Travels with Herodotus Read online

  Two armies face each other. One the Persian, the largest in the world, and the second the Scythian, small, standing in defense of a land whose interior is hidden from Darius by a white curtain of snow.

  It must be a moment brimming with tension, I think to myself—and just then a boy arrives to say that Abbé Pierre is inviting me to the other end of the courtyard, where a meal has been set out on a table in the shade of a spreading mango tree.

  “In a moment! Just one second!” I call out. I wipe my forehead, damp from the excitement, and keep reading:

  They were ready and waiting in their ranks when a hare ran across the open space between the two sides, and one after another all the Scythians spotted it and gave chase. Seeing the Scythians in disarray and hearing their cries, Darius asked why his opponents were in such a state of commotion. When he heard that they were chasing a hare, he told his confidants, “These Scythians certainly hold us in contempt. I now think that Gobryas’ interpretation of their gifts was right, and what we need is a good plan for getting safely back home.”

  The historic role of a hare? Scholars agree that it was the Scythians who stopped Darius’s march on Europe. If this hadn’t happened, the fate of the world might have been quite otherwise. And what decided Darius’s final retreat was that the Scythians, lightheartedly pursuing a hare in plain view of the Persian army, demonstrated that they were ignoring it, thumbing their nose at it, holding it in contempt. And this disdain, this humiliation, was a more dreadful blow for the king of the Persians than losing a great battle.

  Night falls.

  Darius orders the campfires lit, as is customary at this time of day. The soldiers who no longer have the strength to march—the camp hangers-on, the vagabonds, the sick—are to remain by the fires. He commands that the donkeys be tethered, so that they will bray, creating the impression that life as usual continues in the Persian camp. And he himself, at the head of his army, begins the retreat under the cover of darkness.

  AMONG DEAD KINGS

  AND FORGOTTEN GODS

  Wishing to stay awhile longer with Darius, I break the sequential order of my travels and leap now from Congo in 1960 to Iran in 1979—the country of a raging Islamic revolution at whose head stands a hoary, sullen, and unbowed old man, Ayatollah Khomeini.

  Slaves and victims as we are of time’s implacable progression, we find it tempting now and then to jump this way from epoch to epoch, and thereby, if only for a moment, if only illusorily, to stand above time and juxtapose at will, assemble or separate, its different points, stages, periods.

  So why is Darius so compelling? Reading what Herodotus writes on eastern rulers, we can see that although all of them perform cruel deeds, there are occasionally those capable of more, and that this “more” can be something useful and even good. It was thus with Darius. On the one hand, he was a murderer. Here he is setting off with his army against the Scythians: At this point a Persian called Oeobazus, all three of whose sons were in the army, asked Darius whether one of them could be left behind. Darius replied in a friendly fashion, as if the request were reasonable, and said that he would leave all three behind. Oeobazus was overjoyed at the prospect of his sons being released from military service, but Darius ordered those responsible for such things to kill all three of them. So he did leave them there in Susa—with their throats cut.

  On the other hand, however, Darius was a good administrator, took care of the roads and the mail, minted money, and supported trade. And first and foremost, almost from the moment when he donned the royal diadem, he began to erect a magnificent city, Persepolis, whose importance and luster we would compare to that of Mecca and Jerusalem.

  I am witness in Tehran to the last weeks of the shah’s regime. The gigantic, even normally chaotic city scattered over a large swath of sandy terrain is now in a state of total disarray. Traffic is paralyzed by endless daily demonstrations. Men, invariably black-haired, and women, invariably in hijabs, walk in kilometer-and even several-kilometer-long columns, chanting, shouting, rhythmically shaking their raised fists. Every now and then armored trucks drive into the streets and squares and fire at the demonstrators. They fire for real, and as the dead and wounded fall, the panicked crowds disperse, or hide in the entryways of buildings.

