The Book of Ancient Bastards Read online

  Apparently it was only a matter of time before Solomon picked up many of these bad, idolatrous habits and displeased God. It was at that point that God told Solomon that he was going to break up his kingdom (in the quote at the opening of the chapter).

  Some religious traditions hold that Solomon eventually saw the error of his ways, got rid of his idols (not sure about all those wives and concubines), and found redemption in the eyes of God. Muslims even hold that he never really fell away from his beliefs.

  Pious bastard.

  Born-of-Sin Bastard

  The son of David and Bathsheba, Solomon was the tangible result of David’s great sin. When the king first met Bathsheba, she was already married to one of his most trusted soldiers, a man known in the Bible as Uriah the Hittite. Consumed with passion for her, David seduced her and got her pregnant, then arranged for Uriah’s death in battle. Bathsheba lost her baby (according to the prophet Nathan, as punishment for the sin she and David had committed together), but she and David had a second son after they were married. That was Solomon.

  7

  NABONIDUS

  The Last King of Babylon

  and His Army of Gods

  (REIGNED 556–539 B.C.)

  The king is mad.

  —The Nabonidus Cylinder

  So imagine you’re the king of Babylon (a city-state in what is now Iraq), and three years into your reign, you decide to chuck it all and take off for a desert oasis where you join a cult devoted to worshipping the moon. Further imagine that you appoint your party-boy son prince-regent in your place. (After all, you’re crazy, not stupid, you don’t want to actually give up anything!)

  Pretty wild story, right? Well, you know what they say: fact is stranger than fiction.

  Ladies and gentlemen, meet the king in question: Nabonidus; the last king of Babylon, and his frat-boy son, Belshazzar.

  Nabonidus’s origins are shadowy; we know nothing about his father, but his mother was a priestess of the Babylonian moon god Sin (proper name, not to be confused with the English word for “religious transgression”). We do know that he came to the throne as a usurper, deposing and murdering the previous king, a child named Labashi-Marduk.

  Presumably prompted by his mother’s vocation, Nabonidus eventually went off to worship the moon, while his son stayed on to rule the kingdom. The Persians took the opportunity to make a run for the money and sent an army to Babylon. Nabonidus returned in time to see his son doing little to protect the city from the Persians. Nabonidus himself took command of the Babylonian army and went out to meet the Persians before they crossed his frontier.

  He lost in battle, fled, and was later taken prisoner by the Persians. What happened next is uncertain. According to some sources, Nabonidus was burned alive by his Persian captors. Most sources agree that his life was spared and he was allowed to return to worshipping Sin.

  And Belshazzar, the guy about whom the Bible itself remarks, “You have been judged and found wanting”? No one is really sure what happened to the guy after his dad surrendered.

  Mysterious bastard!

  Bastard Pottery

  When Nabonidus realized he had a full-scale military crisis on his hands, he left his oasis temple and returned to defend Babylon against the invading Persians. And he didn’t go alone. He took an “army of gods” with him. In his mind, literally. To the Babylonians and many other peoples in the ancient Middle East (a notable exception being the Hebrews), gods were thought to inhabit the statues created in their honor. So when Nabonidus took every idol he could lay hands on with him to Babylon, he and all of his subjects believed that the gods were actually physically with him. It did him no good. The Persians kicked his ass, took the idols, and according to many sources put them back where they belonged. The Persian king, Cyrus the Great, boasted: “As for the gods of Sumer and Akkad which Nabonidus, to the wrath of the lord of the gods, brought to Babylon, at the command of Marduk, the great lord, I [Cyrus] caused them to dwell in peace in their sanctuaries, (in) pleasing dwellings. May all the gods I brought (back) to their sanctuaries plead daily before Bel and Nabu for the lengthening of my days, may they intercede favorably on my behalf.”

  8

  DARIUS I, GREAT KING OF PERSIA

  Will the Real Usurper Please Stand Up?

  (CA. 550–486 B.C.)

  What is right I love, and what is not right I hate.

