Artaxerxes II

Artaxerxes is the Greek form of the Old Persian throne-name Artaxšaça, compounded of arta, the cosmic "truth" or right order that the royal ideology set against the Lie, and xšaça, "rule, kingship", so that the name asserts a kingship exercised through Arta.^[1] The king who bore it was not given it at birth. Ctesias, the Greek physician resident at his court and thus placed to know, records that he was first called Arsaces (Arsicas in the manuscripts); a rival tradition, that of Deinon, gave the name as Oarses.^[2] He took the throne-name only on his accession, following the clearly attested example of his father Darius II, who had been born Ochus. Darius II is the first Achaemenid for whom adoption of a throne-name is independently secure, but the evidence does not show that he introduced a practice that may have been older.^[3]

The Greeks distinguished him from the first Artaxerxes by the epithet Mnemon, "the Mindful", which Plutarch renders as Memor and glosses as a byword for an exceptional memory.^[2] The same author opens his Life by ranking the second Artaxerxes first among the Persian kings for gentleness and greatness of spirit, a judgement that sits oddly against the palace bloodletting with which the reign ended and exposes how far the surviving portraits pull in different directions.^[4] Modern accounts treat the reign as the long, stabilising centre of the fourth century: the empire neither expanded nor collapsed, and the machinery Darius I had built kept running.^[5]

Plutarch wrote centuries after the reign, as moral biography rather than annalistic history. Eran Almagor's close study treats the Life as an artistic and rhetorical whole: character governs the selection, rearrangement and modification of inherited material. The result is not a simple fall from mildness to cruelty. Plutarch keeps incompatible images in view—a restrained and moderate king and one governed by cruelty or passion—and leaves readers to test them against one another.^[6][7]

Much of the court material reached Plutarch through Ctesias, Deinon and other lost writing, but their contribution changes across the Life. Almagor finds Ctesias dominant chiefly in chapters 11–19, with details from Deinon inserted intermittently; for chapters 23–30 he posits an unidentified “common source” that may, but need not, have been Deinon. Plutarch did not simply copy these works: he omitted and rearranged episodes and introduced competing versions. An apparent disagreement between named authorities may therefore serve the biography's characterisation rather than preserve two independent reports.^[8][9][10]

The resulting portrait is deliberately unstable. Episodes of clemency and endurance stand beside executions and family catastrophe, but even the Cadusian ordeal can expose vanity rather than offer uncomplicated praise. The Life's value is therefore double: it preserves traditions otherwise lost and shows how a Greek moralist reshaped them for Roman-period readers. Court episodes can illuminate the politics of access and kinship, while their dialogue, motives and ingenious methods of murder require a different degree of confidence from the dated events of the reign.^[6][11][12]

Darius II died in 405, and the succession turned, as Xerxes's had, on the meeting of birth-order and a mother's will. The eldest son, Arsaces, was already a grown man; the second, Cyrus, held the great western command his father had given him, satrap of Lydia and commander of the forces on the sea-coast, and he had the devotion of their mother, Parysatis.^[13] Parysatis pressed for Cyrus the same argument Atossa was said to have used for Xerxes, that Arsaces had been born before Darius became king while Cyrus was born in the purple, to a reigning king; but the argument did not carry, and the elder son was crowned as Artaxerxes.^[13] The claim was a Greek commonplace by now, and Plutarch's own narrative shows it failing, which is itself a caution against reading it as Persian constitutional law.^[14]

