Darius III: Alexander’s stooge

In 1891, George Nathaniel Curzon, ‘the very superior person’ of the mocking Balliol rhyme, and future viceroy of India, arrived at Persepolis. Torched in 330 BC by Alexander the Great, it had once been the nerve-centre of an empire that stretched from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush. For Curzon, whose tour of Iran had already taken him all over the country, the ruins of the great palace were a particular highlight. The Persia of the Achaemenids, the ruling dynasty of the ancient empire, was, so he declared, ‘immeasurably superior to medieval Persia in its attributes and even now more respectable in its ruins’. Coming from a man who was himself no slouch at imperial pomp, this was high praise indeed.

It was not merely as a prototype of the British Raj, though, that ancient Persia could be admired. To generations raised on the Bible, the Achaemenids glimmered as agents of the Almighty. Cyrus, the king who had founded the Persian empire and released the Jews from their Babylonian captivity, was hailed in extravagant terms in the Book of Isaiah as the ‘Anointed One’: the ‘Messiah’. Such praise helped to balance the mingled fear and contempt with which the other great literary influence on men of Curzon’s background, the ancient Greeks, had tended to regard the Persians. Darius the Great, the king who had consolidated the empire founded by Cyrus, had sent the task-force that was defeated in 490 BC by the Athenians at Marathon; ten years later, his son, Xerxes had forced the pass at Thermopylae, and then watched the destruction of his fleet at Salamis. The ‘mute stones’ of Persepolis visited by Curzon, in all their ‘ineffable pathos of ruin’, were nothing that the Greeks had ever mourned. Alexander, so it was said, had burned the great palace as pay-back for the incineration of the Acropolis by Xerxes.