  Snipers fire from the rooftops. Someone hit by a bullet makes a gesture as if he had tripped and was falling forward, but he is instantly caught by those walking beside him, who carry him to the edge of the sidewalk while the procession continues on, fists rising rhythmically. Sometimes, white-clad girls and boys march at the front of the columns, their foreheads encircled by white headbands. They are martyrs—ready to meet their deaths. It is so written on their headbands. On occasion, before the procession starts to move, I walk up to them, trying to understand what their faces express. Nothing—in any event, nothing that I would know how to describe, for which I could find the appropriate words.

  In the afternoon the demonstrations ceased, merchants opened their shops, secondhand-book sellers, of whom there were many here, spread out their collections in the streets. I purchased two albums from them about Persepolis. The shah was proud of this city. He held great ceremonies and festivals there, to which he invited guests from around the world. As for me, I wanted to go there at all costs because it was Darius who had begun its construction.

  Luckily Ramadan arrived, and Tehran grew calm. I located the bus terminal and bought a ticket to Shiraz, which is close to Per-sepolis. I had no trouble getting the ticket, although later the bus turned out to be full. It was a luxurious, air-conditioned Mercedes and it glided soundlessly over the excellent highway. We passed large stretches of dark beige, rocky desert, occasional poor, mud-house villages devoid of any trace of green, groups of children playing, herds of goats and sheep.

  At the rest stops one always gets the same thing: a plate of buckwheat grits, a hot lamb shish kebab, a glass of water, and, for dessert, a cup of tea. I can’t converse because I don’t know Farsi, but the atmosphere is pleasant; the men are friendly, they smile. The women, on the other hand, gaze the other way. I know that I must not look at them, that it is forbidden, and yet when one spends some time in their proximity, now and then one of them will adjust her chador in such a way that for a moment an eye can be seen peering out from under it—invariably black, large, shining, framed by long lashes.

  I have a window seat on the bus, but after several hours the view is still the same, so I take Herodotus out of my bag and read about the Scythians.

  Here is how they conduct themselves in war. When a Scythian kills his first man, he drinks some of his blood. He presents the king with the heads of those he kills in battle, because his reward for doing so is a share of the spoils they have taken in the battle, but no head means no spoils. The way a Scythian skins a head is as follows: he makes a circular cut around the head at the level of the ears and then he picks it up and shakes the scalp off the skull; next he scrapes the skin with a cow’s rib, and then, having kneaded the skin with his hands, he has a kind of rag, which he proudly fastens to the bridle of the horse he is riding. The reason for his pride is that the more of these skin rags a man has, the braver he is counted. Many of them make coats to wear by sewing the scalps together into a patchwork leather garment like leather coats …. Human skin, apparently, is thick and shiny-white—shinier, in fact, than any other kind of skin. I read no further, because suddenly palm groves appear outside the window, broad green fields, buildings, and further on streets and streetlights. Above the rooftops glisten the cupolas of mosques. We are in Shiraz, city of gardens and carpets.

  I am informed at the hotel reception desk that the only way to get to Persepolis is by taxi and that it is best to set out before dawn, because that way one will see how the sun rises and illuminates the royal ruins with its first beams.

  It was dark still when I found the driver waiting for me in front of the hotel, and we set off at once. The moon was full, so I could see that we were on a plain as flat as the bottom of a dried-
up lake. After a half hour along the empty road, Jafar—that was the driver’s name—stopped and took a bottle of water out of the trunk. It was so cold at this early hour that the water was icy, and I myself was shaking so much that he took pity on me and covered me with a blanket.

  We communicated solely via sign language. He showed me that I was supposed to wash my face. I did so, but when I wanted to dry it, he made a gesture forbidding it: one cannot wipe one’s face—the sun must dry off the moisture. I understood this to be a ritual, and stood patiently waiting.