The new king went to Pasargadae, the seat of Cyrus the founder, for the rite that made a Persian a king. Plutarch preserves the fullest description of an Achaemenid coronation anywhere in the sources: the candidate for initiation "must enter it, take off his own dress, and put on that worn by Cyrus the Elder before he became king", then eat a cake of figs, chew terebinth and drink a bowl of sour milk, and, Plutarch adds, "if there are other rituals than these they are not known to others".^[15] The sanctuary was that of a warrior goddess whom the Greeks equated with Athena and whom scholars identify with Anāhitā; the candidate divested himself of his own robes and put on the founder's, re-enacting Cyrus's path to greatness.^[16] Plutarch places the accusation at the coronation: Tissaphernes brought forward Cyrus's former tutor, who alleged that Cyrus planned to ambush the king in the sanctuary. Parysatis intervened, and Artaxerxes spared his brother and sent him back to the coast.^[13] Briant regards the temple-ambush detail as likely later royal propaganda designed to blacken the rebel's memory, while accepting that a conflict and denunciation occurred. Xenophon independently says that Tissaphernes accused Cyrus of plotting, that Artaxerxes arrested him, and that Parysatis secured his return.^[17][18] The surviving sources do not recover why the court allowed Cyrus back to Sardis. Once there, he corresponded with the king and remitted tribute, preserving an outward loyalty while he prepared his revolt in secret.^[17]

In 401 Cyrus gathered an army in Asia Minor, screening its purpose as a campaign against the Pisidians, and marched east. The force combined roughly thirteen thousand Greek mercenaries with a larger Asian mobilisation; the hoplite phalanx supplied a disciplined striking arm.^[19] The deception held long enough that only deep in the march did the Greeks learn they were bound for Babylon and the king.^[20] Cyrus crossed the Euphrates and drove into Babylonia before Artaxerxes could bar the way. The king had cut a broad trench across the plain to stop him, but did not man it, and allowed the rebel to pass within a short distance of Babylon itself before he gave battle at Cunaxa, some five hundred stades from the city.^[20] Against the reputation for indecision fixed on him in the Greek tradition, the campaign shows preparation under pressure: Artaxerxes tried to slow Cyrus, prepared the approaches to Babylon and brought to Cunaxa a disciplined army probably superior in number, though several major contingents had not yet arrived.^[19]

The battle is narrated at length only from the rebel side, by Xenophon, who fought in it; Plutarch, conscious that his readers knew that account, added only what Xenophon had passed over, praising the way Xenophon "brings it all but before our eyes, and by the vigour of his description makes his reader always a participant in the emotions and perils of the struggle".^[20] The armies met in the early afternoon. Artaxerxes drew up his scythe-bearing chariots opposite the Greeks, meaning to break their line before it closed; the Greek phalanx on Cyrus's right charged, routed the troops before it, and pursued, never coming near the king. The battle was therefore decided at the centre, where Cyrus caught sight of his brother among the royal bodyguard, charged, wounded him, and was cut down in the melee.^[20] His death ended the revolt at a stroke: an army that had all but won on its own wing found it had no cause left to fight for, since the whole enterprise had been Cyrus and the crown.

The propaganda of the aftermath was fierce, and it turned on who had killed the pretender. Artaxerxes had it proclaimed that he had struck Cyrus down with his own hand, and in Plutarch's telling the two soldiers who claimed the blow died for saying so, by two different deaths. The Carian whose blow to the ham had brought Cyrus down cried out that the kill was his alone; the king ordered him beheaded, then consigned him at his mother's request to Parysatis, whose executioners racked him on the wheel for ten days before putting him to death. Mithridates, the young Persian who had struck Cyrus first, let wine at a banquet draw the same boast from him, and the king condemned him to the lingering torture of the boats, seventeen days in the dying.^[21] The stranded Greek mercenaries were the sharper problem. Xenophon reports that their generals were seized during negotiations with the satrap Tissaphernes and executed. The rank and file elected new leaders, Xenophon among them, and fought their way north along the Tigris, through Carduchian country and the Armenian highlands, to the Black Sea. The retreat became the subject of Xenophon's Anabasis and furnished Greek readers with an unusually detailed account of campaigning deep inside the empire. It did not alter the immediate result: Cyrus was dead, his bid for the throne had failed, and Artaxerxes remained king.^[19]

