Ctesias, The Persica

Ctesias came from Cnidus, a Dorian city of coastal Caria, in the south-west of Asia Minor, and belonged to its famous school of physicians, which traced its art to the healing god Asclepius himself. The year of his birth is unknown, perhaps around 441 BCE.^[1] He reached the Persian court in the last years of the fifth century and was taken into royal service on the strength of his medical skill, in the line of Greek doctors, Democedes of Croton the first of them, whom the King had drawn to the palace before him.^[2] Diodorus Siculus reports that he came to Persia as a prisoner of war, and that he lived at court for seventeen years.^[3] The figure has been fought over ever since: Müller emended it to seven, Jacoby took it for the boast of a man who had staked his authority on long residence, and Brown argued for taking Ctesias at his word, a captive from the Ionian troubles of about 414 who really did stay seventeen years and left for home in 398/7.^[2][4] Schmitt likewise treats the number as probably exaggerated, though the fact of a long residence is not in doubt.^[1] If the seventeen years are right and they closed in 398/7, Waters notes, they will have begun as early as 415, in the last decade of Darius II.^[5]

He was the King's own physician, and he treated the royal family. Llewellyn-Jones takes him to have cared for Artaxerxes himself, for the King's much-loved wife Stateira, and for his revered and feared mother Parysatis, and to have learned Persian, so that he could converse with the Achaemenid nobility and gather their family histories and dynastic traditions at first hand.^[6][7] Most consequential for his book, he won the trust of the queen-mother, who became one of his chief informants.^[2] The position had its ceiling: his own account of the physician Apollonides, put to a hideous death for misconduct with a royal woman, reads as a reminder that a court doctor was a servant of the Great King like any other.^[6]

That he was ever in Persia at all has been doubted, since so much of what he wrote is fabulous, and the doubt is old; but it runs against the near-unanimous ancient consensus, which Waters shares, and against a documentary check.^[5] The men who move through his account of the reigns of Darius II and Artaxerxes II can be matched, name and role, against the Babylonian Murašû archive from Nippur: whatever Ctesias made of them in the telling, they were real people of the court he claimed to have served.^[5] Parysatis herself surfaces in that archive as Purušatu, a great landholder in Babylonia who ran an establishment of her own, judges and noble servants included.^[8]

His one securely dated moment is a great one. In 401 BCE the King's brother Cyrus the Younger rose in revolt, and at Cunaxa near Babylon the two armies met; Ctesias was present, and he treated the wound that Cyrus dealt Artaxerxes in the fighting.^[2] The battle itself, and the long march home of the Ten Thousand Greeks who had come out with Cyrus, belong to Xenophon, who marched among them. What belongs to Ctesias is the eyewitness claim. Xenophon, writing from Cyrus's side, names Ctesias as his own authority for what happened around the King, and reports that Ctesias tended the royal wound (Anabasis 1.8.26).^[9] Ctesias made that claim the ground of his whole book, as Photius preserved it:

In nearly all instances his [Ctesias'] account is antithetical to Herodotus, and he even repudiates him often as a liar and calls him out as a writer of fables. For he is younger than Herodotus. He says that for the majority of things that he recounts, he was an eyewitness or, when that was not possible, he heard it straight from the Persians themselves. Thus he composed his history.

Photius, Bibliotheca 72 (Ctesias T8), trans. Waters^[5]

Eyewitness where he could be, and otherwise the word of the Persians themselves: the two pillars of his authority, and both have been pressed. Waters, who accepts the court service, still calls it an open question, and the eyewitness pose was in any case a standard weapon in the competitive world of Greek historiography, aimed here at discrediting a famous predecessor.^[5] After Cunaxa, with Parysatis's encouragement, Ctesias showed kindnesses to the captured Spartan general Clearchus, who gave him a signet ring in friendship before his execution; and in the years that followed he served as the King's go-between with the Athenian admiral Conon and on an embassy toward Sparta, until he was tried at Rhodes for serving Persian interests. He then settled again in his native Cnidus, and it was there, after 397 BCE, that he wrote his books, trading on the cachet of the man who had been physician to the King of Kings.^[1]