  Sunrise in the desert is invariably a luminous, and in moments a mystical spectacle, during which the world that sailed away from us in the evening and vanished into the night suddenly returns. The sky reappears, the earth and people reappear. It all exists once again, we can see it all again. Should there be an oasis somewhere close by, we will see it; if a well, we will see it, too. In this affecting moment, Muslims fall to their knees and say their first prayer of the day—the salat as-subh. But their rapture communicates itself also to unbelievers. Everyone in the desert experiences the return of the sun to the earth in the same way; it elicits perhaps the only truly ecumenical emotion.

  Bright daylight arrives and then Persepolis reveals itself in all of its royal glory. It is a great stone city of temples and palaces situated on a vast, broad terrace carved into the slopes of mountains which rise abruptly, without any intermediate stages, in the place where the plain on which we are now standing ends. The sun dries my face, and the point of this ritual is as follows: The sun, much like man, needs water in order to live; if, upon awaking, it sees that it can drink a few drops from a man’s face, it will be kinder to him in the hour when it becomes cruel—at noon. And it will manifest its kindness by providing him with shade. It does not give shade directly, but by the agency of various other things—a tree, a roof, a cave. We know full well that without the sun, in and of themselves those things would have no shade. And so the sun, smiting us, also supplies us with a defensive shield.

  It was a dawn exactly like the one now when, two centuries after Darius began to build Persepolis, at the end of January of 330 B.C.E., Alexander the Great approaches the city at the head of his armies. He doesn’t yet see the buildings, but he has heard about their magnificence, and that they conceal countless treasures. On this very plain on which Jafar and I are standing, he encounters a strange group: “They encountered the first delegation immediately beyond the river. But these ragged figures differed greatly from the elegant opportunists and collaborators with whom Alexander hitherto had dealings. Their cries of greeting, as well as the branches of supplicants they carried in their hands, signified that they were Greeks: people either middle-aged or elderly, perhaps former mercenaries who had fought on the wrong side against the cruel monarch Artaxerxes Ochos. They were a pitiful, downright ghastly sight, because each of them was horribly disfigured. In accordance with the typical Persian method, they had all had their ears and noses cut off. Some were missing hands, others feet. All had a disfiguring brand on their foreheads. ‘These were people,’ says Diodor, ‘who were skilled in the arts and in various crafts, and did good work; they had their appendages cut off in such a way as to leave only those necessary for performing their profession.’ ”

  These unfortunates nevertheless ask Alexander that he not order them to return to Greece, but rather leave them here, in Persepolis, which they are building: in Greece, with their appearance, “each one of them would feel isolated, would be an object of pity, a social outcast.”

  We arrive in Persepolis. A long, wide staircase leads to the city, flanked on one side by a tall bas-relief carved in dark gray, well-polished marble and representing vassals walking to the king in order to pay him homage, proffer their loyalty and subservience. There is one vassal for every step, and there are several dozen steps. When you place your feet upon one step, you are accompanied by its appointed vassal, who, when you walk a step higher, will hand you over to the next vassal while he himself remains where he was, guarding his own step. It is astonishing that the figures of the vassals are identical to one another down to the most minute details of their appearance, proportions, and shape. They all have rich, floor-length gowns, creased head coverings, long spears which they hold before them with both hands, and decorated quivers slung over their shoulders. Their facial expression is serious, and despite the fact that an act of servility awaits them, they walk erect, their posture full of dignity.

  The sameness of appearance of the vassals accompanying your ascent up the stairs creates a paradoxical impression of motion within immobility: you climb the stairs, but because you always see the same vassal, you simultaneously have the impression of standing still, as if you were trapped in invisible trick mirrors. When you have reached the top, you turn and look back. The view is magnificent: below you stretches a boundless plain, at this hour already bathed in blinding sunlight, and traversed by only one road—the one leading to Persepolis.