Cyrus had drawn his Greeks from Sparta's world, and Sparta, now the dominant power in Greece, took up his war on the Asiatic Greeks against the king. For a decade the western satraps, Tissaphernes and then Pharnabazus, fought the Spartans in Anatolia, and in 396 the Spartan king Agesilaus campaigned in Asia with some success. Artaxerxes answered not by matching Sparta on land but by turning its rivals loose on it: Persian money financed a coalition of Athens, Thebes, Corinth and Argos, and the Corinthian War (395 to 387) pulled Agesilaus home.^[22] At sea the king's fleet, commanded by the Athenian exile Conon, destroyed Spartan naval power at Cnidus in 394. The instrument of Achaemenid policy in the fourth century was the daric and the diplomat rather than the army, and it worked: the western Greeks, unable to unite, could be played against one another indefinitely.^[23]

The war ended on the king's terms. In 387/6 the Spartan Antalcidas negotiated a general peace whose text Artaxerxes issued as a royal decree, read out from the King's seal to the assembled Greek envoys. Xenophon preserves it:

King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in Asia should belong to him, as well as Clazomenae and Cyprus among the islands, and that the other Greek cities, both small and great, should be left independent, except Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros; and these should belong, as of old, to the Athenians. But whichever of the two parties does not accept this peace, upon them I will make war, in company with those who desire this arrangement, both by land and by sea, with ships and with money.

Xenophon, Hellenica 5.1.31, trans. Brownson^[24]

The document is the high point of Achaemenid influence in Greek affairs. From the Persian side its force lies in the second sentence as much as the first: the king does not petition, he decrees, and undertakes to make war on whichever party refuses the settlement. The peace confirms the king's sovereignty over the Greek cities of Asia without a new campaign, and the autonomy guaranteed to the mainland cities is a device as well as a principle, since a Greece of small independent states, forbidden the leagues through which any one of them might grow strong, is a Greece that must keep coming to the king. The autonomy clause let Persia break up Sparta's hegemony without conquering anyone.^[22] The mechanism outlasted the moment: the peace was reaffirmed and reissued through the following decades as the "Common Peace", each renewal sought at the Persian court and granted under royal guarantee, so that for a generation the King of Kings was the acknowledged umpire of the Greek world, courted in turn by Sparta, Athens and Thebes.^[23] What the Athenian orators denounced as a national disgrace was, in the imperial reckoning, the quiet recovery of a lost frontier and a lasting hold over Greek affairs, bought with money rather than men.

Against this success in the west stood an unbroken failure in the south-west. Egypt had risen in the last years of Darius II under a dynast of Sais, Amyrtaeus, and by 404 he ruled at least the Delta as an independent pharaoh; his revolt, unlike the many earlier Egyptian risings, held.^[25] The loss of the whole of Egypt was confirmed early in Artaxerxes's reign, and it opened a secession of some sixty years, through the native Twenty-eighth, Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Dynasties, during which Egypt remained outside the empire and became a base for stirring trouble in the Levant.^[25] The failure was not for want of trying. A great expedition under Pharnabazus and the Athenian general Iphicrates in 373 reached the Delta and was defeated as much by the Nile flood and the divided command as by Egyptian arms; further attempts foundered on the difficulty of moving a large army across the Sinai and forcing the river's mouths.^[26] Egypt was recovered only in 343, under Artaxerxes III, and even that reconquest proved brief. The loss mattered beyond the tribute of a rich province. An independent Egypt was a paymaster and a refuge for the empire's enemies: it hired the same Greek mercenaries the king relied on, backed the western rebels, and gave the Levantine cities a neighbour to defect to, so that the recurring troubles of Phoenicia, Cyprus and Cilicia through the reign fed on Egyptian money and Egyptian example.^[27] For the whole of Artaxerxes II's long reign Egypt, one of the empire's richest provinces and a major grain producer, lay outside it. The secession demonstrated that Achaemenid power, so effective at securing the Asiatic Greeks by diplomacy, could fail against a determined province at the far end of a desert march.^[28]