The Persica was conceived as a history of the Near East from the legendary Assyrian king Ninus down to Ctesias's own day, closing in the eighth regnal year of Artaxerxes II, 398–397 BCE. It ran to twenty-three books, and the shares are the first thing to notice. The first six stood almost apart: books 1–3 on the Assyrians, books 4–6 on the Medes, so distinct that by the beginning of the Christian era a separate edition of them circulated under the title Assyriaká, and Photius's epitome, beginning at book 7, seems to have worked from a copy that had lost the opening volume. The remaining seventeen books were the Persica proper, from the rise of Cyrus to the author's own time.^[1]

The proportions are revealing, and Waters maps them precisely.^[5][1] Five books (7–11) were given to Cyrus the founder, by Ctesias's day already a figure of legend about whom he could embroider at will. Four or five books (19–23) covered only the first eight years of Artaxerxes II, the years Ctesias himself had witnessed. And a mere handful (12–18) had to carry the whole 125 years between the death of Cambyses in 522 and the end of Darius II in 404. Within that compressed span the imbalance only deepened: the reigns of Darius I and Xerxes, the age of the Persian Wars, were treated in about two books, while four went to Artaxerxes I. The shape of the work tells its own story. Ctesias wrote most fully where he could gossip, and hurried past the great affairs of state.

Ctesias's advertised advantage over Herodotus was access. He claimed, in the passages Diodorus draws from him, to have based his history on the basilikai diphtherai, the "royal parchments" or leather record-books in which the Persians were said to keep a written account of their old history according to a certain law.^[1][3] It is a tantalising claim, for the Achaemenid chancery did keep records, and a Greek at court who could reach them would be a witness beyond price. But it will not bear its own weight. A second Diodorus passage credits its account to the archive only at second hand: "the barbarians say that such is the account concerning Memnon as given in the royal records", the record reached on the say-so of Persian informants, not from Ctesias's own reading; and the two passages do not even name the records alike, basilikai anagraphai in the one, basilikai diphtherai in the other.^[3][2] Jacoby held, bluntly, that the archive Ctesias claimed did not exist.^[2]

Waters draws the balance more finely. The records were real: Darius states at Behistun that his own proclamation was set down "on clay and on parchment", the very kind of royal document Ctesias invoked.^[5] Ctesias must have known such archives existed, and the claim to have drawn on them was, whether or not it was true, an impressive one to make.^[5] But had he actually consulted them, Waters argues, he would have had far too much accurate information at his disposal, exact dates and details his narrative conspicuously lacks; the likeliest conclusion is that he relied mainly on oral report, with any documentary matter reaching him at second hand through palace staff, and subordinated all of it to his literary purposes.^[5] The chancery record was there; Ctesias, on this reading, appealed to its authority without ever opening it.

On his hostility to Herodotus there is no doubt. Ctesias wrote in open opposition, branding him a liar and a spinner of yarns and setting himself up as the possessor of more authentic information; he kept to the Ionian tradition and, Photius reports, wrote in the Ionic dialect, the very form of the polemic shadowing the man it attacked. Waters places the quarrel within the agonistic habits of Greek history-writing, where correcting or discrediting a famous forerunner was a standard tactic; the rivalry, that is, was partly a literary posture.^[5] Yet the correction repeatedly fails against the Iranian evidence.

The sharpest test is the roster of the Seven who slew the Magus and made Darius king. Herodotus's list (Otanes, Intaphrenes, Gobryas, Hydarnes, Megabyzus, Aspathines) agrees, in all but one name, with the roster Darius himself carved at Behistun.^[10] Ctesias's list (Onaphas, Idernes, Norondabates, Mardonios, Barissos and Ataphernes) corresponds to the royal text hardly at all.^[1] Where the King's own monument can be laid beside the two Greeks, it is Herodotus, the outsider, who proves right, and the court insider who strays. Ctesias's variant genealogies of the royal house belong with the same failure (see Bardiya and the Accession of Darius).

What, then, is Ctesias good for? For the texture of the palace, its intrigues, its feasts, its formidable women, he is unmatched, precisely because that was what he cared to record. Later authors quoting him lingered over exactly these scenes, and one of the few of his sentences to survive in something like his own words concerns the magnificence of the King's board:

The king of the Persians, as Ctesias and Dinon relate in the Histories of Persia, supped with fifteen thousand men, and there were expended on the supper four hundred talents.

