Atossa

Atossa was a daughter of Cyrus the Great, founder of the empire, and probably his eldest; her mother was most likely Cassandane, Cyrus's chief wife, who bore him also his sons Cambyses and Bardiya and at least one further daughter, Artystone.^[3][4] Her birth falls in the 550s or 540s BCE, and the notice in Aeschylus that she was still living when Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 would put her death after that date, in her seventies. She therefore spanned the whole first century of the dynasty, from her father's conquests to the eve of Salamis, and stood in blood-relation to the first four kings: daughter of Cyrus, sister of Cambyses, wife of Darius, mother of Xerxes. That position, at the junction of the founder's line and the line of Darius, is the reason both the Greeks and the modern historians have found her worth arguing over. She is the hinge on which the whole royal house turns (see the Achaemenid dynasty), and it is precisely a woman in so central a place, and so poorly documented, that a tradition can make carry almost any weight it likes.

The name is itself a small study in the limits of the evidence. The Greek Atossa reflects an Old Persian form reconstructed as *Utauθā, which corresponds to the Avestan Hutaosā and has been glossed, tentatively, as 'well trickling' or 'well granting'.^[3] Hutaosā is also the name of the queen of Vīštāspa in the Avestan and later Zoroastrian tradition, the royal patroness of Zarathustra, and the two names are the same name. This is a point about naming, not identity: the daughter of Cyrus is a historical woman of the sixth century, the Avestan Hutaosā a figure of religious legend, and the shared name shows only that it was a traditional and prestigious one in the Iranian world. It recurs elsewhere in the royal house, borne in the later genealogies by a sister of Cyrus I, and again by a daughter and wife of Artaxerxes II more than a century later.^[3] In the Persian administrative record the same name appears in its Elamite dress as Udusa, and the recovery of that Elamite form, set beside the Greek one, is what has allowed Atossa to be traced, faintly, in the tablets.

Atossa's marriages are the thread on which the Greek account of her hangs, because each was a marriage to a king and each carried a claim to the throne. She was first the wife of her full brother Cambyses II. Sibling marriage, shocking to the Greeks, was practised in the royal house; Herodotus frames Cambyses's marriage to his sister as an innovation sanctioned by the ruling that the Persian king might do as he pleased.^[5] On Cambyses's death in 522, and through the brief reign of the man who took the throne as Cyrus's son Bardiya, whom Darius would later brand the impostor Gaumāta, Atossa passed, as royal widows did, into the household of the new ruler. When Darius seized the kingship in turn (see the accession of Darius), she passed to him.

Herodotus sets out the marriages as a single act of dynastic consolidation:

Darius took wives from the noblest houses of Persia, marrying Cyrus' daughters Atossa and Artystone; Atossa had been wife of her brother Cambyses and afterwards of the Magian, Artystone was a virgin.

Herodotus, Histories 3.88, trans. Godley^[6]

He married also Parmys, the daughter of Bardiya, and Phaidyme, the daughter of his fellow conspirator Otanes. The logic is transparent, and modern historians read it as Herodotus did. Darius was not of Cyrus's line; he came to the throne as a collateral Achaemenid whose descent from a royal house was, at the least, freshly asserted. By gathering into his own household the women of Cyrus's family, above all Cyrus's daughters, he bound his kingship to the founder's blood. One recent account describes the usurper as 'chaining himself to Cyrus' wife and daughter', continuing the old line through Atossa while securing his flank through alliances with the great conspirator families.^[7] Marriage to Atossa was thus a political instrument, and her importance to Darius was, in the first place, the importance of what she represented: a link to the dynasty he had displaced and needed to inherit.^[8] That she became his principal consort, and that her son rather than an elder half-brother succeeded, follows from this, and it is the ground on which the Greek tradition built her into something more.