The last decade of the reign saw a series of rebellions among the governors and dynasts of Asia Minor, which Diodorus, following a Greek source, worked up into a single coordinated uprising, the "Great Revolt of the Satraps", that supposedly cut off half the king's revenue and brought the empire to the edge of ruin. The episode has become the test case for how far the fourth-century empire had decayed, and the modern verdict has moved sharply against the ancient dramatisation.^[29][30]

The maximal reading takes Diodorus at his word: satraps such as Ariobarzanes of Hellespontine Phrygia, Datames in Cappadocia, Orontes and Mausolus of Caria, joined with the pharaoh Tachos of Egypt and the Spartans in a common front that nearly toppled Artaxerxes. Briant, the fullest modern student of the reign, dismantles this. The revolts were not simultaneous but strung across years; the rebels distrusted and betrayed one another as readily as they fought the king, several changing sides for reward; and Diodorus's own figures, half the revenue lost yet the war still funded, do not cohere.^[29][30] The mediating position grants the symptoms while denying the diagnosis: there were real revolts, and Egypt's independence gave them a haven, but they were, in Briant's summary, "localized and never had a goal of imposing a king who was not of royal stock".^[31] No rebel tried to found a kingdom of his own or to replace the dynasty, because, as he puts it, "there was in fact no alternative to Achaemenid dynastic continuity"; the crown reabsorbed the defectors and the west was pacified by Artaxerxes's son Ochus before the reign closed.^[32] What would settle the question is Persian-side documentation of the 360s in the west, which is almost wholly lacking, so that the "Great Revolt" survives chiefly as an artefact of a Hellenocentric source anxious to read decline into the empire. On the evidence, the reign's western troubles were a chronic instability the centre managed, not a mortal crisis it barely survived.^[33]

Plutarch gives Artaxerxes a difficult late campaign against the Cadusians, a people of the mountains south-west of the Caspian. Diodorus preserves a closely similar account, and the Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire judges the two versions to be literary doublets, one dependent on the other; the campaign's historicity and placement are therefore uncertain.^[34][35]

In Plutarch's version the country was barren and broken, the army ran short of food, and the baggage animals were slaughtered for meat until a horse's head fetched a fortune. The author stresses the king's bearing in the disaster. Artaxerxes went on foot at the head of the column over the roughest ground, quiver on his back and shield in hand, and let the soldiers cut trees from his own game-parks for firewood.^[34] Teribazus extricated the army by approaching the Cadusians' two kings separately and inducing each to make peace before the other could do so.^[34] The scene is not straightforward praise. Almagor reads it as deliberately equivocal: endurance and self-discipline remain possible, but the same details can expose a king governed by vanity, while Tiribazus rather than Artaxerxes devises the escape. It belongs to the Life's conflict between restraint and passion; it does not turn the uncertain campaign into a secure historical rebuttal of Greek stereotypes.^[34][36]

For a century and a half the Achaemenid kings had named only Ahura Mazdā in their inscriptions, with at most a reference to "the other gods who are". Artaxerxes II broke that reticence. In his building texts at Susa and Ecbatana he sets two further deities beside the Wise Lord by name, the goddess Anāhitā and the god Mithra. The clearest case is the Susa palace inscription (A²Sa), which records the rebuilding of a hall of Darius I destroyed by fire and closes with a prayer to the new triad:

This palace Darius my great-great-grandfather built; later under Artaxerxes my grandfather it was burned; by the favor of Ahuramazda, Anaitis, and Mithras, this palace I built. May Ahuramazda, Anaitis, and Mithras protect me from all evil, and that which I have built may they not shatter nor harm.

