10 DESTINY DISRUPTED
and icons, laying the basis for the hostility toward representation in reli-
gious art that reemerged forcefully in Islam.
Sometimes Zoroaster, or at least his followers, called Ahura Mazda "the
Wise Lord" and spoke as if he was actually the creator of the entire uni-
verse and as if it was he who had divided all of creation into two opposing
aspects a short time after the moment of creation. Thus, Zoroaster's dual-
ism inched toward monotheism, but it never quite arrived there. In the
end, for the ancient Persian Zoroastrians, two deities with equal power in-
habited the universe, and human beings were the rope in a tug of war be-
tween them.
A Zoroastrian priest was called a magus, the plural of which is magi: the
three "wise men of the East" who, according to the Christian story,
brought myrrh and frankincense to the infant Jesus in his stable were
Zoroastrian priests. The word magician also derives from magi. These
priests were thought by others {and sometimes themselves claimed) to pos-
sess miraculous powers.
In the late days of the empire, the Persians broke into the Mediter-
ranean world and made a brief, big splash in Western world history. Per-
sian emperor Darius sallied west to punish the Greeks. I say "punish," not
"invade" or "conquer," because from the Persian point of view the so-called
Persian Wars were not some seminal clash between two civilizations. The
Persians saw the Greeks as the primitive inhabitants of some small cities on
the far western edges of the civilized world, cities that implicitly belonged
to the Persians, even though they were too far away to rule directly. Em-
peror Darius wanted the Greeks merely to confirm that they were his sub-
jects by sending him a jar of water and a box of soil in symbolic tribute.
The Greeks refused. Darius collected an army to go teach the Greeks a les-
son they would never forget, but the very size of his army was as much a
liability as an asset: How do you direct so many men at such a distance?
How do you keep them supplied? Darius had ignored the first principle of
military strategy: never fight a land war in Europe. In the end, it was the
Greeks who taught the Persians an unforgettable lesson-a lesson that they
quickly forgot, however, for less than one generation later, Darius's
dimwitted son Xerxes decided to avenge his father by repeating and com-
pounding his mistakes. Xerxes, too, came limping home, and that was the
end of Persia's European adventure.