NOTES for Dan 6:1-28
The image of a pagan ruler in the Book of Daniel is not painted only in black. Such a ruler is not always and not necessarily the embodiment of pure evil, a fiend of hell with nothing human in him. On the one hand there is Belshazzar, a cynic ready to violate any norms and rules and trample any holy things because for him there is nothing sacred at all, no norms or rules except his own will and his own desires. On the other hand there is Darius, a person of a completely different sort, with his own ideas of good and evil and corresponding rules of life and government, which in general Darius is ready to follow. Forced to throw to the lions a man whom Darius himself understands to be innocent and undeserving of execution, the ruler can find no peace because he has violated moral norms that are obvious to him and binding upon him.
But here the laws of the state begin to operate, that very state machine which takes no account of moral norms, just as no machine takes account of them at all. Its symbol becomes the irrevocability of a law adopted in the Persian Empire and its absolute binding force for everyone without exception. Giving orders and signing decrees, the king becomes their prisoner. He cannot revoke his decisions; he cannot stop the machine he himself has set in motion. Near him and around him are courtiers who will not allow the king to do so, even if the king himself wants it. The retinue really does, to a certain degree, make the king, often a very cruel king, and so it has been in every age.
Of course, much here depends on the concrete person, on the extent to which the person himself is ready to follow the rules of the game and allow the state machine to define him and his existence as a person, as a politician, as a statesman. Yet, as has often happened in history, a person who does not want to play by the rules ends up outside the game, whether voluntarily or by force. Understanding this, people who sought spiritual and everyday independence have in every age tried to stay away from affairs of state and politics. Often they were guided not by cowardice and not by snobbish escapism, but by a sober assessment of the situation and the realism proper to people who know the true state of things.
There have, of course, been exceptions: people who, even in high posts and at the head of a state, did what they considered right. But such people have been few, and their fate has never been simple. Darius, the hero of the Book of Daniel, as one can see, is not one of them. He is left only to grieve while continuing to do what the machine he himself has set in motion demands. In his spiritual condition, the condition of a pagan who has fallen under the power of the ruler of this world, he has no other choice.