He found that it was logical to believe in God, just as he found it logical not to accept churches or organized religions. In response to Blaise Pascal, Voltaire wrote:

Simple reasoning will afford us proofs of the truth of the creation; for when we perceive that matter cannot exist, move, etc. of itself, we readily come to know that it must have been assisted; but we can never discover by the bare help of reason, how a body which we see continually subject to change, is to be restored again to the same state as it was in at the time it put on that change: neither will reasoning satisfy us how a man could be produced without the seed peculiar to his species. Hence it follows, that the creation is an object of reason.

Voltaire, however, did more than simultaneously criticize religion and assert the existence of God. He also was actively critical of atheism.

It is at this point that the career of Voltaire and the career of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are tangential to each other. Voltaire, who was born in 1694 and who died in 1778, was older than Goethe, who was born in 1749. When Goethe was a university student, he was an admirer of Voltaire's work. Goethe studied at Leipzig from 1765 to 1768, when he was between 16 and 19 years old; Voltaire would have been between 71 and 74 years old during that time. Additionally, Goethe studied at Strasbourg from 1770 to 1771; he was between 21 and 22 years old then, and Voltaire was between 76 and 77 years old. The young Goethe saw the aging Voltaire as an example of intellectual courage. Goethe relates how Voltaire did not surrender to the increasingly vicious attacks of the atheists:

Those principles, for which he had stood all his life, and to the spread of which he had devoted his days, were no longer held in honour or esteem: nay, that very Deity he acknowledged, and so continued to declare himself free from atheism, was discredited.

Even as Goethe praised the courage with which Voltaire resisted the efforts of those who would "discredit" the concept of God, he also was disappointed in Voltaire's continued attacks on religion.

Voltaire's factious dishonesty and his constant perversion of noble subjects became more and more distasteful to us, and our aversion to him grew daily. He seemed never to have done with degrading religion and the Holy Scriptures on which it rests, for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as they called it, and had thereby awakened in me feelings of irritation.

In a bizarre turn of events, Voltaire's devotion to God and hatred of the church led him to comment on fossils. Because the fossil record suggests that there was a major flood which covered most of the earth's surface at one time, Voltaire rejected the veracity of the fossil record. Voltaire wanted to demonstrate that there had been no flood, because he wanted to undermine the authority of the Old Testament. To deny the evidence presented by fossils, however, took arcane reasoning. Goethe recounts:

when I now learned that, to weaken the tradition of a deluge, he had denied the existence of all fossilized shells, and admitted them only as lusus naturae, he entirely lost my confidence; for my own eyes had shown me on the Bastberg, plainly enough, that I stood on what had been the floor of an ancient sea, among the exuviae of its original inhabitants. These mountains had certainly been once covered with waves, whether before or during the deluge did not concern me; it was enough that the valley of the Rhine had been one vast lake, a bay extending further than eye could see; no amount of talk could shake me in this conviction. I hoped, rather, to extend my knowledge of lands and mountains, let the result be what it would.

Voltaire created enemies on both sides: atheists attacked him relentlessly, because he firmly believed in the existence of a creating and logical God; Christians were disappointed in the extremism of his attacks on anything connected with traditional religion.

An Odd Type of Democracy

Pure democracy is very rare, and usually unsuccessful; for this reason, history admits more often of republics. But the democratic principle takes many forms. One of the strangest is when a nation votes to give its monarch the right to veto its vote. This is a political paradox: voting to ensure that the voting does not ensure anything. The English newspaper The Independent reports:

Citizens of the Alpine tax haven Liechtenstein gave their reigning prince a resounding vote of confidence yesterday in a referendum which flatly rejected attempts to curb royal power in one of Europe's most undemocratic countries.

Although The Independent editorializes that the Liechtenstein is "undemocratic," it seems that it was a thoroughly democratic process by which the citizens of that nation chose to give their monarch near-absolute powers.

Proposals to strip Liechtenstein's Prince Hans-Adam II, 67, of his power of parliamentary veto were opposed by 65 per cent of the country's 36,000 subjects in a referendum organised by pro-democracy campaigners.

The results of this election appear unambiguous. One might well wonder why the citizens would vote to render their votes powerless. Perhaps, while each voter trusts his own judgment, most of the voters do not trust the judgment of most of the other voters.