Ctesias and Dinon, in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 4.27, trans. C. D. Yonge^[11]

Fifteen thousand fed at a sitting, four hundred talents spent: the royal table as the empire's wealth made daily spectacle. The figure looks like the kind of round marvel Ctesias delighted in, and it reaches us at six centuries' remove, as a quotation inside the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. Yet here the Iranian record corroborates him instead. Henkelman has shown that the Greek picture of the King's table answers closely to the ration economy of the Persepolis Fortification archive, where the royal table appears as a great organised institution with its own hierarchy and bureaucracy; the marvel, Llewellyn-Jones concludes, rests on something real.^[6] The banquet was not invented; it was seen.

The eunuchs who fill his court are a harder case. Ctesias names the influential eunuch of each reign, and the modern question is what the word covers. Behind the Greek eunouchos lies the Assyro-Babylonian title ša rēši, an officer "of the head" of the King, which need not denote a castrate at all, so that some of Ctesias's eunuchs may be court officials mislabelled by their Greek reporters.^[6] Waters presses the other side: whatever their historical reality, Ctesias's eunuchs serve literary ends, cast as figures of unwavering loyalty or of base treachery, and the Greek fascination with them, the overstating of their sway, did much to fix the later image of the empire as effeminate.^[12] Court title or literary type, the eunuch is a place where his palace colour and his taste for melodrama cannot be prised apart.

His surest legacy is the queen-mother. Parysatis, his patron and source, dominates the surviving court-narrative, and the poisonings, feuds and revenges the tradition attaches to her descend, through Plutarch, largely from Ctesias. Plutarch's Artaxerxes, the one work for which he demonstrably read and used the Persica, gives the scene that has fixed her forever in the imagination, the halved bird at the King's own table:

Parysatis, cutting a bird of this kind into two pieces with a knife one side of which had been smeared with the drug, the other side being clear of it, ate the untouched and wholesome part herself, and gave Statira that which was thus infected.

Plutarch, Artaxerxes 19, trans. Dryden^[13]

The same tradition has Parysatis play the King at dice for a condemned eunuch's life, lose on purpose, win the next throw, and have him flayed; she "enjoined them to flay him alive, to set his body upon three stakes, and to stretch his skin upon stakes separately from it".^[13] She is drawn as "naturally implacable and savage in her anger and revenge", the deadlier of the two women at war in the palace.^[13] This is the world Ctesias reported, and it is at once his most vivid contribution and the deepest ground of suspicion about him. Scenes of harem intrigue, poison and the machinations of eunuchs and courtesans are also the classic furniture of a Greek fantasy about the decadent Oriental court, and it is never certain how much is Persian tradition and how much the shape a Greek storyteller gives it.

Brosius has done most to sort the two. The Greek writers, she argues, remembered by preference the sensational, so that a handful of royal women, Atossa, Amestris and Parysatis above all, come down as cruel schemers and have been allowed to stand for Persian royal women as a class; how much of this reflects what such women did, and how much what Greeks thought women at court were like, has to be asked of each story in turn.^[8] Against the melodrama she sets the documentary evidence of real institutional power: Parysatis as Purušatu in the Murašû tablets, a wife of Darius II entitled to the rank of a royal consort and wielding it with all the economic weight it carried.^[8] Llewellyn-Jones reads the palace scenes the same way, as women working within the rules of the court rather than subverting them, the queen-mother policing the harem's conduct with the King's leave and guarding the dynastic line; Parysatis's poisoning of Stateira crossed even that line, and she was banished to Babylonia for it.^[6] The power was real, and Persian; the relish of the telling is Greek.

Where Ctesias had no informant at all, he composed. The first six books are the plainest case. Of the Medes he knew almost nothing, not even the names of their kings, and filled three books with elaborate romances like the doomed love of the Median Stryangaeus and the Saka queen Zarinaea. The Assyrian books are dominated by the mythical warrior-queen Semiramis, whose foundation of Babylon and conquests of Egypt and Ethiopia transpose real Persian deeds back into a legendary age. Most tellingly, Ctesias has Semiramis come to Mount Bagistanon (Behistun), lay out a great park around its spring, and raise there an inscribed monument to herself.^[3] This is plainly the famous relief and trilingual cuneiform of Darius the Great, misread across the centuries and fathered on a queen of myth.