  —Darius I

  The lines quoted above are part of a lengthy inscription carved into the side of a mountain in western Iran during the height of the Persian Empire. At first glance, they appear to be the words of a religious leader, or perhaps those of a noble and inspiring king.

  They are neither.

  These are the words of Darius I, Great King of Persia from 522 to 486 B.C., a usurper who likely had a hand in murdering his king and definitely had one in murdering that king’s younger brother.

  When the Persian king, Cambyses, set out on an expedition to conquer Egypt, Darius accompanied him, serving as a member of his personal guard. When Cambyses’s younger brother rebelled back home, Cambyses left Egypt to return to Persia, dying under suspicious circumstances along the way. Darius was crowned king of Persia soon afterward, and led the dead Cambyses’s army to Persia, where he dealt with Cambyses’s rebellious brother by having him murdered.

  Once he’d taken the throne, Darius proved initially unpopular. Several of his subject peoples rebelled. Babylon rose up twice. It took him years to consolidate his power.

  Once he had done so, Darius found his western frontier attacked by the forces of Croesus, a wealthy king of Lydia (in what is now western Turkey). But in this case wealth did not equal power, and Croesus lost in battle to the Persians, and Lydia became a Persian province.

  Having conquered Lydia, Darius inherited not just Croesus’s considerable wealth, he also inherited a conflict with the Greek cities of Ionia (a region in Asia Minor, now western Turkey). When the Persians conquered these Greeks, the Greeks bided their time for a bit, then eventually rose in revolt, killing their governor and driving the Persians out in 499 B.C.

  Assisting these Greeks were their cousins across the Aegean Sea in the city-state of Athens. A furious King Darius ordered that one of his servants step up to remind him three times at every meal to “remember the Athenians.” The king began plotting revenge on the impudent foreigners who had dared attempt to thwart his will.

  Nursing his grudge for the several years it took to put down the Ionian Revolt, Darius massed the largest army the world had ever seen (the Greek historian Herodotus claimed that it numbered 250,000 men, but that’s probably an exaggeration), loaded them onto boats captained and crewed by some of his Phoenician subjects, and set sail for Athens.

  The famous result of all this grudge-holding came in 490 B.C. with the climactic battle of Marathon, where an army of Athenian heavy infantry, supported by soldiers from allied neighboring cities, smashed once and for all the myth of Persian military invincibility. And it was a fight almost completely of Darius the usurper’s making.

  Bastard Spin-Doctor

  After Cambyses’s death, Darius claimed that Cambyses had gone crazy in Egypt and died of natural causes on his way home to deal with his brother’s rebellion. Darius then went on to claim that the man who rose in revolt against Cambyses was an imposter—not his younger brother at all. Some trick that, fooling his own mother and the wives in his harem!

  9

  POLYCRATES, TYRANT OF SAMOS

  Never Arm Your Enemies

  (REIGNED ca. 538–522 B.C.)

  Without the knowledge of the Samians, Polycrates sent an envoy to Cambyses the son of Cyrus (who was gathering an army to attack Egypt) and asked him to send a messenger to him in Samos to ask for an armed force. When Cambyses heard this, he sent an envoy to the Samians and requested a naval force to join him in the war against Egypt. So Polycrates selected those of the citizens whom he most suspected of desiring to rise against him, and sent them away in 40 warships, charg
ing Cambyses not to send them back.

  —Herodotus, The Histories

  In modern parlance, the word “tyrant” carries a negative connotation—it describes someone who rules in a cruel and arbitrary manner. But to the ancient Greeks who coined the word, it simply stood for someone who had seized power (usually by military force) and ruled alone, without necessarily being evil.

  One of the ancient Greek tyrants who helped give the word its negative connotation was Polycrates, tyrant of the Greek island of Samos. While today he might be called an “enlightened despot” with a taste for literature, the arts, and great feats of engineering, Polycrates did terrible things to both his immediate family members and his subjects during his sixteen-year rule.

  Seizing power along with his two brothers in 538 B.C., Polycrates initially split the island of Samos with the two of them. Within weeks, he had murdered one brother and exiled the other, taking total control for himself.