Artaxerxes II, A²Sa, trans. Kent^[37]

The same triad recurs in his texts at Ecbatana (A²Ha) and at Susa (A²Sd), always with Ahura Mazdā keeping the first place; and where the king recites the old creation-formula of his ancestors, at Ecbatana (A²Hc), the great god is still Ahura Mazdā alone, "who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man", so that the two further gods are added to the protective prayer without displacing the Wise Lord from the account of the world.^[38] The Greek sources supply a matching notice: Plutarch reports that the king consigned a rival's mistress, Aspasia, to a temple, saying that "he appointed her a priestess of the Artemis of Ecbatana, who bears the name of Anaitis, in order that she might remain chaste for the rest of her life", and the Babylonian priest Berossus credited Artaxerxes with setting up images of Anāhitā in the great cities of the empire, from Susa and Ecbatana to Damascus and Sardis.^[39][40]

The religious meaning of the change remains disputed (see Anāhitā and Mithra). The positions run from a genuine religious revolution, the king promoting long-popular Iranian deities and even a novel image-cult into the state religion, to the minimal view that two gods always worshipped simply surface for the first time in the epigraphic habit. The inscriptions do not settle the matter: their wording is inconsistent, and Artaxerxes III, in his one surviving text at Persepolis, kept Mithra beside the Wise Lord but let the goddess fall away. The king's own wording establishes a narrower point: with Artaxerxes II the royal record first speaks of gods other than Ahura Mazdā by name, and it does so in the mouth of the king who reigned longest.^[41]

The reign's monuments are modest beside those of Darius and Xerxes, but real, and they concentrate where the fourth-century court now spent its year, at Susa and Ecbatana rather than Persepolis. The A²Sa inscription commemorates the restoration of the Apadana at Susa, the great audience-hall his ancestor Darius had raised and a fire had gutted in the intervening century, an act of pious reconstruction that also let the king restate the whole royal genealogy back to Achaemenes.^[37]

Other Susa texts record a palace built, in the king's own phrase, as a "pleasant retreat", a paradayadam, the Old Persian word that stands behind the Greek paradeisos and names the walled and planted royal garden (see the paradise garden); it is one of the earliest attestations of the term in a royal inscription.^[42] At Ecbatana too he built and inscribed. His own tomb was cut high in the rock of the mountain behind Persepolis, in the cross-shaped façade Darius had established at Naqš-e Rostam: the king stands on a stepped throne borne up by the peoples of the empire, before the fire-altar and the winged symbol. The composition follows the type established by Darius without reproducing every detail. The building record is small but its message is continuity, a king presenting himself as the faithful restorer of what his forefathers made.^[43]

The court is where the reign's ancient reputation was made, and unmade. Parysatis dominates the sources' picture of it. Cyrus had been her favourite, and after Cunaxa she is shown hunting down the men who had a hand in his death and his mutilation, reaching each by a different route: the boasting Carian she begged from the king after sentence had already been passed, to die at her executioners' leisure; Mithridates she reached through her chief eunuch, who teased the fatal boast out of him at table so that the king himself would do the condemning; and Masabates, the royal eunuch who had taken the head and hand from Cyrus's corpse, she won from Artaxerxes at dice, in a wager she had contrived, and had flayed alive.^[44] Her feud with the king's wife Stateira is the set-piece. Ctesias and Deinon accuse Parysatis of poisoning her daughter-in-law with a bird smeared on one side of a knife: "there is a little Persian bird which has no excrement, but is all full of fat inside; and the creature is thought to live upon air and dew", the rhyntaces, cut in two so that only the victim's portion carried the poison, and Stateira died in convulsions.^[44] The king suspected his mother and, though he did not kill her, sent her away for a time to Babylon.