  This scenery creates two entirely different, even opposite psychological situations:

  —From the king’s point of view: The king stands at the top of the stairs and looks down at the plain. At its other end, meaning very far, far away, he sees that some specks have appeared, some motes of dust, grains, particles barely visible and difficult to identify. The king watches, wonders—what could this be? After a while the motes and kernels of grain draw nearer, grow larger, and slowly crystallize. Those are probably vassals, he thinks, but because the first impression is always the most important, and in this case it was “motes and kernels of grain,” such will always remain the king’s view of his liege men. A certain amount of time passes: he can already see figures, the outlines of people. Well, I wasn’t mistaken, the king says to the courtiers surrounding him, those are vassals; I must hurry to the Audience Hall, so that I can sit down on the throne before they arrive (the king does not speak with subordinates other than while sitting on the throne).

  —And now from the opposite point of view, that of the vassals and of everyone else: They appear on the stage from the opposite side, facing Persepolis. They see its magical, astounding constructions, its gilding and glazing. Speechless, they fall to their knees (although they do so, they are not yet Muslims; it will be another one thousand years before Islam arrives here). Having recovered their composure, they rise and shake the dust from their garments. That is what the king sees as being the movement of specks and particles. As they draw nearer to Persepolis, their rapture increases, but so does their humility, their awareness of their own wretchedness, baseness, worthlessness. Yes, we are nothing, the king can do with us as he pleases; even if he condemns us to death, we will accept the sentence without a word. But if they succeed in leaving here in one piece, what a distinguished rank they will acquire among their people! He is the one who visited the king, others will say. And later—he is the son of the one who visited the king, the grandson, the great-grandson, etc. One secures in this way one’s family’s standing for generations to come.

  It is possible to walk endlessly around Persepolis. The complex is deserted and quiet. No guides, guards, hawkers, touts. Jafar stayed below, and I am alone on the great burial ground of stones. Stones shaped into columns and pillars, sculpted into bas-reliefs and portals. No stone here has a natural shape, none is as it would be in the ground, or as it would appear lying on a mountainside. Each is carefully cut, fitted, worked over. How much exacting labor went into all this over the years, how much toil and drudgery on the part of thousands upon thousands of people? How many of them died, hoisting these gigantic boulders? How many dropped from exhaustion and thirst? When we look at lifeless temples, palaces, and cities, we can’t help but wonder about the fate of their builders. Their pain, their broken backs, their eyes gouged out by errant splinters of stone, their rheumatism. About their unfortunate lives, their suffering. But the very next question that invariably arises is: Could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? Without the overseer’s whip, the slave�
��s fear, the ruler’s vanity? In short, was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man? And yet, does not that monumentality owe its existence to some conviction that what is negative and weak in man can be vanquished only by beauty, only through the effort and will of his creation? And that the only thing that never changes is beauty itself, and the need for it that dwells within us?

  I walk through the propylaeum, through the Hall of the Hundred Columns, through Darius’s Palace, the Harem of Xerxes, the Treasury. It is terribly hot and I don’t have strength left for Artaxerxes’ Palace, or for the Council Hall, or for the dozens of other buildings and ruins making up this city of dead kings and forgotten gods. I descend the great staircase, passing once again the procession of vassals emerging from the stone, on their way to pay homage to the king.

  Jafar and I drive back to Shiraz.

  I look over my shoulder—Persepolis grows smaller and smaller, the dust rising in the car’s wake increasingly obscures the rear view, until finally, as we are entering the city, it disappears altogether behind the first turn.

  I return to Tehran. To demonstrating crowds, to chants and shouts, to the crack of small-arms fire and the stench of gases, to snipers and secondhand-book sellers.

  I have with me Herodotus, who recounts how, on Darius’s order, one of the commanders he had left behind in Europe, Megabazus, conquers Thrace. There is among the Thracians, writes Herodotus, a tribe called the Trausians. Trausian customs are basically identical with those found elsewhere in Thrace, except for what they do at birth and death. Whenever a baby is born, its relatives gather around and grieve for the troubles it is going to have to endure now that it has been born, and they recount all the sufferings of human life. When anyone dies, however, they bury him in high spirits and with jubilation, on the grounds that he has been released from so many ills and is now in a perfectly happy state.