Artaxerxes III

The king bore two names. His personal name, given in Greek as Ochus (Ôchos) and in the Babylonian tablets as Umakuš or Umasu, was the name he had carried as a prince; on becoming king he took the dynastic throne name Artaxerxes, Old Persian Artaxšaçā, "whose reign is through arta", the truth or right order that stands at the centre of Achaemenid royal ideology (see arta). Rüdiger Schmitt records the throne name as that of Ochus, son of Artaxerxes II and Stateira.^[1] The reading of the personal name was long uncertain: it was earlier given as Umasu, and Schmitt first established the correct form Umakuš, the same name his grandfather Darius II had borne before his own accession.^[2] The Babylonian usage is explicit that the two names belong to one man, as a chronicle heading puts it: "[Year] 14, Umasu, who is called Artaxerxes".^[3]

The exact year of accession is not quite fixed, and the uncertainty is itself informative. Babylonian documents date the change of reign to 359, but Polyaenus reports that Ochus concealed his father's death for ten months while letters circulated in the old king's name commanding that Ochus be proclaimed.^[4] If that report is trustworthy, Ochus had not been the designated heir, and his official reign may only have begun in 358/7. The scholarship therefore gives the reign as 359/8 to 338, the double date registering both the death of Artaxerxes II and the moment the succession was made public.^[5]

No connected Persian narrative of the reign survives, and the surviving names do not represent the same number of independent witnesses. Kuhrt's survey of the classical tradition traces fourth-century Persica through much later authors: Ephorus fed Diodorus, Plutarch selected from lost writers including Deinon, and Pompeius Trogus survives only in Justin's epitome.^[6] The Companion makes the consequence explicit. Diodorus and Plutarch preserve overlapping channels that may also include Heracleides of Cyme and writers no longer identifiable, while the parallel in Trogus and Justin was probably not independent.^[7]

Plutarch's closing contrast between the gentle Artaxerxes II and a son "who outstripped all in cruelty and bloodlust" therefore belongs to a literary genealogy, not to an eyewitness dossier.^[8] Kuhrt identifies Deinon's Persica, probably written in Asia Minor in the 330s, as Plutarch's principal source for this group of court intrigues.^[9] Waters describes the lurid accession tales as "like high romance, probably inspired by Ctesias' Persica" (see Ctesias).^[10] Briant likewise treats the excessive cruelty attributed to Ochus as a recurrent feature of Greek court narrative rather than a quality unique to him.^[11]

Repetition shows that a story circulated; it does not by itself supply corroboration. That rule matters for the accession massacres, the Cadusian episodes, the Apis story and the poison narrative. It does not make those reports false. It lowers the evidential value of apparent agreement when later authors are reworking the same small body of material.^[7] Babylonian tablets, royal building and the outcome of the Egyptian campaign provide independent checks on particular claims, but none supplies a continuous counter-narrative.^[12][13]

The non-Greek record is a control on the literary narrative, but it is neither complete nor evenly distributed. Babylonian documentation contracts sharply after the revolts of 484 BCE. The Companion estimates that the next century and a half preserves roughly a quarter of the material available for the first fifty years of Persian rule. Late Achaemenid archives from Borsippa are rare, though a small group from the Ezida temple belongs to Artaxerxes III's reign.^[14]

The great Persepolis administrative archives do not bridge the gap. The Fortification tablets date mainly from 509 to 493 BCE and the Treasury tablets mostly from 492 to 457, well before Ochus became king.^[15] One Babylonian document shows what the later traces can and cannot do. CT 49 4, a letter order from year 5 of Artaxerxes III, concerns barley from the previous year owed by the Ezida temple. Pirngruber reads it most plausibly as evidence of occasional arrears in payment.^[16] It fixes a transaction within a working institution; it does not justify calling the whole reign orderly or disordered.

Documentary silence is therefore not a verdict on government. The tablets can settle names and dates, preserve a deportation from Sidon, and supply the formula used at the king's death. Monumental evidence establishes royal work at Persepolis. Neither corpus narrates the western wars or the Egyptian campaign, for which Diodorus remains indispensable. The result is an asymmetrical history: precise documentary points interrupt a broad literary account whose motives and causal explanations still require source criticism.

