Free Persian Fire by Tom Holland Page B

the rugged line of mountains to the east, it was Darius' horse who neighed to them in greeting. At once, his companions slipped from their saddles and fell to their knees in homage. The Greeks, when they repeated this story, would claim that it had been agreed among the conspirators that 'the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne' 51 — and they added, furthermore, that Darius had cheated. His groom, it was said, had dabbled his fingers inside a mare's vulva beforehand, and then, just as the sun rose, placed them beside the nose of Darius' horse. But this was scurrilous nonsense, and typical of the Greeks. How like them to distort the holy rites of Truth!
    For it is evident, even from the unsatisfactory version that we have, that Darius' accession was marked by potent and awful ritual. The conspirators gathered in the chill of that September night not because they wished to discover who the next king might be, but because they already knew. Otanes, Darius' only conceivable rival, had already bowed to the inevitable and discounted himself as a candidate for the throne: the noblemen riding across the plain of Nisaea were celebrating a fait accompli. Blessed by the neighing of the sacred white horses, and by the mountain dawn, Darius could know himself doubly the champion of Arta. As the first rays illuminated the plain, so night, the order of Drauga, menacing and indistinct, began to fade before the brilliant light of the sun. 'So can I recognise you as strong and holy, O Mazda, when by the hand in which you hold the twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man, and by the glow of your fire whose power is the Truth, the might of Good Thought shall come to me.' 52 And now, that late September dawn, the might of Good Thought had indeed come to Nisaea, for the Liar was dead, and the Righteous Man was king.
    Or so it pleased Darius to claim. Yet the imagery, although it would suffuse his propaganda, was not his own. If it bore witness to the reverence for Arta found among all the Aryans,then it drew as well on the teachings of a far more rigorous dualism. 'The twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man': not Darius' words but those of that most fabled of visionaries, Zoroaster, the prophet of the Aryans, the man who had first revealed to a startled world that it was the battleground in a relentless war between good and evil. Here, in this war, was the great death-struggle of things - for the Prophet, continuing with his novel doctrines, had taught that the cycles of the cosmos would not keep revolving for ever, as had always been assumed, but move instead towards a mighty end, a universal apocalypse in which Truth would annihilate all falsehoods, and establish on their ruin an eternal reign of peace. Presiding over this final and decisive victory would be the Lord of Life, Wisdom and Light, Ahura Mazda himself— not, as other Iranians had always believed, one among a multitude of divinities, but the supreme, the all-powerful, the only uncreated god. From him, like fire leaping from beacon to beacon, all goodness proceeded: six great emanations of his own eternal light, the Amesha Spentas, holy and immortal; 51 a broader pantheon of beneficent spirits; the world in its many beauties; plants and animals (and, in particular, because it spent its days preying upon insects, those swarming spawn of the dark side, the hedgehog); the faithful and ever-righteous dog; and finally, noblest of all creations, man himself. 'Unblock your ears, then, to hear the Good News — gaze at the bright flames with clear-seeing thought!' the Prophet had proclaimed, alerting humanity to the great decision that confronted it. 'You have the choice as to which faith you will follow, everyone, person by person, with that freedom all are granted in the mighty test of life.' 5 ' 1 Choose wrong, and the path of the Lie, and of chaos, would be opened; choose right, and the path of order, tranquillity and hope.
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