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War Profiteering

I followed up my large treasure find in Susa with an even larger find in Persepolis in early 330 BC.

I headed to the Citadel where I knew the gold would be stored. It was my greatest payday: I found roughly twenty-five hundred tons of gold.

The amount of riches I found in Persepolis surely justified war, no matter what the cost. To give you an idea of the payload, the amount of wealth I seized in Persepolis alone was the equivalent of roughly three hundred times the annual national income of the Greek Empire.

‘Nuff said. You can stop reading. The auditorium is closed, thanks for showing up…

I decided to stay in Persepolis for a while. What was I thinking?

I liked living in Persepolis, which at the time, was the coolest place one could imagine. So once again, I acted out of character and decided to hang around for a while. Residing – albeit temporarily – in Persepolis was an odd affair.

Persians practiced Zoroastrianism. A religion whose God was Ahura Mazda and whose devil was Ahriman. Cyrus was Zoroastrian and as such, I wanted to be accepted by the locals as their rulers, in other words, as Ahura Mazda’s chosen one on Earth. Suffice to say this was a tough sell with the locals.

After all, how could the people of Persepolis accept me – son of Greek Gods – as Ahura Mazda’s chosen one amongst Zoroastrians?

No amount of propaganda would overcome this. I could not have my cake and eat it too. I would have to choose, again. You would call this irony I suppose. So I had to leave, the sooner the better.

But I was tempted to stay. We spent considerable time in Persepolis, over four months to be precise. Did sustained warfare justify such a long stay? After all we spent seven months in Tyre; Persepolis proved to be no Tyre. Truth is that we did pause a little bit to celebrate and enjoy the spoils. I also wanted to celebrate the New Year as the sole ruler of Persia. The New Year, or No Ruz, coincides with a celebration of spring Equinox and has been celebrated for a thousand years before my time in Persia, going back to the beginning of Zoroastrianism.

We celebrated lavishly. In a drunken state, an Athenian woman named Thais convinced me to fully avenge Xerxes’ destruction some hundred fifty years ago. She promised that our partial destruction of Persepolis was not enough to appease the Gods.

She argued that I would have to go all out and destroy the palaces as well. It would, in her words, represent my greatest accomplishment.

The lure was too tempting so I gave in. I doubt Cyrus would have approved but I did my best to restrict the damage to Xerxes’ palace… to the best of my knowledge, humans even inhabited the palaces after the fires.

At the time, the decision to unleash hell on the city made logical sense: Persepolis benefited as the richest and most fortunate city in the world, it was only fair that I would inflict upon it a taste of Xerxes’ own medicine, no?

Spurned by the crowd, I tossed the initial torch into the royal palace. Thais was the second person to throw a torch after me. To some extent, I will always regret this decision and the actions that pursued.

Initially, we had invited the Persian nobility to attend the New Year festivities but they declined our offer. In fact, there was no procession that year. I was essentially given the one-finger salute.

The signal they were sending me was that they were not my friends, rather my enemies, as such, they needed to see what damage I inflicted upon my enemies.

Had they shown up, things could have been different. By not attending, they asked for it. My goal was to inflict a punishment upon Persepolis on par with Thebes and Tyre. In Thebes, I razed the city! I felt great about myself. I wanted to burn Persepolis and leave absolutely no sign that a city ever existed. Ironically, the ruins remained and forever kept the legacy of the Persian Empire alive. Oh well… at least I seized its fortune.

I chose to find a silver lining in the matter: hopefully it proved to Greeks that I would not forget some of the reasons for this journey: to end the Persian Empire as we knew it. It also showed that I would never turn my back on them or sell out to the Persian Empire. From then on, I was to serve as its just ruler.

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