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Royal banquets were on a different order of magnitude. According to Heraclidis, “One thousand animals are slaughtered daily for the king.” (This figure seems so incredible that at least one historian believes it refers to soldiers’ rations.) Dishes and cups were of silver and gold. Over three hundred royal concubine musicians were available to play the harp or sing throughout the banquet.38

The magnificent Achaemenid palaces—which fused architectural styles from conquered kingdoms—were also metaphors for the empire as a whole. By incorporating Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and other foreign elements into their buildings and monuments, the Achaemenid kings announced their continuity with earlier empires and demonstrated their ascendance over them. For the Achaemenids, power was most effectively demonstrated not by homogenizing and “Persianizing” subject peoples, but by preserving, incorporating, and exploiting the empire's tremendous ethno-cultural diversity.39

THE FALL OF THE FIRST HEGEMON

Achaemenid Persia was the first world-dominant power in history. Cyrus and Darius had mastered the secret of strategic tolerance, which enabled them to build an empire that included “the whole of the known world and a good deal of territory till then unknown,” stretching “from the burning sands of Africa to the icebound border of China.”40 But if history has glorified Cyrus and Darius, so it has villainized Darius's son Xerxes. Indeed, the beginning of the end of the Achaemenid Empire is usually traced to Xerxes’ “despotic” reign (485-465 BC), which was marked by a number of major military setbacks for the Persians and the first hints of Greek ascendancy.

Our knowledge of Xerxes largely comes from the Greeks, who tell us that he brutally crushed rebellions across the empire—desecrating temples and sanctuaries, killing priests, even enslaving subjects in the process. In addition to being cruel and intolerant, Xerxes is also reputed to have been decadent and licentious. Not content with his harems, it seems that Xerxes fell in love with many women, including his sister-in-law, his daughter-in-law, and his niece. (None of these relationships worked out.) Greek sources suggest that Xerxes also insisted more forcefully on the “Persian” character of the empire. He elevated the Persian god Ahura Mazda over all other deities in a way that none of the earlier Achaemenid kings did. In Egypt and Babylonia, where Cyrus and Darius had left the local population considerable autonomy and respected their local customs, Xerxes reduced these countries to a condition of “servitude.”41

These classical Greek depictions of Xerxes may well be biased. After all, Xerxes mounted a massive military campaign against Greece and, in his brief capture of Athens, laid waste to the shrines of the Acropolis. But since it was common for ancient rulers to take such retributive measures in cases of rebellion, it is difficult to know whether Xerxes was actually more “despotic” than the earlier Achaemenid kings. According to some modern historians, Xerxes merely continued the Achaemenid tradition of tolerance when it was strategically possible and ruthless retaliation when it was not—the difference being that Xerxes faced much more serious and widespread threats to Persian rule.42

In any event, Xerxes managed to preserve the Persian Empire, although the latter half of the Achaemenid dynasty was marked by revolts throughout the land, especially in Asia Minor, often followed by harsh suppressions. Egypt was lost around 400 BC only to be retaken sixty years later by Artaxerxes III, the penultimate Achaemenid ruler. As a conqueror, Artaxerxes seems more a reflection of Xerxes than of Cyrus or Darius. According to Diodorus, after “demolishing the walls of the most important [Egyptian] cities, by plundering the shrines [Artaxerxes] gathered a vast quantity of silver and gold, and he carried off the inscribed records from the ancient temples.” A court eunuch eventually poisoned Artaxerxes. In many ways, the Achaemenid dynasty