The stories of the accession are the sharpest instance of the problem. Late Latin writers describe a bloodbath. Valerius Maximus has the new king "buried Atossa alive, who was both his sister and his stepmother. He locked his uncle and more than 100 sons and grandsons in an empty courtyard and had them killed in a hail of arrows"; Justin and Curtius add that eighty of his brothers were murdered in a single day.^[17] Briant notes that this "presentation fits perfectly with the despicable image of Artaxerxes III in the ancient literature", and cautions that even if the tradition preserves something real, "all that can be concluded from it is that Ochus had made enemies at court before his accession".^[18]

Set beside this, the sober notices are strikingly quiet. Diodorus registers the accession in a single flat clause, "Ochus, who changed his name to Artaxerxes", taking over the kingdom with none of Plutarch's melodrama.^[19] The Babylonian dating leaves no room for a drawn-out war of succession: the throne passed, on the tablet evidence, between November 359 and April 358. The 2021 Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire concludes that, "despite Plutarch's account, Ochus/Artaxerxes III appears to have succeeded his father without any notable conflict", and that the historical value of the detailed depictions of intrigue and court excess "should ... be set very low".^[20] Some killing of rivals at the outset of a reign is entirely plausible, and Maria Brosius accepts that Ochus had to rid himself of his brothers Ariaspes and Arsames; but the eighty-brothers massacre is best read as the tradition dramatising a normal, if brutal, securing of the throne.^[21]

Ochus inherited a west in disorder, but not a single coordinated rebellion. Modern research treats Diodorus’s “Great Satraps’ Revolt” as a bundle of local conflicts whose participants had conflicting interests and no coherent strategy.^[22] Several governors of Asia Minor had nevertheless acted independently and maintained their own Greek mercenaries. An early act of policy attributed to the king by the Scholia on Demosthenes struck directly at this. "The king of the Persians sent an order to the coastal satraps to disband their mercenary armies (ta mistophorika strateumata), on the grounds of the enormous expenses they were incurring", and the mercenaries so released drifted to the Athenian general Chares.^[23] Stephen Ruzicka reads the order as a deliberate stroke to ensure that no official kept "even the nucleus of a force which would allow him to act independently".^[24] Briant is more sceptical of the report itself, suspecting that the source "has attributed to Artaxerxes III an attitude often attributed to the Persians by the Greeks".^[25]

Whatever its exact form, western resistance narrowed. The order “was followed by all, apart from Artabazus”, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, whose revolt was in time put down; Artabazus fled to the court of Philip of Macedon, and Orontes too was brought back to obedience.^[26] By the mid-350s these separate western challenges had been contained and central authority restored across Asia Minor and, for the moment, the Phoenician coast. The restoration was carried through as much by the king's generals, above all Mentor of Rhodes, as by the king in person, and it set the platform for the recovery of Egypt.^[27]

In Ruzicka’s reading, the disband order addressed a fiscal and command problem in the west: money to hire Greek soldiers could give an individual governor a ready nucleus of force. Removing those troops limited that capacity, while the discharged men’s movement to an Athenian general shows how mobile, and how independent of any single master, the mercenary market had become.^[24] The wars that followed were fought on the Persian side largely by these same professionals under commanders like Mentor, so that the instrument of the western revolts became, in the king's hands, the instrument of their suppression.^[27]

Early in the reign Ochus led, or renewed, a war against the Cadusians, the mountain peoples of the south-western Caspian who had defied Persian control for generations. Justin and Diodorus preserve a single vivid scene from it. In Diodorus's telling, when a Cadusian champion challenged the Persians to single combat, it was the future Darius III, then a young officer called Codomannus, who answered:

Once, when king Artaxerxes (III) was campaigning against the Cadusians, one of them with a wide reputation for strength and courage challenged a volunteer among the Persians to fight in single combat ... but Darius alone entered the contest and slew the challenger, being honoured in consequence by the king with rich gifts.

Diodorus Siculus 17.6, trans. Brosius^[28]

The episode is the beginning of Codomannus's rise, and Ruzicka suggests that his fame from it may in time have overshadowed the king's own achievement in the war.^[29] How much of the campaign is history is uncertain. The Companion observes that the accounts of the Cadusian wars in Plutarch and Diodorus "are literary doublets, one account dependent on the other", so that the reality behind them is hard to fix.^[30] Whatever its historicity, the scene presents the reign as opening with the king asserting himself in person against a rebellious frontier, part of the reputation for energy that even hostile sources allow him.