The fullest Greek expression of Atossa's influence is the story of the physician Democedes of Croton, which Herodotus tells at length. Democedes, a Greek doctor reckoned the finest of his day, had come to the Persian court as a captive and won favour by curing Darius of a dislocated ankle that the king's Egyptian physicians had only made worse. Then Atossa fell ill, with a growth on her breast, and turned to the same physician:

As long as it was but a small matter, she said nothing of it but hid it for shame; but presently growing worse, she sent for Democedes and showed it to him. He promised to cure her, but made her to swear that she would requite him by granting whatsoever he requested of her; saying, that he would ask nothing shameful.

Herodotus, Histories 3.133, trans. Godley^[9]

When she was healed, Democedes collected on the oath. He wanted to go home, and he used Atossa to engineer it. She was to work on the king. Herodotus gives her a speech, delivered in the royal bedchamber, that turns a private cure into imperial strategy:

Sire, you are a mighty ruler; why sit you idle, winning neither new dominions nor new power for your Persians? If you would have them know that they have a man for their king, it is right and fitting for one of your youth and your wealth to let them see you achieving some great enterprise.

Herodotus, Histories 3.134 (Atossa to Darius), trans. Godley^[9]

At her prompting Darius resolves on a campaign, and agrees first to send a reconnaissance party, guided by Democedes, to spy out the coasts of Greece. Democedes escapes on the mission, which is his object throughout, and the seed of a war against Greece is sown in the queen's chamber. The scene is a small masterpiece of Herodotean design, and almost every element of it is suspect as history. It runs on a Greek narrative pattern in which a woman's private wish, here a whim for Greek serving-maids that Herodotus also reports, sets a king on the road to a great war; the physician's own interest drives the plot; and the chronology does not work, for the episode is placed some twenty years before the invasion it is supposed to prompt.^[10] Its function in the wider Greek picture is plain enough: it makes the physician the clever Greek who outwits the Persian court, and it makes the war against Greece begin in the intrigues of the palace.^[11] Maria Brosius, in the standard reassessment of the Persian royal women, concludes that in the Democedes story 'Atossa is merely a literary figure; the actions and words ascribed to her cannot be taken as historical reality'.^[11] The verdict is worth holding until the other Greek scenes and the Persian evidence are in; what the anecdote clearly cannot bear on its own is the weight the tradition puts on it, that a queen's counsel launched the empire's westward wars.

The second and heavier pillar of Atossa's Greek reputation is the succession. Darius had sons by more than one wife. The eldest of all was Artobazanes, born to the daughter of the noble Gobryas before Darius became king; Xerxes was the eldest of the four sons Atossa bore him, but was born after the accession. Herodotus stages a contest between the two half-brothers, decided, on the advice of the exiled Spartan king Demaratus, by the principle that the son born to a reigning king should have precedence over one born to a private man. Behind the ruling he places Atossa, and states her power without qualification: he believed that even without the argument the crown would have gone to Xerxes, 'for Atossa was all-powerful'.^[1]

Xerxes himself recorded his accession in an inscription at Persepolis, and it names no mother:

Darius had other sons also, (but) thus was the desire of Auramazda: Darius, my father, made me the greatest (OP maθista) after himself. When my father Darius went to his (allotted) place, by the favour of Auramazda I became king in my father's place.

Xerxes, XPf §4^[12]

The text insists on descent from the father and the will of Ahura Mazdā, and says nothing of Atossa; had she made him king, as Herodotus implies, the omission would be strange.^[8] The mechanics of the choice, the born-in-the-purple principle and its doubtful status as a Persian custom, are matters for the reign that followed (see Xerxes I); what concerns Atossa is whether she decided it. Pierre Briant draws the conclusion plainly: the mother of the crown prince held a prestigious position at court, but 'there was strictly speaking no Achaemenid queen', and 'the mother of the crown prince had no special rights. She could perhaps wield her personal influence, but nothing more'.^[8] Her standing was a consequence of her son's status, not its cause. The Herodotean apparatus around the succession is in any case largely fiction: the advising Demaratus is a Greek intrusion, the Spartan custom he cites did not exist, and Xerxes had in fact been marked as heir long before the supposed contest, holding a high office at Persepolis at least twelve years before Darius's death.^[7] Brosius adds the objection that maternal descent from Cyrus cannot have been the deciding factor at all, since Atossa was not Cyrus's only daughter married to Darius: her sister Artystone bore him sons who were equally Cyrus's grandsons, yet were passed over.^[11] That descent was not decisive need not mean it counted for nothing: on the reading of the Wiley Companion, Xerxes' birth to Cyrus's daughter still helped him be 'viewed as the only legitimate prince', a pedigree his half-brothers by other mothers lacked, so that what is at issue is how much weight the Cyrid line carried, not whether it carried any.^[7] Darius chose Xerxes, and chose him early, for reasons of his own, and the smoothness of the succession in 486 was the fruit of that long preparation. Atossa's part in it, real enough as the standing of a king's mother, has in Herodotus been magnified into the sole and sufficient cause.

