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Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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and rural reform in the West from the Renaissance to the present day.
While there were vast state mints in Persia, our sources for Achaemenid imperial administration—borne out by the later arrival of the looters and plunderers in Alexander the Great’s army—suggest that tons of stored bullion remained uncoined and that there was a chronic stagnation in the Persian economy. With metals on deposit in imperial treasuries, provincial taxes were more often paid in kind as “gifts”—food, livestock, metals, slaves, property—rather than in specie, illustrative of high taxes and an undeveloped moneyed economy. One of the reasons for the initial rampant expansion and inflation of the later Hellenistic world (323–31 B.C.) was the sudden conversion of precious metals stored in the Achaemenid vaults into readily coined money by the Macedonian Successor kings, who, in transforming a command economy to a more capitalist one, hired out thousands of builders, shippers, and mercenaries.
Persian literature—a corpus of drama, philosophy, or poetry apart from religious or political stricture—did not exist. True, Zoroastrianism was a fascinating metaphysical inquiry, but its reason to be was religious, and thus the parameters of its thought were one with all holy treatises, embedded as it was with a zeal that precluded unlimited speculation and true free expression. History—the Greeks’ idea of free inquiry, in which the records and sources of the past are continually subject to questioning and evaluation as part of an effort to provide a timeless narrative of explication—was also unknown among the Persians, at least in any widely disseminated form. The nearest approximation was the public inscriptions of the Achaemenids themselves, in which a Darius I or Xerxes published his own res gestae:
A great god is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created man, who created peace for man, who made Xerxes king, one king of many, one lord of many. I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of lands containing many men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Darius the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, so of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan seed. (A. Olmstead,
History of the Persian Empire,
231)
The emperor Augustus issued similar proclamations in imperial Rome, but there were still a Suetonius, Plutarch, and Tacitus eventually to set the record straight. Just as the Ottomans would later bar printing presses throughout their empire in fear of free expression, the idea of public criticism of the Achaemenids through written documents was literally unknown.
All Persian texts—whether public inscriptions, palace inventories, or sacred tracts—concern the king, his priests, and bureaucrats at large, and confine themselves to government and religion. Even if other avenues of public expression had existed, the Persian victory at Thermopylae could not have been portrayed onstage or remembered in poetry without the approval of Xerxes—and not without Xerxes as chief protagonist in the triumph. The commemoration of the Persian victory in Bactria proves that well enough: “Says Xerxes the king: When I became king, there was within these lands which are written above one which was restless. Afterward Ahura Mazda brought me help. By the favor of Ahura Mazda I smote that land and put it in its place” (A. Olmstead,
History of the Persian
Empire,
231).
Persian religion was not as absolutist as that in Egypt, inasmuch as the Achaemenids were agents of Ahura Mazda, not divinities per se. Nevertheless, royal power was predicated on divine right, imperial edict was considered a holy act. So the constant refrain of all the Achaemenid kings: “Of me is Ahura Mazda, of Ahura Mazda am I.” When Alexander the Great learned to say the same thing, even his most loyal Macedonian lords began to plot either an assassination, a coup, or a return to Greece. Conquered peoples of the Persian Empire like the Babylonians and Jews, however, at
While there were vast state mints in Persia, our sources for Achaemenid imperial administration—borne out by the later arrival of the looters and plunderers in Alexander the Great’s army—suggest that tons of stored bullion remained uncoined and that there was a chronic stagnation in the Persian economy. With metals on deposit in imperial treasuries, provincial taxes were more often paid in kind as “gifts”—food, livestock, metals, slaves, property—rather than in specie, illustrative of high taxes and an undeveloped moneyed economy. One of the reasons for the initial rampant expansion and inflation of the later Hellenistic world (323–31 B.C.) was the sudden conversion of precious metals stored in the Achaemenid vaults into readily coined money by the Macedonian Successor kings, who, in transforming a command economy to a more capitalist one, hired out thousands of builders, shippers, and mercenaries.
Persian literature—a corpus of drama, philosophy, or poetry apart from religious or political stricture—did not exist. True, Zoroastrianism was a fascinating metaphysical inquiry, but its reason to be was religious, and thus the parameters of its thought were one with all holy treatises, embedded as it was with a zeal that precluded unlimited speculation and true free expression. History—the Greeks’ idea of free inquiry, in which the records and sources of the past are continually subject to questioning and evaluation as part of an effort to provide a timeless narrative of explication—was also unknown among the Persians, at least in any widely disseminated form. The nearest approximation was the public inscriptions of the Achaemenids themselves, in which a Darius I or Xerxes published his own res gestae:
A great god is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created man, who created peace for man, who made Xerxes king, one king of many, one lord of many. I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of lands containing many men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Darius the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, so of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan seed. (A. Olmstead,
History of the Persian Empire,
231)
The emperor Augustus issued similar proclamations in imperial Rome, but there were still a Suetonius, Plutarch, and Tacitus eventually to set the record straight. Just as the Ottomans would later bar printing presses throughout their empire in fear of free expression, the idea of public criticism of the Achaemenids through written documents was literally unknown.
All Persian texts—whether public inscriptions, palace inventories, or sacred tracts—concern the king, his priests, and bureaucrats at large, and confine themselves to government and religion. Even if other avenues of public expression had existed, the Persian victory at Thermopylae could not have been portrayed onstage or remembered in poetry without the approval of Xerxes—and not without Xerxes as chief protagonist in the triumph. The commemoration of the Persian victory in Bactria proves that well enough: “Says Xerxes the king: When I became king, there was within these lands which are written above one which was restless. Afterward Ahura Mazda brought me help. By the favor of Ahura Mazda I smote that land and put it in its place” (A. Olmstead,
History of the Persian
Empire,
231).
Persian religion was not as absolutist as that in Egypt, inasmuch as the Achaemenids were agents of Ahura Mazda, not divinities per se. Nevertheless, royal power was predicated on divine right, imperial edict was considered a holy act. So the constant refrain of all the Achaemenid kings: “Of me is Ahura Mazda, of Ahura Mazda am I.” When Alexander the Great learned to say the same thing, even his most loyal Macedonian lords began to plot either an assassination, a coup, or a return to Greece. Conquered peoples of the Persian Empire like the Babylonians and Jews, however, at
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