Darius I

Darius, son of Hystaspes, of a collateral Achaemenid line, came to the throne in 522 BCE by force and by argument, and reigned until 486. He is the central historical figure of this compendium's period, and the author of its single most important text, the inscription at Behistun.

The contested accession

Darius was not the obvious heir. By his own account, on the death of Cambyses the throne had been seized by a magus, Gaumāta, who impersonated the dead prince Bardiya; Darius and six fellow nobles killed the usurper and Darius took the crown 'with the help of Ahuramazda', then put down a storm of rebellions across the empire in a single year (see the accession of Darius). This is the founding narrative of his reign, and it is also its greatest problem: a strand of scholarship, ancient and modern, suspects that the man Darius killed was the real Bardiya and that Darius himself was the usurper who invented the impostor. The compendium keeps this open.

The remaking of the empire

Whatever the truth of 522, Darius's achievement in the decades after is not in doubt. He organised the empire into some twenty tribute-paying satrapies with fixed assessments; standardised weights, measures and coinage (the gold daric); developed the Royal Road and the Aramaic chancery that bound the provinces to the centre; cut a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea; and founded a new dynastic capital, Persepolis. Herodotus reports that the Persians called him 'the shopkeeper' for his fiscal system, Cambyses 'the master', and Cyrus 'the father' — a folk-memory of Darius as the empire's great administrator.

Religion and the royal ideology

Darius is also the fullest voice of Achaemenid royal religion. His inscriptions name Ahura Mazdā as the god who 'made Darius king', and cast his politics as the victory of the Truth over the Lie: his rivals are liars, the loyal are truth-followers. On his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam the inscription DNb turns this into a personal ethic — a king who is friend to the right and no friend to the wrong, who rewards by merit, who governs his own anger — one of the most remarkable statements of kingly self-fashioning to survive from antiquity.