Atossa's other life is on the Athenian stage. In Aeschylus's Persae, produced in 472 BCE within eight years of Salamis and the earliest surviving European drama, the action at the Persian court is carried by an unnamed Queen, the widow of Darius and mother of Xerxes, whom antiquity and modern scholarship alike identify as Atossa. She enters in majesty, the chorus of Persian elders bows before her, and she recounts a dream of foreboding in which her son yokes two women, figures of Hellas and Persia, to one chariot; the dream is fulfilled at Salamis, and the play turns on her grief and on the summoning of Darius's ghost, who from the underworld approves the influence of the mother over the son.

The Queen is drawn with dignity and even sympathy, and the portrait has often been taken as evidence for the real standing of Atossa. It is better read as evidence for Greek habits of thought. Joseph Vogt argued, and the point is now widely accepted, that the queen of the Persae is Greek in character throughout: she is nameless in the Greek manner, since a respectable woman was not named in public; her grief runs in the channels of Greek tragic emotion; and Aeschylus makes her the mother of a god, a notion of divine kingship that had no place in Persia.^[11] Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg pressed the case further in an influential essay pointedly titled 'Exit Atossa', which questioned how much of the tragic Queen and the intriguing queen of Herodotus can be tied to any political reality at all, and insisted on separating the palace stories from the events they are made to explain.^[11] The stage Atossa tells more about how Athenians imagined the Persian court than about the woman who lived in it; she is a Greek figure in Persian dress, and her name is left off precisely because she is a type as much as a person.^[4] The play's own matter, its dream, its Salamis, its theology of hybris, sits with the Persae itself (see the Persians); what bears on Atossa is only that the Athenian theatre could put so commanding a queen at the centre of the Persian court and expect its audience to find her plausible.

Between Aeschylus and Herodotus there is a third Greek Atossa, and she is stranger than either. Hellanicus of Lesbos, writing in the middle of the fifth century, made Atossa a figure of masculine invention: on his account she was the first Persian ruler to wear the tiara and trousers, to be served by eunuchs, and to hand down her judgments in writing.^[13] The portrait dissolves any pretence that the Greek traditions preserve a single remembered woman. Hellanicus's Atossa is half-merged with the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis, credited with the inventions by which a Greek imagined an oriental despotism ran; she is a founder of court custom, not a wife or a mother. Set beside Aeschylus's grieving dowager and Herodotus's bedchamber strategist, she makes three incompatible Atossas within two generations, each shaped to a different Greek purpose. What the three share is only the name and the presumption behind it, that a great queen stood at the origin of the Persian monarchy's characteristic vices, its softness, its eunuchs, its rule by whim. The multiplicity is itself the argument: three authors who cannot agree on what kind of figure Atossa was are not three witnesses to a woman but three uses of a name.

