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All along the Caspian, the Cadusians and Amardians, on either side of the chain of mountains bordering the Iranian plateau, defied all the efforts made to subdue them.* India and the Sakse had developed from the condition of subjects into that of friendly allies, and the savage hordes of Gedrosia and the Paropamisus refused to recognise any authority at all.**
* They appear in the history of every epoch as the
irreconcilable foes of the great king, enemies against whom
even the most peacefully disposed sovereigns were compelled
to take the field in person.
** The Sakæ fought at Arbela, but only as allies of the
Persians. The Indians who are mentioned with them came from
the neighbourhood of Cabul; most of the races who had
formerly figured in Darius’ satrapy of India had become
independent by the time Alexander penetrated into the basin
of the Indus.
The whole empire needed to be reconquered and reorganised bit by bit if it was to exercise that influence in the world to which its immense size entitled it, and the question arose whether the elements of which it consisted would lend themselves to any permanent reorganisation or readjustment.
The races of the ancient Eastern world, or, at any rate, that portion of them which helped to make its history, either existed no longer or had sunk into their dotage. They had worn each other out in the centuries of their prime, Chaldæans and Assyrians fighting against Cossæans or Elamites, Egyptians against Ethiopians and against Hittites, Urartians, Armæans, the peoples of Lebanon and of Damascus, the Phoenicians, Canaanites and Jews, until at last, with impoverished blood and flagging energies, they were thrown into conflict with younger and more vigorous nations. The Medes had swept away all that still remained of Assyria and Urartu; the Persians had overthrown the Medes, the Lydians, and the Chaldæans, till Egypt alone remained and was struck down by them in her turn. What had become of these conquered nations during the period of nearly two hundred years that the Achæmenians had ruled over them? First, as regards Elam, one of the oldest and formerly the most powerful of them all. She had been rent into two halves, each of them destined to have a different fate. In the mountains, the Uxians, Mardians, Elymasans, and Cossæans—tribes who had formerly been the backbone of the nation—had relapsed into a semi-barbarous condition, or rather, while the rest of the world had progressed in civilization and refinement, they had remained in a state of stagnation, adhering obstinately to the customs of their palmy days: just as they had harried the Chaldæans or Assyrians in the olden times, so now they harried the Persians; then, taking refuge in their rocky fastnesses, they lived on the proceeds of their forays, successfully resisting all attempts made to dislodge them. The people of the plains, on the other hand, kept in check from the outset by the presence of the court at Susa, not only promptly resigned themselves to their fate, but even took pleasure in it, and came to look upon themselves as in some sort the masters of Asia. Was it not to their country, to the very spot occupied by the palace of their king, that, for nearly two hundred years, satraps, vassal kings, the legates of foreign races, ambassadors of Greek republics—in a word, all the great ones of this world—came every year to render homage, and had not the treasures which these visitors brought with them been expended, in part at any rate, on their country? The memory of their former prosperity paled before the splendours of their new destiny, and the glory of their ancestors suffered eclipse. The names of the national kings, the story of their Chaldæan and Syrian conquests, the trophies of their victories over the great generals of Nineveh, the horrors of their latest discords and of the final catastrophe were all forgotten; even the documents which might have helped to recall them lay buried in the heart of the mound which served as a foundation for the palace of the Achgernenides. Beyond the vague consciousness of a splendid past, the memory of the common people was a blank, and when questioned by strangers they could tell them nothing save legends of the gods or the exploits of mythical heroes; and from them the Greeks borrowed their Memnon, that son of Tithonus and Eôs who rushed to the aid of Priam with his band of Ethiopians, and whose prowess had failed to retard by a single day the downfall of Troy. Further northwards, the Urartians and peoples of ancient Naîri, less favoured by fortune, lost ground with each successive generation, yielding to the steady pressure of the Armenians. In the time of Herodotus they were still in possession of the upper basins of the Euphrates and Araxus, and, in conjunction with the Matieni and Saspires, formed a satrapy—the eighteenth—the boundaries of which coincided pretty closely with those of the kingdom ruled over by the last kings of Van in the days of Assur-bani-pal; the Armenians, on their side, constituted the thirteenth satrapy, between Mount Taurus and the Lower Arsanias.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from coins in the Cabinet des
Médailles