ABSTRACT
The Jewish garrison at Elephantine (p. 63) exemplifies the mixed racial and cultural character of the Persian Empire: 1 it was a garrison of Jews, stationed in Egypt, commanded by Iranians, owing allegiance to Persia, recording its business in Aramaic, on a site whose name is Greek (the 'place of ivory'); fmally, among the names identified in its papyri is a Chorasmian from north of the River Oxus in Afghanistan. Ease of travel was one of the benefits brought by an empire as large and stable as the Persian, which after the conquests of Cyrus, Kambyses and Darius I in the second half of the sixth century extended from Thrace to modem Afghanistan and from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Third Cataract of the Nile. The eastern travels ofHerodotus, who moved freely across the two thousand miles separating Babylon from Cyrene, were made possible by Persian indulgence and protection, in much the way that the evangelism of St Paul was facilitated by the Roman Peace. Some Greeks admired Persian methods (p. 18); even Plato, who thought that Persians suffered, as from a disease, from an excess of tyranny which made them congenitally weak, could call their empire a 'solidly based system' (Laws 685 where the reference is to Persia). Herodotus' History can be seen as a sermon on the text that Spartans and Persians, even in their great period of conflict, gradually came to value each other's qualities: 2 at first (Hdt. i.l53) Cyrus the Great scoffs at the Greeks who come together in a market-place to cheat each other; by the end, the exiled Spartan king Demaratos is shown (vii.l04) lecturing a clearly impressed Xerxes on the subject of Spartan deference to law. The Persian Empire, then, was not uniformly hated or despised by
Greek writers. Nor did Greek interest in Persia cease after the fifth century:3 apart from Plato, several fourth-century commentators had good things to say, like the Oxyrhynchus Historian (xix Bartoletti), who comm~nts on the way Persian commanders deliberately withheld
payments from (Greek) mercenaries; this would put them more in their power. The two most interesting items, in view of recent archaeological fmds, are, first, a remark ofa fourth-century historian, Herakleides of Kyme (FGrHist. 689F 2), who says that the Persian king pays his soldiers in food, dividing the meat and bread equally, and that this corresponded to the money which Greek employers paid to their mercenaries. Herakleides goes on to speak of them as the king's 'fellow-diners'. And, second, there is a sentence in Plutarch's Life of Artaxerxes (chapter iv) about the revolt of the younger Cyrus (for which seep. 184): 'some say that he revolted because he was not given enough rations.' The publication in 1969 of the Persepolis Fortification Tablets makes all this intelligible: the tablets record payments of large quantities of food-grain, sheep and so forth-to Persian grandees like 'Parnaka', the Pharnakes who is named by Herodotus (e.g. viii.l26). Thus (PF 6581): '10 sheep, entrusted to Harbezza, Parnaka received for rations. At Persepolis and Tenukku. Third month, for a period of 5 days, in the 19th year. Basaza wrote (the text). Mannunda communicated its message.' Now to eat ten sheep in five days a man needs a lot of help. The rations given to Parnaka were surely intended to support a large household, of a feudal type; in fact a household of what Herakleides called 'fellow-diners'. That satraps as well as the king had their entourage of fellow-diners is proved by Xenophon's Anabasis (i.8.25) which says that Cyrus the Younger had his 'table-sharers', and by Diodorus' description (xvii.20) of the 'kinsmen' of the satrap Spithrobates, who fought with him at the battle of the Granikos in 334. (This item comes from Kleitarchos, who was interested in Persian institutions, cp. F 5; not surprisingly since he probably grew up in Persian-held Ionia, which as with Herodotus, Ephorus and Herakleides must have helped determine his literary bent.) Feudalism is a system ofloyalty in return for benefits, usually land.