  He enforced his rule with an army of Greek mercenaries. In order to pay this army, Polycrates levied a tax on any ship that passed within a few miles of Samos, which boasted a central location on the Aegean. Merchant ships either paid up to the captains of his fleet of triremes or had their cargoes seized.

  Unlike many Greeks on the mainland, Polycrates maintained friendly relations with the Persian governors of the provinces that bordered his island. So when the Persian king Cambyses requested ships to support his invasion of Egypt, Polycrates sent him the ones mentioned in the quote that opens this chapter.

  Once those sent by him to their certain deaths began to suspect they’d been betrayed, they turned around and tried to take Samos by force. When that didn’t work, they set about preying on Samos’s sea lanes as pirates.

  As for Polycrates, his story doesn’t end well. Believing that Polycrates had made a secret deal with the Egyptians, the Persian governor at Sardis had him seized and crucified.

  Gruesome end for a gruesome bastard.

  Engineering Bastard

  Fascinated with how things worked, Polycrates harnessed the resources of his island home of Samos to produce the first trireme—a warship with three decks of oars, which allowed it to travel faster than standard biremes (which had only two rowing decks) and which made the ram it sported on its prow a whole lot more effective and devastating as a weapon. After the success of the first trireme, he had an entire fleet of them built. He also oversaw the construction of a great underground tunnel that acted as a pipeline, bringing a reliable supply of fresh water to the island from the mainland.

  10

  HIPPIAS, TYRANT OF ATHENS

  Just Because You’re a Paranoid Tyrant Doesn’t Mean Someone Isn’t Out to Get You

  (REIGNED 527–510 B.C.)

  Hippias fled to Lemnos, where he died, the blood gushing from his eyes. Thus was his country, against which he led the Barbarians, avenged.

  —Suidas, tenth-century Byzantine lexicographer and historian

  The last tyrant to rule ancient Athens, Hippias was a paranoid whose fear of plots on his life helped usher in the world’s first democratic government (to replace his).

  The son and successor of the most successful tyrant in the ancient world, Hippias became tyrant of Athens upon the death of his father Pisistratus in 527 B.C. Because he initially continued his father’s policies (light taxes, no curbs on personal freedoms for the most part), the people were willing to let Hippias rule unopposed.

  But Hippias had a brother: a patron of the arts and bon vivant named Hyparchus. And when Hyparchus got into a quarrel in 514 B.C. with a gay couple he was trying to break up (he had a crush on the younger and cuter of the two men), he wound up murdered.

  At that point Hippias freaked out and began giving “tyranny” its more modern meaning. He arbitrarily killed those he suspected of plotting against him. He sentenced people to death for having the wrong friends. (And he seized their property for good measure.) The crackdown was swift and devastating.

  In so doing, he played into the hands of the exiled Alcmeonid family.

  These Athenians, run out of town by Hippias’s father, promptly bribed the priestess oracle at Delphi to claim that the Spartans—backwards, superstitious, and with good reason the most-feared warriors in Greece—should invade Athens, take the city, and drive Hippias out in order to please the gods.

  By 510 B.C. they had done it, trapping Hippias and his troops on the Acropolis, the city’s fortified central hill. Settling in for a siege, Hippias at first seemed prepared to wait the invaders out. Then his family, including his children, fell into their hands (they had been trying to escape to Persia and were caught outside the city’s gates). Hippias agreed to leave Athens and go into exile in exchange for the safety of his kids.

  When he left Athens, Hippias, who had been a rare pro-Persian ruler in mainland Greece, hotfooted it to Persia and asked the Great King Darius I to intercede on his behalf. Darius allowed him to set up a government-in-exile in Persian-held western Anatolia (modern Turkey), but made him wait for a decade before sending emissaries to the Athenians demanding that they take back their tyrant and restore him as their ruler.

  The Athenians laughed at him, then turned around and sent troops and ships to support the Ionian Revolt against Persia. See the entry on Darius I for the rest of the story.

