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.^[1]

No connected Persian account of the reign survives, and the narrative has to be built from Greek writers who wrote a generation or more after the events and with no love for Persia. The one continuous thread is the sixteenth book of Diodorus Siculus, which draws on the fourth-century historian Ephorus; around it stand Plutarch, whose life of Artaxerxes leans on the lost Persica of Deinon, the epitome of Pompeius Trogus made by Justin, and the contemporary Athenian orators Isocrates and Demosthenes. Matthew Waters warns that the lurid court stories in this material read "like high romance, probably inspired by Ctesias' Persica", so that their reliability is in doubt from the outset (see Ctesias).^[5]

The tradition is unanimous that Ochus was cruel. Plutarch closes his life of the elder Artaxerxes by contrasting the gentle father with a son "who outstripped all in cruelty and bloodlust".^[6] Diodorus calls him the most bloodthirsty of the kings, and the Egyptian sources hate him more fiercely still. But Pierre Briant has argued that the label is a topos of the Greek image of the oriental despot rather than a secure fact about the man, and that the "excessive 'cruelty' attributed to Artaxerxes III by the ancient authors does not appear to have been unique to him".^[7]

The apparent unanimity is partly an illusion of transmission. The Greek notices descend through a small number of later channels that repeat and elaborate one another; the Egyptian Apis tradition likewise recycles a charge already made against Cambyses.^[6][5][8] A tradition can be uniform because it is well founded or because it comes from few hands. That does not make the hostile reports false, but it takes away the argument from numbers: apparent agreement counts for less when the surviving traditions are so closely related.

Against the literary portrait, the Babylonian tablets fix parts of the chronology that the Greek accounts leave uncertain, while the reconquest of Egypt demonstrates military competence.^[6][8]

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.^[9] 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".^[7]

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.^[10] 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".^[8] 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.^[11]

Ochus inherited a west in disorder. The Satraps' Revolt of the 360s had left the governors of Asia Minor accustomed to acting as independent princes, each maintaining his own body of Greek mercenaries. His first act of policy, according to 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.^[12] 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".^[4] 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".^[7]

Whatever its exact form, the policy worked. 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.^[2] By the mid-350s the western revolt was over 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.^[1]

The disband order, whatever its precise history, points to the structural problem the reign faced in the west. A generation of revolt had turned the satraps of Asia Minor into paymasters of standing mercenary armies, and it was the money to hire Greek soldiers, as much as any grant of office, that made a governor dangerous. Stripping the coastal satraps of their hired troops struck at the revolt's root, and the fact that the discharged men drifted straight to an Athenian general shows how mobile, and how independent of any single master, that mercenary market had become.^[4] 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.^[1]

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^[13]

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.^[4] 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.^[8] 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".^[7] 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".^[14] 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^[15]

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".^[7][16] 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.^[4] The frontier fortresses of Pelusium and Bubastis fell, Nectanebo's nerve failed, and the last native pharaoh 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^[17]

The significance is hard to overstate. "And so Egypt returned to the Achaemenid fold, nearly sixty years after Amyrtaeus's secession", with a Persian satrap once more resident at Memphis.^[7] 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.^[7] Ruzicka, who has written the fullest modern study of the Persian wars for Egypt, insists 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".^[4] The design of the operation bears that out. The frontal assaults of 373 and 351 had broken on the water defences of the Delta; in 343 Artaxerxes divided his army into three separate strike forces advancing at once, so that Nectanebo could not mass his own troops against any single line of attack.^[4] 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".^[8] The empire stood whole again for the last time in its history.^[2]

The reconquest earned Ochus lasting hatred in Egypt, and that hatred shaped the tradition. 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.^[18] 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".^[19]

The Apis story is almost certainly not true, and the reason is instructive. The identical charge, killing the Apis, had already been fixed on Cambyses, the first Persian conqueror of Egypt, more than a century and a half before, and is disbelieved there too (see Cambyses II). Briant sets the pattern out plainly: in the hostile traditions Ochus "is like Cambyses, with whom he is frequently compared in the ancient texts", and the Apis accusation is part of the comparison rather than an independent report.^[7] The Companion concludes that scholars "consider the slaughter of the Apis bull an invention of Egyptian priests to damage the reputation of the conquerors", and that "the propagandistic alignment of the king with the outrageous conqueror Cambyses obviously proved effective".^[8] The Cambridge Ancient History reaches the same verdict on the Apis-killing motif as a whole: "it is a piece of folklore. 'Not proven', or even 'not guilty', is the necessary verdict".^[16] Amélie Kuhrt notes that the outrages "echo some of the outrages of which Cambyses was accused ... The result is that many have doubted the reality of such sacrileges".^[6] The plundering of a conquered and rebellious province is credible; the sacrilege against the bull is a borrowed slander.