The story is Ctesias at his most novelistic, and its details differ between his telling and Deinon's, the surest sign of how far such court narratives are shaped for effect. The modern reading takes the vendetta as a literary elaboration of harem intrigue rather than reportage, of a piece with the whole Greek image of the effeminate, poison-ridden oriental palace that Ctesias did so much to found.^[9] What the tradition does attest, beneath the romance, is something real about the shape of Achaemenid power: at a court where the king was the sole source of favour, physical access to him was the currency of politics, and the people who had it, the queen mother, the wives, the eunuchs of the chamber, wielded an influence the Greek writers could see but could only explain as decadence.^[45]

Artaxerxes outlived his own designated heirs, and the reign that had begun with one brother's revolt ended in a war among his sons. He had named the eldest, Darius, crown prince, granting him the upright tiara that marked the successor; but Darius was drawn into a conspiracy against his father, was tried before the royal judges, and was executed.^[46] Of the remaining sons, Ochus schemed against the two who stood in his way: he drove the mild Ariaspes to suicide by a campaign of false warnings that his father meant to kill him, and had the favoured Arsames murdered.^[46] The old king, Plutarch says, learning of Arsames's death, "could not hold out even a little while, but straightway expired of grief and despair".^[46] According to Plutarch's late account, Ochus succeeded as Artaxerxes III and then eliminated rival members of the royal house to secure the throne; the scale and sequence belong to that hostile literary tradition rather than a contemporary Persian record.^[46]

Plutarch closes the Life with a figure that is itself a lesson in the sources: "He had lived ninety-four years, and had been king sixty-two, and had the reputation of being gentle and fond of his subjects".^[46] The reign of sixty-two years is impossible on the Babylonian and Greek dating alike, which put his accession in 405/4 and his death in 359/8, a reign of about forty-six years, still the longest of the dynasty; the inflated number shows why Plutarch's precise-looking figures must be checked against the dated record.^[47] The Persian evidence gives the hard anchor: dated business tablets and the astronomical record carry his regnal years to the end, and fix the transfer of power to his son within the following months.^[48]

Artaxerxes II became a central exhibit in the older picture of fourth-century Achaemenid decline. Cyrus's march into Babylonia seemed to expose military weakness; Egyptian independence showed that a major province could escape; the western satrapal revolts appeared to turn governors against the centre; and Greek stories of palace violence made the king look unable to govern even his own household. Joined into a single sequence, these episodes could be read as the beginning of an irreversible fall. The sequence was persuasive partly because the surviving narratives are densest precisely where Greeks fought Persians or imagined the royal court.^[49][9]

Briant's reconstruction changed the scale of the diagnosis without making the reign's failures disappear. It separated events that Diodorus and later decline narratives had made cumulative. The western revolts were serious but did not form one simultaneous movement with a common programme or an alternative royal claimant. Egypt was a different kind of loss: durable, strategically costly and sustained across the whole reign.^[33][28] That distinction matters. A collection of regional crises could tax the court without amounting to the progressive collapse of the imperial system, while Egypt's success still sets a firm limit on any account of effortless stability.

The king's position in Greek affairs supplies the strongest counterweight to the decline model. The King's Peace shows that the crown could convert money, naval power and rivalry among the Greek states into an enforceable settlement issued in the king's name. Its repeated renewal kept Greek powers negotiating at the Persian court for decades.^[22][23] This capacity coexisted with repeated difficulty in recovering Egypt. The same reign could therefore be strong in one theatre and ineffective in another, a pattern obscured when every setback is treated as evidence of general decay.

Waters places Artaxerxes II at the stabilising centre of the fourth century, while Briant's source-critical history rejects a single downward curve from Cunaxa to Alexander.^[5][49] Ruzicka's regional study keeps the cost of Egypt visible within that revision.^[28] These approaches converge on a more exact problem than whether the empire was simply strong or weak: how a durable centre managed serious failures at its western and south-western margins. The forty-six-year reign does not by itself prove institutional strength, but its dynastic continuity, command of Greek diplomacy and ability to absorb western rebellions are incompatible with the ancient image of a state already in terminal collapse.^[49][5]