Waters makes this the centre of a larger case. The more openly fictional matter in the Persica is also the matter furthest from Ctesias's own time, and it is exactly there that the Near Eastern parallels are thickest.^[5] His Semiramis, on Waters's reading, is a Hellenised rendering of the old Mesopotamian legends of Sargon of Akkad, formative for Assyrian, Babylonian and ultimately Persian ideas of kingship, her exploits reading like the Assyrian royal annals reworked in Greek.^[5] The Bagistanon episode is a refraction of something real: below Darius's relief the cliff carried other, older sculpture, some of it still legible in Ctesias's day, and an inscribed monument he took, at second hand, for the work of his heroine.^[5] On this view the invention had a real object behind it. The Persica, in Waters's phrase, is not a distillation of Akkadian literature but a work of Greek literature bearing a deep Near Eastern imprint, so that the value of these books lies in what they show of how the Persians of about 400 BCE, and the Greeks who listened to them, imagined the empires before Persia.^[5] Lanfranchi and others have pressed the same point for the Assyrian material, genuinely Assyrian terms and traditions surfacing in it, the historical empire remembered at two removes.^[14] Ctesias's Median matter includes a Bactrian conquest he alone reports (see the Medes).

On the events a historian of the empire most needs, Ctesias is at his worst. He had almost no interest in Greco-Persian relations: the conquest of Ionia, the Ionian Revolt, the whole tangle of Persian intervention in the Peloponnesian War go all but unmentioned. His account of Xerxes' invasion of Greece was, in one verdict Schmitt records, "little more than a string of absurdities": he passed straight from Thermopylae to Plataea and, in a notorious blunder, shunted the sea-fight at Salamis into an appendix, out of order.^[15] The transposition is his own, not the epitomator's, and it stands first among what Stronk calls his "blatant blunders", the errors no rehabilitation conceals.^[2] Whether the silence reflects incompetence or a decision to pass lightly over ground Herodotus had already covered in full is debated; Schmitt inclines to think he curtailed the great struggles because he had little to add, and lavished his pages on the harem instead.^[1] Either way, the reader who comes to Ctesias for the Persian Wars comes away empty, or worse than empty. His strength and his failure are the same fact: he wrote a history of the court, not of the empire.

Under Ctesias's name also went a book of Indica, a single volume on an India he never visited, compiled from what he heard at the Persian court on the empire's eastern edge. It is the origin of some of antiquity's most enduring marvels: the manticore, a red beast with a man's face and a scorpion's sting, which "can strike to the distance of a hundred feet, and no creature can survive the wound it inflicts save only the elephant";^[16] the dog-headed Cynocephali who bark instead of speaking; griffins that guard the mountain gold; and the one-legged Sciopodae who shade themselves with a single great foot. Fantastic as it is, Schmitt judges it, for all its dog-headed men, "a valuable document on pre-Alexandrian India", a record of what was known and imagined of the far east before Alexander's march opened it to Greek eyes.^[1] It also drew the ancient fire the Persica largely escaped: Llewellyn-Jones and Robson observe that the loudest ancient censure of Ctesias, Lucian's included, attaches to the Indica, a book of marvels judged as marvels, far more than to the Persian history.^[17] The paradox is that the Indica was also quarried for centuries by writers on natural wonders, its beasts passing into the medieval bestiary, so that the least historical of Ctesias's works was among the most read. Ctesias wrote besides a geographical Periplous in three books and a treatise On the Tributes throughout Asia, said to have listed the commodities rendered to the royal household from every part of the empire, though whether this last was a separate work or an excursus of the Persica is uncertain.