Against the literary image of a destroyer stands the king's own record at Persepolis, which shows a ruler careful of Achaemenid tradition. His single Old Persian inscription there, A³Pa, cut on a stairway, is a plain restatement of the dynastic 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. Kuhrt^[20]

The closing formula sets the god 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.^[6] He also broke with a long-standing royal habit in the placing of his tomb. From Darius I onward the kings had been buried in the cliff of Naqš-e Rostam, a few kilometres from Persepolis; Artaxerxes II had been the first to cut his tomb into the mountain directly above the Persepolis terrace, and, as Briant notes, "he was followed in this by his successor".^[7] The rock-cut tomb above the platform, its façade carrying the enthroned king before the fire altar and the two registers of throne-bearers, is Ochus's, identified by Erich Schmidt as Tomb VI.^[8] Not every scholar credits him with much building: Muhammad Dandamaev, doubting even that the king ever resided there, remarks that "he was buried at Persepolis, where in all probability he never had been during his lifetime".^[2]

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".^[21] Aelian even makes the poisoning an act of Egyptian revenge for the Apis, so neatly does the murder complete the hostile portrait. Later historians long repeated it as fact.^[22]

The Babylonian evidence points the other way. A contemporary astronomical diary records the succession in the neutral formula reserved 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".^[23] Kuhrt observes that by "the conventional Akkadian phrase used here, Artaxerxes III ... died from natural causes, in contrast to the description of Xerxes' death by murder", where the diaries do record a killing.^[6] Brosius presses the point: the diary "contradicts the Greek claim of the murder of Artaxerxes III, noting the succession of Arses as the logical consequence of Artaxerxes's natural death", and the scribes who recorded Xerxes's assassination plainly would not have hidden this one.^[11] Briant treats the whole poisoning story as an instance of a favourite Greek theme, since "a frequently used motif is poison" in the court literature, applied to this reign and the next alike.^[7] The Companion doubts the scale of Bagoas's role in any case: "That he alone, however, staged the elevation of kings at his discretion is inconceivable".^[8] The evidence does not settle it. A natural death in late summer 338, the Babylonian date falling between 26 August and 25 September, is at least as well supported as the murder, and the confident poisoning narratives owe much to a tradition already committed to seeing this king undone by villainy. On the reading now most widely followed, the poisoning is a later embellishment rather than a documented event, the diary's neutral formula weighing more heavily than the Greek insistence on murder. Only a fuller run of the astronomical diaries for 338, or a Babylonian notice as explicit as the one that records the killing of Xerxes, would close the question.

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^[24]

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]".^[25] 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".^[26] 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, and soon rid himself of Bagoas by making the poisoner drink his own cup.^[11] These were the same months in which Philip of Macedon, fresh from his victory at Chaeronea, was preparing the invasion of Asia that his son Darius III would have to meet.^[1]

The received image of Artaxerxes III, the cruellest of the kings, is largely the creation of the enemies who wrote his history, and it survives only where the independent evidence is thin. Where that evidence exists, in the Babylonian tablets and the plain record of the reconquest, it shows something different: an energetic and effective ruler who found the empire loosened at the edges and left it whole. He ended the western revolts, recovered Egypt after two generations of independence, and restored the Achaemenid state very nearly to the frontiers of Darius I. Accepting the murder tradition, Dandamaev speculated that, had Ochus "not been murdered in 338 B.C., it is possible that Persia would have been better prepared for the impending war with Macedonia".^[2]

What the recovery did not touch was the machinery that had produced the crisis. The wars of the west and of Egypt had both been won largely with Greek mercenaries, and the empire's reliance on them, and on a handful of able commanders, was a dependence the victories concealed rather than cured. The satrapal revolts had been suppressed, not made impossible, and the throne still passed by killing. Ochus bought the dynasty time, and the years after his death show how little of it there was to spare.

The recovery he achieved was real, and it was the last the dynasty would manage. Within eight years of his death the throne had passed through a murdered boy-king to a collateral, and within a dozen the empire itself was gone. The reign is best read not as the beginning of the decline but as the last proof that the Achaemenid system, competently handled, could still hold and even restore its vast inheritance, right up to the eve of its fall.