Astyages

The Greek Astyagēs is a distortion. The king's name appears in Babylonian as Ištumegu, and both go back, on the accepted reconstruction, to an Old Iranian *R̥šti-vaiga-, understood as 'swinging the spear' or 'lance-hurler'; the familiar Greek form was reshaped by popular etymology, as if from astu ('town') and the root of agnumi ('to break').^[1] Ctesias and the excerpts of him in Photius preserve a closer Astyïgas, and Photius records that Ctesias made a deliberate point of correcting the name, and of denying that Cyrus was related to the king at all, both marked departures from Herodotus.^[2] A Median king-list that Diodorus drew from Ctesias gives the same ruler yet a third form, Aspandas.^[3] No inscription of Astyages's own survives, for the Medes have left no securely identified royal texts and it is uncertain that they wrote at all; he is known only through others.

Those others fall into sharply unequal classes. The fullest account is Herodotus's (1.107–130), which, as Rüdiger Schmitt observes, was drawn from the traditions of the Harpagids of Lycia, the descendants of the Median general Harpagus, and is shaped throughout as folktale.^[1] A rival Greek version stands in Ctesias's Persica, whose account of Astyages Schmitt judges 'on the whole very unreliable'.^[1] Xenophon's Cyropaedia offers a third, frankly fictional, portrait. Earliest of all, and independent of the prose tradition, is Aeschylus, who in 472 BCE already knew of a Median dynasty before Cyrus but did not name its last king. In the Persae the ghost of Darius runs through the rulers of Asia in a line that is schematic and nameless where Herodotus's is elaborate:

For Medus was first to be the leader of its host; and another, his son, completed his work since his soul obeyed the direction of wise thoughts. Third, after him, Cyrus, blest in his fortune, came to the throne and stablished peace for all his people.

Aeschylus, Persae 765–772, trans. Smyth^[4]

Astyages, the last Median king before Cyrus, is presumably the unnamed 'son' here; Aeschylus knew that a Median power had preceded the Persian, but not the story that later filled the gap.^[1] Against these Greek voices stands the one contemporary record, spare and official: two Babylonian inscriptions of Nabonidus and the near-contemporary Nabonidus Chronicle, composed within Astyages's own lifetime or just after. Because the two prose portraits are irreconcilable, Herodotus's hostile and Ctesias's favourable, Schmitt concludes that the sources 'report almost nothing about Astyages' reign' and that 'a final judgment on his character is not possible'.^[1] What can be recovered is not a life but the shape of a fall.

The one body of evidence contemporary with Astyages is Babylonian, and it says very little, but what it says is firm. Two clay cylinders of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, and the Nabonidus Chronicle, a reign-by-reign record compiled somewhat later, register the Persian conquest of Media from the outside, in the flat idiom of Babylonian officialdom. In the earlier text, a cylinder from Sippar recording the rebuilding of the temple Ehulhul at Harran, Nabonidus casts the coming Persian victory as a promise of the god Marduk, made in a dream:

The Medes, whose power is great, are roving around the temple you are commanding to be built. … The Mede of whom you spoke, he, his land and the kings who went at his side, are no more. … With his few troops he scattered the multitude of the Medes. Astyages, king of the Medes, he seized and took him captive to his land.

Nabonidus, the Sippar cylinder, trans. after Kuhrt^[5]

The 'third year' in which Marduk rouses Cyrus is Nabonidus's, that is 553 BCE, which sets the war's opening several years before its end. The Chronicle, whose testimony historians rate above the royal inscriptions, gives the decisive events without a propaganda frame:

(Astyages) mustered (his army) and marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan, for conquest … The army rebelled against Astyages (Akk. Ishtumegu) and he was taken prisoner. They handed him over to Cyrus … which he carried off as booty (from) Ecbatana he took to Anshan.

The Nabonidus Chronicle, col. ii.1–4, trans. after Kuhrt^[6]

Three plain facts survive in these lines and are nowhere in doubt: a king the Babylonians called Ištumegu ruled at Ecbatana; his own army turned against him and delivered him to Cyrus of Anshan about 550; and Cyrus stripped the Median capital of its treasure and carried it home. The Chronicle's mention of Ecbatana is the earliest secure notice of the Median capital in any surviving text.^[6] Everything of consequence that the Greek tradition adds to this, the dreams and the banquet, the far-flung empire, the kinship of king and conqueror, is uncorroborated, and at two points the contemporary record contradicts it outright.