Egypt had broken away under Amyrtaeus around 404, near the start of Artaxerxes II's reign, and a great expedition to recover it had failed disastrously in 373. Ochus made the recovery of the province his own goal, and his first attempt, in the winter of 351/350, failed as well. Briant stresses how little is actually known of it: "we have not a shred of corroborative evidence of their attacks on Egypt prior to the moment when Artaxerxes himself summoned his army and suffered a defeat in 351".^[31] The pharaoh Nectanebo II, with Greek mercenaries and the natural defences of the Delta, held the frontier.

The reverse mattered beyond Egypt. Isocrates, writing to Philip a few years later, used it to mock the whole empire as rotten, saying that the king had "retired from Egypt not only defeated but laughed at" and scorned as unfit "to be a king or to command an army".^[32] The failure also encouraged fresh revolt: the news that the Great King could be beaten ran along the Levantine coast and helped touch off the rising that centred on Sidon. The image of a moribund Persia, which the modern reader inherits partly from Isocrates, belongs to this brief interval and not to the reign as a whole. Ochus answered the humiliation within a few years, and answered it completely.

The Phoenician cities rose against Persia in the mid-340s, provoked, Diodorus says, by the arrogance of the Persian officials quartered among them. Sidon, the richest of them, led the revolt under its king Tennes, drove the satraps Belesys and Mazaeus out of the region, and looked to Nectanebo of Egypt for support. Ochus marched from Babylon in person with a great army. Faced with it, Tennes turned traitor and tried to buy his own safety by handing over the city, but the surrender did not soften the king's revenge:

When Tennes, the ruler of Sidon, learnt the size of the Persian force, he ... decided to make arrangements for his own safety ... the king maintained his merciless rage and had all the five hundred holding olive branches shot down ... the king put Tennes to death as he thought him to be of no further use ... They say that those destroyed by the fire ... were more than forty thousand ... the other cities, terrified, surrendered to the Persians.

Diodorus Siculus 16.43–45, trans. Kuhrt^[33]

The forty thousand and the total destruction are almost certainly exaggerated. Briant observes that "Sidon was not obliterated from the map nor was its population entirely eliminated", and the Cambridge Ancient History notes flatly that "there is no doubt that this story of the city's destruction is exaggerated, since Sidon is mentioned as a city of some importance when Alexander arrived in Phoenicia in 332".^[34][35] What is not in doubt is the outcome: Phoenicia and its neighbours submitted, the coast was secured, and the road to Egypt lay open. The severity, real or magnified, served the strategic purpose of terrifying the other cities into surrender.

In 343 Ochus led the main campaign against Egypt himself, with Mentor of Rhodes among his commanders and the eunuch Bagoas prominent in the high command. Mentor had served Nectanebo and was, in Ruzicka's phrase, "thoroughly familiar with Nectanebo's installations and defense plans", an intelligence advantage that told heavily.^[36] The frontier fortresses of Pelusium and Bubastis fell, and Nectanebo withdrew from the Delta and abandoned his kingdom:

So he gave up the kingship and taking most of his possessions with him fled to Ethiopia ... After taking over all of Egypt and destroying the walls of the most important cities, Artaxerxes looted the shrines ... he installed Pherendates as satrap of Egypt ... and left with his army for Babylon carrying off a lot of money and booty and having earned great glory for his achievements.

Diodorus Siculus 16.51, trans. Kuhrt^[37]

The campaign restored Egypt to Achaemenid rule after about sixty years of independence. "And so Egypt returned to the Achaemenid fold, nearly sixty years after Amyrtaeus's secession", with a Persian satrap once more resident at Memphis.^[38] Briant judges that Ochus "had made it his personal goal not only to reestablish order in Phoenicia but also to reconquer Egypt", a proof of prowess that in turn justified the power he had seized in troubled circumstances.^[38] Ruzicka argues that the victory was earned, not lucky: the reconquest was "a well-conceived and perfectly executed" campaign, "not the consequence of any supposedly fatal shortcomings on the part of Nectanebo II".^[39]

The operational structure is important because Diodorus gives the Greek commanders the most visible roles. Artaxerxes divided his army into three coordinated strike forces rather than driving one mass against a single Delta position. Within each force, the Greek contingent was paired with a comparable Persian contingent under a trusted Persian of high rank. This arrangement added strength, checked the danger of independent action and allowed the forces to operate far from the king's own command.^[40] It was a Persian plan that incorporated Greek specialists under paired command, not a Greek army rescuing an otherwise incapable empire.