Only 15 per cent voted in favour of the proposal. Sigvard Wohlwend, one of the organisers of the referendum, said he was disappointed by the outcome. He described the prince and his son, Crown Prince Alois, 43, who has been acting in his father's stead since 2004, as "the most powerful monarchs in Europe."

Although living under nearly unrestrained royal power, the citizens of Liechtenstein enjoy a great degree of freedom - understood as the usual mix of civil rights and human rights: freedom of speech, freedom of the market, freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom to assemble, property rights, and low taxes. Many countries with elected governments have, at least according to international "watchdog" organizations, less freedom.

Again quoting Mr. Wohlwend, The Independent continues:

He said the prince of Liechtenstein held the absolute right to veto any decision taken by the parliament and people. "No judges can be appointed without the approval of the prince," he added.

If, with John Locke, we say that a government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, then the monarch of Liechtenstein is legitimate in his claim to be able to veto the results of a popular vote by his subjects, or able to veto a decision made by their elected representatives.

The Crusades Begin

Most historians cite the year 1095 A.D. as the start of the Crusades. This is generally accurate, but several qualifications must be added. First, the concept of a military counterattack into Islamic lands was indeed first proposed in 1095, but no concrete action was taken until 1096. Second, although the term 'Crusades' is usually used in the plural - historians identify variously six or nine or some other number of allegedly distinct Crusades - the counterattack begun in 1096 was arguably one long action. As scholar Harold Lamb writes,

historians have picked out six of the crises of this conflict and have named them the six crusades. In reality it was all just an ebb and flow of the conflict begun by

Islamic attacks against Europe as early as 711 A.D., when Muslims invaded Spain, almost four hundred years prior to the so-called Crusades. After decades of coastal raiding, Islamic armies invaded Italy in 841, and occupied portions of the Italian peninsula for several decades. Massive Muslim armies attempted to invade France in 732, but were repelled by the soldiers under the command of Charles "the Hammer" Martel. Repeat attempts to invade France over the following two centuries alternated with decades in which the Muslims were content to loot and pillage French coastal cities, but not permanently occupy them.

Third, an emphasis upon the concept of counterattack, i.e., a largely defensive maneuver, must be understood as central to the Crusades. Although the Islamic occupational armies were pushed out of Italy by 884, as historian Will Durant notes,

their raids continued, and central Italy lived through a generation of daily fear. In 876 they pillaged the Campagna; Rome was so endangered that the pope paid the Saracens a year bribe of 25,000 mancusi (c. $25,000) to keep the peace. In 884 they burned the great monastery of Monte Cassino to the ground; in sporadic attacks they ravaged the valley of the Anio; finally the combined forces of the pope, the Greek and German emperors, and the cities of southern and central Italy defeated them on the Garigliano (916), and a tragic century of invasion came to an end. Italy, perhaps Christianity, had had a narrow escape; had Rome fallen, the Saracens would have advanced upon Venice; and Venice taken, Constantinople would have been wedged in between two concentrations of Moslem power. On such chances of battle hung the theology of billions of men.

In 1095, Islamic armies still occupied Spain; Muslim raiders were still sacking coastal cities and island around the Mediterranean; Islamic pirates were still marauding among cargo ships in the Adriatic and Aegean. By 1095, Europe had endured almost 400 years of continuous attacks. The time to do something about it had arrived.

Zeno of Citium

Zeno of Citium - not to be confused with Zeno of Elea! - had an impact on culture, religion, and philosophy far beyond the time and space he occupied during his life. Born approximately 336 B.C. in Citium, a Phoenician city on the island of Cyprus, he would have been familiar with both Greek and Phoenician cultures and languages, although to which extent we cannot say with certainty. An experienced merchant, he was shipwrecked on the Greek coastline near Piraeus, and ended up in Athens around 312 or 314 B.C. (he was apparently on a mission to transport purple dye from Phoenicia). His family of origin seems to have been populated with merchants.

There is some ambiguity about the details of his life. The exact dates of his birth and of his arrival in Athens are not precise. Some scholars suspect that he may have traveled to Athens voluntarily, instead of being shipwrecked. There are accounts that he may have been sold into slavery for a brief time, and his freedom regained when a friend purchased it for him. For philosophical purposes, however, we do not need such biographical particulars. What interests us most about Zeno of Citium is his ideas.