Astyages was the son of Cyaxares, the Median king who, with Babylon, had brought down Nineveh in 612, and he came to the throne on his father's death, conventionally about 585 BCE. The one event of his reign that the Greek sources date is a foreign marriage. In Herodotus, a five-year war between Media and Lydia over the Halys frontier was broken off when day turned to night in the middle of a battle, the solar eclipse usually fixed to 585; the two sides made peace, and Alyattes of Lydia gave his daughter Aryenis to Astyages.^[7] The match made Astyages the brother-in-law of Croesus, Aryenis's brother and the next Lydian king, and so knotted the last Median king into the dynastic web of Anatolia. Matt Waters cautions that these connections, like much else in the Greek record of the period, have no independent confirmation.^[8] A second, Babylonian, marriage-tie is reported by the Hellenistic writer Berossus, who has a daughter of Astyages, Amytis, married to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon; but Berossus wrote three centuries later and most likely confused Astyages with his father Cyaxares, who was king when such a match would have been made, so the tradition is treated with caution.^[8] Herodotus gives Astyages a reign of thirty-five years, which fits a fall about 550.^[1]

Beyond the marriages and the war with Cyrus the sources preserve almost nothing of what he did, and two of the few concrete hints come from the Babylonian side rather than the Greek. The Sippar cylinder's fighting of 553 and the Chronicle's capture of 550 imply hostilities lasting the better part of a decade, and Dandamaev reconstructs from the Babylonian record that Astyages, pressed by Cyrus's revolt, had to withdraw his garrison from Harran, which the Babylonians then occupied about 552; when the war ended in 550 his accumulated treasures were carried off to Pasargadae.^[9] The picture is of a kingdom already under strain before its final defeat, far from the serene great power of the Greek imagination.

The realm Astyages governed is harder to describe than the older histories allowed, and the difficulty bears directly on how his fall should be read. In the Greek picture, taken over from Herodotus, he ruled a centralised 'Median empire' spanning northern Iran and reaching into Anatolia, the immediate model and forerunner of the Persian one. The contemporary evidence will not support this. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, in a paper that reopened the whole question in 1988, argued that the centralised Median state is an artefact of the Greek narrative rather than a fact of the sixth century, a point she herself put as an epigram: "The Median empire exists for us because Herodotus says it did".^[10] Reviewing the Assyrian and Babylonian record, Robert Rollinger finds behind the Greek empire a much smaller thing. Ištumegu, on his reading, ruled 'a political entity of medium size around its center, Hagmatana', controlling 'a territory no larger than the central Zagros region', 'in control neither of northwestern nor of southwestern Iran' and 'not characterized as suzerain and superior of the king of Anshan'.^[11] Where a centralised kingdom was assumed, the Assyrian sources show only a plurality of small units under local 'city lords', and the model now offered in place of the empire is a loose Iranian confederation gathered round a charismatic leader, caught in the Babylonian phrase 'kings who march at his side'.^[11] Liverani draws the same conclusion from the manner of Astyages's fall, holding that Cyaxares and Astyages were not emperors on the Persian model but a line of authoritative chiefs, their prestige won in the destruction of Assyria rather than in any imperial command.^[12]

For Astyages the consequence is direct. If he was no emperor, two central claims of the Greek story dissolve: the grandeur of his realm, and his supposed overlordship of the Persians. The second is the point the modern reassessment presses hardest. The Greek writers make Cyrus a Median subject who rebelled, which requires Media to have ruled Persia; but, as Amélie Kuhrt argues, an image of 'Median overlordship of Persia' is 'nowhere borne out by contemporary evidence' and is positively 'contradicted by the Cyrus Cylinder', in which Cyrus presents himself as the fourth king of Anshan in an unbroken line owing nothing to Media.^[13] The one Babylonian phrase that might point the other way, Nabonidus's description of Cyrus as a 'young servant', was long read as making Cyrus the vassal of the Mede; but, as Waters argues, the words more naturally cast Cyrus as the servant of the god who raised him, a standard Near Eastern formula, and cannot carry the weight of a Median suzerainty.^[8] The revision is not unopposed. Waters himself notes that the Babylonian 'kings who march at his side', whom Ctesias's tradition names as the rulers of the Hyrcanians, Parthians and other peoples, could preserve a memory of real Median domination over its neighbours, a looser thing than an empire, what he calls a 'Big Man confederacy' of dependants owing loose allegiance.^[2] What almost no one now defends is the old picture of Astyages as the centralising overlord of an Iran that already contained Persia. The full debate is set out under the Medes; its effect on Astyages is to shrink him from the emperor of Greek memory to a Zagros king of uncertain reach.