  Bastard’s End

  Hippias served the Persians as an administrator and advisor for decades while awaiting the opportunity to be revenged on the city that had tossed him out on his ear. In 490 B.C., he felt he’d gotten it. By now close to eighty years of age, Hippias received permission to accompany Darius’s invasion fleet to its appointment with destiny at the seaside plain of Marathon. Wounded in the ensuing battle, he died soon afterward, as noted in the quote from Suidas that opens this chapter.

  11

  ARISTAGORAS,

  TYRANT OF MILETUS

  Better a Live Rebel Than a Dead Royal Governor

  (?–497 B.C.)

  While the cities were thus being taken, Aristagoras the Milesian, being, as he proved in this instance, not of very distinguished courage, since after having disturbed Ionia and made preparation of great matters he counseled running away when he saw these things. . . .

  —Herodotus, The Histories

  How’s this for cynical: yesterday’s tyrants becoming today’s liberty-loving embracers of democracy? We’ve seen this during the modern era: Boris Yeltsin in Russia, for example, rejecting communism out of convenience rather than out of conviction, and being catapulted to power as a result.

  But it’s hardly a new story.

  Take Aristagoras, the Persian-appointed tyrant of the semi-independent Greek city-state of Miletus (in the region of Ionia in Asia Minor, now Turkey), the guy whose push for homegrown democracy touched off the so-called “Ionian Revolt” in 499 B.C., a conflict that led to the loss of thousands of lives and served as the precipitating event in a wider conflict between the Greeks and the Persians over the two centuries that followed.

  Hardly a born-and-bred defender of personal liberty, Aristagoras’s opportunism was born of the most instinctive of human impulses: self-preservation. Here’s how it happened.

  Shortly after he became tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras was tapped to help the empire pick up some new real estate in the form of Naxos, a strategically placed Greek island in the middle of the Aegean Sea. In exchange for helping with this, Aristagoras was to receive a large portion of the loot to be taken when the island fell.

  In anticipation of said loot, Aristagoras took out a large cash loan from the local Persian satrap (governor). With this money, he hired mercenary soldiers and ships to help with the conquest.

  The only problem was that Aristagoras got into a major personal feud with the Persian admiral set to lead the expedition. The feud got so ugly that the admiral secretly warned the Naxians of an invasion on the way. Not surprisingly, the whole venture failed.

  Bastard-in-Law

  Aristagoras owed his position as tyrant to his father
-in-law, Histiaeus. Histiaeus had been tyrant before him, and had done his job so well that the Persian king, Darius I, appointed him to his own governing council. When Histiaeus went east to the royal court at Persepolis, he recommended Aristagoras succeed him. Later, when Aristagoras was attempting to foment revolt among the Greek cities of Asia, Histiaeus secretly helped him, hoping that a rebellion led by his son-in-law would lead to his own being appointed to retake the city and re-establish himself as Miletus’s tyrant.

  But, in a setup that twentieth-century mafia bosses would admire, Aristagoras was still on the hook to the Persians for the money he’d borrowed. Desperate to save his own skin, Aristagoras set about quietly stirring a rebellion in Miletus and the neighboring cities, inviting such mainland Greek cities as Sparta and Athens to help their cousins across the Aegean Sea.

  The Spartans, not surprisingly, refused (it was too far from home for these xenophobes). But the Persian king had just succeeded in really pissing off the Athenians by baldly interfering in their internal politics and insisting that they take back the tyrant (Hippias) to whom they had given the boot. So the Athenians agreed to send a fleet of ships to help.

  And with that the Ionian Revolt was born. The result? Sardis, the westernmost provincial capital in the Persian Empire (and home base of the governor who had strong-armed Aristagoras in the first place) was sacked and burned by the Greek rebels. After a five-year-long campaign and the investment of much time, effort, blood, and money, the Persians put down the revolt.

  And Aristagoras? Still fearing for his own skin, he relocated to Thrace (in the European part of Turkey), where he tried to establish a colony from which to continue the war against Persia. He was killed trying to strong-arm the locals (see how this sort of thing just keeps running downhill?).