In any case, he was in Athens around the age of 22, penniless. Several vignettes describe his entry into philosophy: in one of them, Zeno frequents a bookstore, and is drawn to the works of Socrates - by which we must understand the works of Plato. When Zeno expressed an interest in meeting thinkers like Socrates, the shopkeeper directed him to Crates the Cynic. Zeno got his start in philosophy with Crates, and there are certain clear similarities between Zeno's Stoicism and Cynicism. It was probably while working with Crates that Zeno wrote his Republic, not to be confused with Plato's book of the same title.

Eventually Zeno's school of philosophy became distinct from Cynicism. Perhaps originally cited as 'Zenonians' by contemporaries, Zeno's students soon became known as 'stoics' because Zeno lectured from the Stoa Poikile or 'painted porch' in the agora or marketplace in Athens. This distinction seems to have been in place starting around 300 B.C.

Given the fragmentary nature of the direct textual evidence about Zeno, early Stoicism appears as a hodgepodge of concepts. In part, Zeno's Stoicism - which must be clearly distinguished from later Stoicisms - can be negatively defined, inasmuch as he consciously contrasted himself to other philosophies.

While Epicurus, who'd gained attention around 306 B.C., built his Lebensphilosophie around the concepts of randomness and pleasure, Zeno organized his philosophy of life around an orderly universe governed by the laws of nature and around individual goodness attained by practicing virtue. The concept of Natural Law will be central to Zeno's Stoicism.

In a deliberate contrast to Plato's Republic, Zeno's book seems anarchistic or libertarian: he envisions a society with no currency or money; his understanding of God excluded the need for temples; he posits that a truly rational society, composed of rational individuals, will also not need a legal system or courts of law. Like Plato's book, Zeno's text raises the question of whether the author envisioned these as concrete suggestions for practical concrete implementation, or whether he considered his ideal to be unreachable perfection, presented as an abstract example of his values, but not as a blueprint for social engineering.

Many accounts describe Zeno as ugly and ascribe eccentric behaviors to him; one account implies that Zeno was overly conscious of social propriety, a quality of which Crates tried to cure him by publicly causing him to be doused with lentil soup. Such apocryphal narratives are entertaining, but their accuracy may be in doubt; some contradict each other: one reports that Zeno associated mainly with the undesirable residents of Athens, while another relates that he was highly honored by the city. Again, while enjoyable, such details are philosophically uninteresting.

Much of what we know about Zeno's doctrines comes from later Stoics and some historians; the imprint of Crates and the Cynics is clear in Zeno's thinking. Zeno presents us with an early version of Natural Law theory: it is in the structure of the universe itself that good and evil, right and wrong, are to be understood. To be good or right is to be in harmony with the nature of the universe. Later Stoics will sharpen the idea that the universe may be an organism, a living thing, a mind.

A few astronomical breakthroughs are ascribed to Zeno, along with that fatalism and acceptance which are characterized by the non-philosophical use of the word 'stoic'.

Zeno died around 256 B.C., allegedly after interpreting a minor accident as a sign from the universe that it was time for him to die.

Finding Troy

Homer's Odyssey and Iliad have long been popular books, but by the 1700's, historians had begun to look at them as purely fictional. Professors thought that there had never been a city called Troy, or a war between it and Mycenaean Greece.

A scholar named Heinrich Schliemann startled the researchers of the world with proof that Troy was, in fact, exactly what and where Homer wrote that it was. Schliemann was a traveller, a brilliant linguist, and an archeologist. Having become wealthy in the business world, he was able to finance his own expeditions. Given the views of universities of that time, none of them would have financed an expedition to find Troy.

Between 1870 and 1890, he conducted a series of excavations at the site he considered to be Troy. He arrived at that location by carefully analyzing Homer's description of the landscape, and his description of the sea voyages made across the Aegean by characters in the Odyssey and Iliad.

Schliemann found Troy. Scholars now generally agree that his discoveries attest to narratives of the Trojan War. The traditional account, as found in Homer and other ancient sources, is largely accepted as historically accurate.

A corollary of Schliemann's work now guides contemporary archeologists: ancient texts often provide accurate guidance for finding and excavating historic sites, and such texts should not be rejected as fictional unless the reader is forced beyond any reasonable doubt to do so.