Herodotus makes Astyages the pivot of Cyrus's founder-legend, the tyrant-grandfather whose own cruelty brings on his fall. The machinery of the tale is a pair of dreams about his daughter Mandane. In the first, so much water flows from her that it drowns his city and all Asia:

Astyages had a daughter, whom he called Mandane: concerning whom he had a dream, that enough water flowed from her to fill his city and overflow all Asia.

Herodotus 1.107, trans. Godley^[7]

Reading the vision through his dream-interpreting Magi, the king marries Mandane not to a Mede but to a compliant Persian he thinks beneath her, 'a man whom he knew to be well born and of a quiet temper', held to be 'much lower than a Mede of middle estate'; this is the elder Cambyses, the father of Cyrus, not the later king.^[7] A second dream, of a vine growing from Mandane and overspreading Asia, makes the danger plain, and Astyages resolves to destroy the child at birth. The task falls to Harpagus, and through Harpagus to a herdsman, who rears the boy instead; when the ten-year-old's bearing betrays him, Astyages spares his recovered grandson but takes a monstrous revenge on Harpagus, serving him his own son's flesh at a banquet:

dishes of sheeps' flesh were set before Astyages and the others, but Harpagus was served with the flesh of his own son, all but the head and hands and feet, which lay apart covered up in a basket.

Herodotus 1.119, the Thyestean banquet, trans. Godley^[7]

The full drama belongs to Harpagus, whose betrayal it motivates, and is told under his name. Its shape is the point here. Every element, the grandfather warned by a portent, the marriage arranged to defuse it, the doomed and rescued grandchild, the cannibal feast, is the furniture of legend rather than the substance of a reign. The birth-story is the oldest of Near Eastern hero-patterns, the exposed infant who comes back to reign; its nearest parallel is Sargon of Akkad, cast adrift in a reed basket, with Moses and Romulus further instances, and Briant notes that this shared inheritance 'shows that the various versions are constructed on a very ancient Near Eastern framework'.^[14] The tale was kept and burnished, Schmitt and others hold, by the Harpagids of Lycia, who took their name from Astyages's betrayer and had every reason to remember his deeds; Dandamaev puts the motive plainly, that Harpagus's descendants 'concocted, in order to justify the disloyalty of their ancestor, certain stories about the absurd cruelty of Astyages'.^[9]

That so much of Herodotus is legend is confirmed by the one Greek writer who set out to contradict him. Ctesias of Cnidus, a physician at the court of Artaxerxes II a generation later, rejected the kinship on which the whole Herodotean legend rests: in the epitome of Photius, 'as far as Astyages is concerned, Cyrus was not related to him at all'.^[3] There are no dreams of Mandane, no exposure and no banquet. Astyages, whom Ctesias calls Astyïgas, flees the victorious Cyrus and is hidden by his own family:

He says that in Ecbatana Astyïgas fled from Cyrus' sight and was hidden in the kriokranoi of the royal palace and that it was his daughter Amytis and her husband Spitamas who hid him.

Ctesias, Persica F9, epitomised by Photius, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[3]

Discovered when his children are threatened with torture, he is bound by Cyrus's man Oebaras, then freed and 'honoured like a father'; his daughter Amytis, once her husband Spitamas has been put to death, becomes Cyrus's wife, so that in this version Cyrus enters the Median royal house by marriage rather than by birth.^[3] Whether this is any nearer the truth than Herodotus is doubtful. The modern judgement of the Persica is severe: Waters describes a work whose 'obvious literary underpinnings and romantic elements' repeatedly cost it its historicity, tending 'toward storytelling or romance'.^[2] Yet Ctesias's very divergence has an analytical use. Lenfant argues that, of the two versions, it is the pro-kinship one, Herodotus's, that should draw the greater suspicion, since a manufactured descent from the last legitimate king is precisely the kind of story invented to legitimise a usurper; the denial of kinship may be the less interested tradition.^[15] Neither can be confirmed, and the Near Eastern sources say nothing of any family tie.

The three traditions of Astyages's fall can be laid side by side and the contemporary record used to judge between them. Herodotus compresses the war into a single betrayed battle: the grown Cyrus revolts, Harpagus turns the Median nobility and secures the army's defection, and Astyages, 'so infatuated that he forgot what he had done to Harpagus', hands him the command and is undone on the field.^[7]

So no sooner had the Medes marched out and joined battle with the Persians than some of them deserted to the enemy, but most of them of set purpose played the coward and fled; those only fought who had not shared Harpagus' counsels.

