The Persian Empire from 450 to 334
Once Athens turned its energies away from attacking Persia and toward building its own empire in Greece, Persia
was able to consolidate its position in Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean but was unable to regain the strength it
had wielded before its disastrous invasion of Greece. The Persians realized that in order to safeguard their western
provinces from Greek attacks, it was necessary to find more effective tools to use against the Greeks than military
force. Those tools were diplomacy and the Persians’ immense wealth, which they used adeptly, beginning with the
closing years of the Peloponnesian War, when they subsidized Sparta. Afterward they shifted their resources
between the Greek cities, keeping the Greeks at each other’s throats and making the Great King the arbiter of Greek
affairs. Then, in the middle of the 4th century B.C., Persia became distracted by internal problems, and a new and
unexpected power united Greece under its banner, against Persia: Macedon.
The Government and Army of Persia
As was the case with all other Near Eastern empires, Persia was a monarchy, ruled by a king whose power was
absolute. The Persian king was the earthly regent of the one god, Ahura Mazda, and was a great warrior as well as
the guarantor of justice. The approach taken by the Persians to imperial administration was flexible, adapted to local
circumstances. Darius I seems to have been the main architect of the administrative system, which was built around
some 20 large provinces known as satrapies, in turn often subdivided into smaller administrative units. Local affairs
were left in native hands. Persian systems of revenue administration and communication were highly sophisticated.
The Persian army was as diverse as the empire’s population but was built around a core of ethnic Iranian units. Its
main combat arms were infantry and heavy cavalry; their primary weapon was the bow.
Alexander and the Fall of Persia
In the 330s B.C., the Persian empire emerged from a period of rebellion and turmoil on the throne, only to find itself
confronted by what it had so long worked to avoid: a Greece united and hostile to Persia. The agent of unification—
Philip, King of Macedon—was soon assassinated, but his son and successor, Alexander, proved to be an even more
lethal menace. At the head of a well-balanced army of seasoned veterans, he launched an invasion of Anatolia,
crushing the Persian army there and marching on to Syria, where he crushed a larger Persian force under King
Darius III’s personal command. The Levant fell to him, then Egypt. Finally, in a hard-fought battle at Arbela in the
old Assyrian homeland, he crushed the last army Persia could muster. Darius fled the field and was assassinated by a
Persian nobleman. Alexander assumed the throne as King of Kings, and the Persian empire came to an end.
Robert L. Dise Jr. has taught at the University of Northern Iowa since 1992; prior to joining its faculty, he taught at Clinch Valley College (now the University of Virginia’s College at Wise). He received his B.A. in History from the University of Virginia (at Charlottesville), concentrating on the history of the ancient world, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, specializing in the history of Rome.
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