With Egypt recovered, the Companion concludes, the king "succeeded in restoring the empire nearly to its borders under Darius I", so that "by the middle of the fourth century, the Achaemenid Empire was at the height of its power".^[41] The empire stood whole again for the last time in its history.^[42]

Later Egyptian and Greek traditions cast the reconquest through priestly hostility to Ochus, and that hostility shaped the surviving portrait. He was said to have plundered the temples, deported sacred books, and, in the worst of the stories, to have killed and eaten the Apis bull, the living image of the god, setting up an ass to be worshipped in its place. Aelian gives the fullest version: "the Egyptians called him 'Donkey' in the language of the country ... His response was to sacrifice brutally the Apis bull", killing it, the story runs, in honour of the ass.^[43] The Egyptian voice comes through the Demotic Chronicle, which laments that "our ponds and islands are filled with weeping ... the Medes will bring them to ruination; they will take away their houses and dwell therein".^[44]

The particular story of the Apis killing is widely doubted. The same charge had already been fixed on Cambyses, the first Persian conqueror of Egypt, more than a century and a half before (see Cambyses II). Briant notes that Ochus is repeatedly made into another Cambyses, while Kuhrt observes that the alleged outrages echo the older cycle closely enough to cast doubt on their historicity.^[45][46] The Cambridge Ancient History calls the bull-killing motif folklore and gives the necessary verdict as "not proven", or even "not guilty".^[47]

Almagor's analysis of Deinon shows how the transfer worked. Plutarch explicitly credited Deinon for the story of Ochus answering the Egyptian insult by sacrificing the bull; Deinon's version adapts Herodotus's Cambyses episode to a later conqueror and gives it a new verbal turn.^[48] The Companion similarly treats the alignment with Cambyses as an effective hostile construction.^[49] This source genealogy does not disprove every report of plunder after the conquest. It distinguishes a plausible record of exaction and temple loss from the specific Apis episode, whose repetition leads back to literary adaptation rather than to a second independent witness.

Against the literary image of a destroyer stands the king's own record at Persepolis, which shows a ruler working within Achaemenid building and dynastic traditions. His single Old Persian inscription there, A³Pa, cut on a stairway, is a plain restatement of the royal formulae:

A great god is Auramazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man ... who made me, Artaxerxes, king, one king of many, one lord of many ... Artaxerxes, the king, proclaims: This stone stairway I have built in my time.

Artaxerxes III, A³Pa, trans. Lecoq and Stolper, reproduced in Kuhrt^[50]

The closing formula sets Mithra beside Ahura Mazdā, asking that both protect the king and "this country and that which (has been) built by me", the wording his grandfather Artaxerxes II had introduced (see Mithra). Ochus raised a palace in the south-western corner of the terrace and added a relief-decorated western stairway to the palace of Darius I, reusing older figures of tribute-bearers.^[51] He also followed Artaxerxes II in placing his tomb in the mountain directly above the Persepolis terrace rather than at Naqš-e Rostam.^[52] The rock-cut Tomb VI, with the enthroned king before the fire altar and two registers of throne-bearers, is conventionally attributed to him.^[53]

Dandamaev doubted that Artaxerxes ever resided at Persepolis and wrote that the king was buried where "in all probability he never had been during his lifetime".^[54] Briant answers the larger claim from the monuments. Construction and restoration at the royal residences continued through the fourth century, and Artaxerxes III's work is especially clear in the south-west corner of the terrace, where A³Pa names his stairway and the relief programme reworks older royal forms.^[55] The programme proves patronage and dynastic continuity; it cannot, by itself, reconstruct the king's itinerary.