Almost none of Ctesias survives directly. Three later authors carry roughly three-quarters of what remains: Diodorus Siculus, who excerpted the Assyrian and Median books at length, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Photius, the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch whose Bibliotheca (codex 72) gives a running epitome of the Persian books, 7 to the end.^[5] Each is what scholars call a "cover text", a later frame through which the lost original must be glimpsed, and Waters cautions that only one scrap, a papyrus fragment, preserves any of the Persica unmediated; everything else is Ctesias as some later reader chose to relay him.^[5] Photius in particular had a criterion of his own: he tended to pick out precisely those accounts that differed from Herodotus, and for the last books from Xenophon, which both preserves the eccentric and warps the balance of what we have.^[2] The eunuchs so prominent in the epitome may owe part of that prominence to Photius's own Byzantine world, where court eunuchs were commonplace.^[5]

The definitive modern collection of every surviving scrap is Felix Jacoby's, in his Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (no. 688), by whose fragment-numbers Ctesias is universally cited; the reader who cannot quote him verbatim cites him, of necessity, by fragment.^[18] Even the fragments' edges blur: where a later author does not name his source, a story may be Ctesias or may be his continuators Dinon and Heracleides, who wrote their own Persica a generation or two afterward, following and correcting his model, so that the count of fragments differs from edition to edition.^[19][14] The crucial and humbling point is that later writers extracted by preference the incredible stories, and that the complete text is gone, so the Ctesias we can read is a residue selected for its strangeness, the sober parts, if there were many, largely lost with the rest.^[1]

How far Ctesias can be trusted is the question behind every use of him, and it has swung hard over a century. It is best set out as a standing disagreement.

The case for the prosecution is ancient and heavy. Plutarch, who used him, dismissed the Persica as "a perfect farrago of incredible and senseless fables";^[20] Lucian's satirical underworld reserved "the greatest punishments of all" for lying historians, "amongst whom were Ctesias of Cnidus, Herodotus, and many others";^[21] and modern scholarship, led by Jacoby, hardened this into near-dismissal, Ctesias as a poiētēs and not a historian.^[22][2] On this reading he is a fabulist who happened to live at a court.

The case for the defence does not deny the fables; it changes what they are evidence of. On the court-perspective reading, Ctesias transmitted the stories, fables and legends "which were being told, recited, and performed within the halls of Persia's elite", so that his book is a witness to how the Persians themselves approached their past.^[7] Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, who in the documentary-turn workshops of the 1980s dismissed the Persica as poor historical material, had also made Ctesias the fountainhead of the Greek image of the East; the later development turns her own insight around, treating the palace gossip he relayed not as fact and not as free Greek invention but as the court's own storytelling, caught by a man positioned to hear it.^[17][6] Lenfant, reading Ctesias beside Herodotus, argues that he did more than plagiarise and contradict his predecessor: he often echoes genuine local, sometimes Babylonian, traditions that ran in competition with the ones Herodotus had collected.^[19]

Between dismissal and rehabilitation sits a pragmatic middle, and it is where most working historians now stand. Ctesias is indispensable where he is all there is: for the reign of Darius II, for the accession and reign of Artaxerxes II, for Parysatis and the harem politics of the late court, the fragmentary record leaves scarcely any other narrative, and his late-court prosopography is anchored in the Murašû tablets even where his stories are not.^[5] Waters's Near Eastern reading gives that middle its firmest ground: the Persica is "Ctesias' Hellenized rendering of Mesopotamian and Iranian traditions", a melodramatic take on a real ruling elite and its forerunners, so that its errors are refractions of genuine matter rather than inventions.^[5] Stronk, likewise, places him between the genres, "no pure novelist, no more than he is a pure historian", his accuracy plausibly growing as he nears his own time.^[2]

Where the balance now lies can be stated as a fact about the field. The old question, liar or historian, has largely been set aside; whether Ctesias was a historian at all, Waters writes, "should no longer be the point of the debate", which has moved to his place as an innovator in the writing of romance and as a witness to Persian court-tradition.^[5] The severe verdict on his reliability as a chronicler of events still stands; what has changed is the recognition that unreliability of that kind does not empty the source.

What would settle the question is exactly what is missing: only a fuller text, or more points where the Iranian and Babylonian record can be laid directly against him, could fix how far the witness is to be believed.^[1][5] The Persepolis archive already supplies one such point, confirming the King's table he described; each new documentary find is a further chance either to convict him or to redeem a detail, and the source will go on being reassessed as the record grows. Until then he is read as he has to be: priceless for the court he saw, treacherous for the events he narrates, and never trusted alone.