Atossa does not stand alone. She is the first of a series of royal women, Amestris the wife of Xerxes, Parysatis the mother of Artaxerxes II, whom the Greek writers present as powerful, scheming and cruel, the instigators of wars and revolts and the poisoners of rivals. The recurrence is the clue. Brosius's study showed that these women appear in Greek historiography less as individuals than as a type, cast in a role the narrative needed them to play, and that the stories preserved about them were selected and shaped to fit Greek expectations of how women behaved and of how an oriental monarchy worked.^[11] The taxonomy is remarkably fixed: in the Greek and Roman sources the royal women initiate wars, act at the prompting of men, punish and poison, and now and then behave 'in a manly way', and Atossa is entered under nearly every heading, the initiator of a war at Herodotus 3.134, the instrument of Democedes at 3.133, the mannish inventor of Hellanicus.^[14] The luxurious, woman-ridden Persian court was a fixture of the Greek argument for Persian decadence and inferiority, set against the disciplined masculinity the Greeks claimed for themselves; the powerful queen was part of that argument, and the influence ascribed to Atossa is one of its clearest cases.^[8] In this reading the women of Herodotus and Ctesias lose their individual historical identity and become literary figures, equipped with the passions of women in general rather than remembered for what they did.^[11] This does not make Atossa unreal, nor prove that no royal woman ever wielded influence. The wider trope of the harem-ridden court, and the reasons the modern picture of a segregated Persepolis harem has collapsed, belong to the dynasty as a whole (see the Achaemenid dynasty). What it means for Atossa in particular is narrower and sharper: the specific agency the Greek sources give her, the counsel that made a war and the will that made a king, is the least trustworthy thing they report, because it is exactly the thing their pattern required.

Against the Greek picture stands the evidence of the empire's own administration, and it shows a wholly different kind of power. The Persepolis Fortification tablets, the working accounts of the royal economy in Darius's Persis, record the establishments of royal women in matter-of-fact detail. Atossa's sister Artystone, under her Elamite name Irtašduna, is one of the best-documented: some thirty texts name her, recording estates at several places, dependent workers, sealed letter-orders issued in her name, her son Arsames, and commodities disbursed 'before her' to support her entourage, in terms parallel to those used of the King's own table.^[2] A second and greater lady, Irdabama, unknown to the Greek writers, appears in some seventy-five texts: the range of her possessions, the size of her workforce and the reach of her authority make her, on the archive's own showing, the best-documented and plausibly the most influential royal woman of her day. This is real economic and household authority, exercised through the administration rather than the bedchamber, and it is invisible in the Greek sources, which knew nothing of it.

Atossa herself was long absent from this record, and her absence was itself made into an argument. David Lewis remarked in 1984 that 'it has proved distressingly difficult to find Atossa'; Brosius, writing in 1996, could find no secure trace of her in the published tablets and rejected an earlier attempt by Walther Hinz to identify her, and the contrast between her prominence in Greek writing and her silence in the Persian documents was, she noted, especially sharp.^[2][11] From that silence a natural inference followed: if Atossa had little or no standing in the working economy of Darius's middle reign, then whatever power she held came to her only as queen mother, after her son's accession, and not as the kingmaker of Herodotus, before it.^[2]

That picture has since been complicated rather than reversed. Renewed work on the archive, in particular Matthew Stolper's study 'Atossa re-enters', published in 2018, has recovered her under the Elamite form Udusa. Two long-known but laconic texts of 500/499 BCE named a woman Udusa without further detail; a newly edited journal entry now records more than eleven thousand quarts of wine 'expended for Atossa', a disbursement on the scale of a royal table.^[2] The figure places her among a very small elite whose 'tables' the Persepolis institution provisioned, exceeded only by Irdabama's largest single issue and the King's own, and far above anything recorded for Artystone.^[2] She also, in one text, 'assigns' workers, which places her among a still larger group of those who controlled the workers the Persepolis institution supported, a group made up mostly of mid-level administrators and only rarely of members of the social and political elite. Yet the establishment behind these entries is modest by the archive's standards: the workforces recorded for her are small, the largest group numbering some fifty, and she is documented far less fully than either Irdabama or her own sister. On the evidence now available Atossa is, in Stolper's words, 'a fully historical figure in the middle reign of Darius', a royal woman with a table, a seal-using staff and a stock of grain and wine in the heartland.