Ochus died in 338, and the manner of his death is the sharpest unresolved question of the reign. The Greek tradition is emphatic that he was murdered. Diodorus names the agent: the chiliarch Bagoas, "a eunuch in body but a fierce villain by nature, killed Ochus with poison by means of a certain doctor, and promoted Arses, the king's youngest son, to the kingship".^[56] Aelian makes the poisoning Egyptian revenge for the Apis, completing the hostile portrait by giving the conqueror a fitting literary punishment. Older modern histories often repeated the murder without qualification.^[57][58]

The Babylonian evidence supports a different reading. A contemporary astronomical diary records the succession in the neutral formula used for an ordinary death, the throne passing to Ochus's son Arshu: "Month Ululu ... Umakush (went to his) fate ... his son, sat on the throne".^[59] Kuhrt reads the conventional Akkadian phrase as natural death, contrasting it with the explicit wording used when Xerxes was murdered.^[60] Brosius follows that argument and treats Arses's succession as the expected consequence of his father's natural death.^[61] The diary fixes the date and does not narrate a killing; the natural-death conclusion rests on the formula and on comparison with the entry for Xerxes.

Briant does not resolve the conflict in favour of the diary. On page 775 he identifies poison as a frequently repeated motif of Greek court literature, yet on the same page he accepts the murder of Artaxerxes III as the premise for reconstructing opposition to the king.^[62] The Companion likewise questions whether Bagoas alone could make and unmake kings, while still allowing a violent death and a broader court faction behind it.^[63] Those positions weaken the lone-eunuch melodrama without discarding murder.

The documentary evidence has therefore not produced a simple new consensus. Kuhrt and Brosius favour natural causes; Briant and the Greek narrative accept murder, while disagreeing about how literally to read the role assigned to Bagoas. The Babylonian formula is contemporary but indirect on cause, and the Greek accounts are explicit but entangled in a familiar poison story. A fuller diary record for 338, or a Babylonian notice as explicit as the one for Xerxes, would materially change the balance. On the surviving evidence, both natural death and court murder remain live readings.

Whatever killed the father, the son did not last. Bagoas set the youngest son, Arses, on the throne as Artaxerxes IV, and when the young king proved harder to control than expected, killed him too. Diodorus tells the sequel:

Bagoas anticipated his plan and killed Arses together with his children while he was still in his third year of reign ... The royal house was now bereft and there was no one to succeed to power by right of birth.

Diodorus Siculus 17.5, trans. Kuhrt^[64]

With the direct line extinct, Bagoas set up "one of the friends called Darius", a man outside the royal house, in the boy-king's place. A Babylonian text known as the Dynastic Prophecy independently registers the same short reign and its violent end: "for two (?) years [he will exercise the kingship]. That king a eunuch [will murder]".^[65] Strabo compresses the whole collapse of the direct line into a sentence: "the successors of Dareius [I] came to an end with Arses. Arses was slain by Bagoüs the eunuch, who set up as king ... another Dareius, who was not of the royal family".^[66] The new king, Artashata, was a member of a collateral Achaemenid branch, a grandson of a brother of Artaxerxes II; he took the throne name Darius III in 336, at around forty-five. In the later court tradition followed by Brosius, Darius soon rid himself of Bagoas by forcing him to drink the cup intended for the king.^[67] These were the same months in which Philip of Macedon, fresh from his victory at Chaeronea, was preparing the invasion of Asia that Darius III would have to meet.^[68]

The immediate result of the Egyptian victory was the restoration of a Persian satrapy and of the empire's southern frontier. Thebes and Athens subsequently sought Persian support against Philip II, diplomacy that Brosius takes as evidence that contemporaries still regarded the king's military and financial resources as "as strong as ever".^[69]

That restoration did not secure the succession. Within five years Ochus and Arses were dead, the direct line had failed, and Darius III faced the Macedonian invasion under circumstances different from those of 343.^[64][63] The violence around the throne is evidence of a dynastic crisis, not by itself a measure of conditions across the provinces.

Recent reassessments therefore describe Artaxerxes III's reign as the dynasty's last major restoration rather than a stage in continuous decline.^[41][69] The description remains bounded by the uneven record: the campaigns and building programme are visible, but surviving documents cannot establish the condition of every province or make the later conquest inevitable.