The Persian Empire, the Greeks and politics.

Collection "Institute of Science and Technology of Antiquity (ISTA)"

The Achaemenid Persian Empire fascinated the Greeks, who perceived it in a very distorted way, and who misunderstood its functioning. In the ^5th century BC, its observation fueled their political reflection, alongside stasis , the term by which they designated the internal conflicts of their cities. In this double exercise, Herodotus, the Tragics and the Sophists thought about politics, and they prepared the birth of political theory in the following century. The debate on the best constitution stems from it: Herodotus projects it onto the Persian conspirators of 522 (III, 80-82). The crisis which broke out that year in the Persian Empire was due to the fact that the succession of Cyrus, who died in 530 BC, was not settled, although he had designated his son Cambyses to succeed him. The latter probably compromised this process himself, by having his brother Bardiya eliminated, by distorting for this purpose the originally Babylonian ritual of the royal substitute, ignored by the Greeks as such, but transformed by them in a totally unconscious way in the mode of doubling and resemblance. The instrument of this machination, the magus Gaumāta, had become Bardiya, by virtue of the ritual itself, and he claimed to reign in place of Cambyses even before his death, which apparently occurred accidentally. Darius, probably cousin of Cambyses, overthrew the magus with 6 conspirators, to reign in his turn, claiming to restore dynastic legitimacy. The constitutional debate that precedes his accession in Herodotus is based on an elementary arithmetic constantly opposing the small number, reduced to the number one, a slightly larger number, but which remains limited, and the large number. This distinction is found between monarchy, the power of one, oligarchy, the power of a minority, and democracy, the power of the many. The Greeks applied it to the political field, while the Indian world distributed Dumézilian functions according to the same criterion. The Greek historiography of the Median and Persian kings is based on a typology of equally tri-functional inspiration, which reserves a role for each of them: founding and organizing king, warrior king, sovereign linked to the Third Function. This typology is not a rigid straitjacket, and it adapts to each of the reigns, and to each of the monarchs.