What the tablets do not do is restore the queen of the Greek tradition. The documented Atossa held economic and household resources; that is a different thing from the political power to make a war or a king, and the one implies nothing about the other. Stolper puts the point precisely: the Atossa of the archive is 'not incompatible but rather incommensurate with the literary Atossa of Herodotus', a documented landholder whose economic footing settles nothing about the kingmaking the Greek sources credit to her.^[2] In Wouter Henkelman's blunter phrase the Herodotean Atossa is 'nothing but a name'.^[2] The archive gives the real Atossa her footing, as a great, if not the greatest, landholder of Persis; it leaves the kingmaker exactly where the Greek sources put her, on the far side of the evidence.

How much power Atossa really held is the central question about her, and the sources will not answer it directly, so it has to be reasoned out from evidence that pulls in opposite directions. The strongest case for a decisive Atossa is Herodotus's, resting on his two scenes and their summary sentence: the counsel in the bedchamber that turns Darius toward Greece, and the verdict that his mother's will, not the argument over birth-order, made Xerxes king.^[1] Read at face value, these make her the woman who set the empire's westward wars in motion and settled its greatest succession, an agency no Persian king's mother is elsewhere allowed.

Against this stands the case built by Brosius and Briant, and each of its parts is grounded. The succession argument fails on its own terms, since Artystone's sons were grandsons of Cyrus no less than Xerxes and were passed over; the Spartan custom Demaratus cites did not exist; and Xerxes had been marked as heir, holding high office at Persepolis, more than a decade before the contest Herodotus dramatises.^[11][7] The Democedes counsel is a misdated literary set-piece driven by the physician's plot,^[11] and Xerxes' own inscription, silent about his mother, is the trace a real kingmaker should have left and did not.^[8][12]

The archive neither rescues Herodotus nor finally refutes him, and the reason is that an argument from silence cuts both ways. Atossa's early invisibility in the tablets was long treated as proof that she was politically weightless; but silence in a partial sample proves little, and Stolper's recovery of her wine-table and workers has now shown that the silence was, in part, an accident of what survives.^[2] Yet the recovery works no magic in the other direction either. What the tablets attest is economic standing, not political power, and a great table says nothing about whether its holder could make a king. The documentary Atossa is real, and the Herodotean Atossa is not thereby confirmed; economic standing and political power are simply different things, and neither settles the other.^[2]

The last consideration is the shape of the Greek testimony itself. It is not one witness but three, and they do not agree: Aeschylus's grieving dowager of 472, Hellanicus's mannish inventor-queen of the mid-century, Herodotus's bedchamber strategist a generation later.^[11][13] These are not independent memories converging on a woman; they are three applications of a single Greek assumption, that a powerful queen stood behind the softness and the intrigue of the oriental court. The stacking tells us how Greeks thought a Persian monarchy worked, not what Atossa did.

What would settle the question is a Persian source that showed her acting: an inscription or a court document naming her with authority, a tablet recording a political rather than an economic intervention, a securely dated tradition owing nothing to the Greek pattern. None exists. Until one appears, the balance of the field is clear and stable: the economic Atossa of the archive can be affirmed, the political Atossa of the Greek stage cannot, and the two are best kept apart rather than letting the vivid one fill the space the documents leave empty.

Stripped of the Greek elaboration, the life reduces to a firm outline and little more. Atossa was a daughter of Cyrus, born about the middle of the sixth century; she was married in turn to Cambyses, to Bardiya, and to Darius, becoming Darius's principal wife as part of his effort to inherit Cyrus's legitimacy; she bore Darius four sons, of whom Xerxes was the eldest and became king; and she lived on as queen-mother into her son's reign, dying after 480. To this the tablets now add that she held a table, a staff and an estate in Persis, on a scale that makes her one of a small group of documented royal women without making her the greatest of them. Everything beyond this outline, the counsel that turned Darius west, the will that decided the succession, the commanding presence of the tragic Queen, the mannish inventor of court custom, is Greek, and answers to Greek needs. Atossa matters, in the end, as the sharpest instance of a general problem: a real and considerable royal woman, remembered almost wholly through outsiders who made her carry an argument, so that to recover her at all is to learn how much of the Persian court the Greeks could see, and how much they invented.