Herodotus 1.127, trans. Godley^[7]

The captive king's parting taunt, that Harpagus has made the Medes slaves and the Persians masters, is the story's own summary, and Herodotus closes the reign in a formula of reversal:

Thus Astyages was deposed from his sovereignty after a reign of thirty-five years: and the Medians were made to bow down before the Persians by reason of Astyages' cruelty.

Herodotus 1.130, trans. Godley^[7]

Ctesias and the accounts that depend on him, Nicolaus of Damascus and Justin, tell instead of a long and hard war, with three defeats of Cyrus before a fourth and victorious battle near the future site of Pasargadae, from which Briant infers that 'the victory of Cyrus was difficult and was long in coming'.^[14] The Babylonian texts take neither drama but confirm and correct both. They make the war long, not sudden: years separate the Sippar cylinder's opening blow of 553 from the Chronicle's capture of 550, so that, in Briant's words, 'Herodotus is obviously simplifying greatly'.^[14] And they reverse the aggression. Where Herodotus and Ctesias have Cyrus march on his overlord, the Chronicle has Astyages muster his army and march against Cyrus 'for conquest', making the Mede the attacker.^[6] The deeper initiative may still have been Cyrus's, whose expansion Rollinger reads as the true cause, with the Median march a response;^[11] the point on which the contemporary and the Greek records agree is the one that decided the war, the defection of Astyages's own army. That agreement is what makes the mutiny, alone of all the story's incidents, securely historical, and Liverani reads it as the clearest sign of what Astyages's kingship really was:

the army deserted — perhaps because not sharing the motivations for the attack, but in any case revealing that the authority of Astyages was rather loose and dependant on the free will of his troops.

Mario Liverani, Continuity of Empire (2003)^[12]

The soldiers who changed sides raised no ethnic objection to serving a Persian, which is itself a measure of how near the two Iranian peoples stood.

On the fate of the deposed king the sources scatter completely, and the scatter is a measure of how little anyone knew. Herodotus has Cyrus keep Astyages by him, unharmed, until he died a natural death. Xenophon, in the romance of the Cyropaedia, dispenses with the conflict altogether: his Astyages is Cyrus's fond grandfather, no adversary, who dies in his bed and leaves the Median lands to his family, the one wholly divergent voice among the sources.^[13] Justin reports that Cyrus took only the crown and treated the old man with a marked clemency:

Astyages was captured in the battle; Cyrus refrained from doing anything except taking the kingship away from him, comporting himself more like a grandson than a victor.

Justin I, 6.16, trans. after Kuhrt^[16]

Ctesias gives the grimmest end. Cyrus, wanting to see the father of his wife Amytis, sends the eunuch Petesacas to fetch him, and Oebaras contrives the murder on the road, leaving Astyages in the desert to die of hunger and thirst; a dream reveals the crime, and Amytis takes a terrible revenge on the eunuch.^[3] The stories cannot be reconciled, but they converge on one impulse. As Kuhrt notes of the whole tradition, 'all agree that Cyrus was intent on treating him generously', and it is this shared instinct, to show the founder sparing the king he displaced, that betrays the political work the tales were doing.^[13] Cyrus's care to appear the legitimate heir, sparing the king and, in the version Ctesias and Xenophon share, marrying into his house, is the one thread that runs through every account whatever else it invents.^[14]

The conquest did not erase the Medes; it promoted them. Media became the first great acquisition of the Achaemenids and Ecbatana one of their royal residences, and the Median nobility kept much of its standing, so that under the Persian kings Medes and Persians stood as the two ruling Iranian peoples.^[9] The closeness left its mark on Greek usage: for a century 'the Mede' could stand for the whole empire and its wars, and to take its side was 'to medise'. This near-parity is a subject of its own (see the Medes); Astyages's part is the long afterlife of his defeat as a founding memory. The overthrow of the Mede became the Persians' own account of how their servitude turned to rule, the moment invoked to justify a new war. Herodotus gives the thought to Xerxes, rallying his people for the invasion of Greece:

As I learn from our eldest, we have never yet remained at peace ever since Cyrus deposed Astyages and we won this our lordship from the Medes.

Herodotus 7.8, Xerxes to the Persians, trans. Godley^[17]

On the Median side the same event was remembered as a wound. When the Magian Gaumāta seized the throne in 522, the empire's memory could construe the usurpation as a Median attempt to recover the primacy Astyages had lost, a reading Herodotus preserves.^[13] The last Median king thus survived less as a man than as a turning point, the figure whose fall the Persians dated their greatness from and the Medes their subjection.