Darius II

The king's birth-name was Ochus (Greek Ōchos), an Old Iranian name borne again by his grandson Artaxerxes III; the Achaemenid house favoured such repetition, and the birth-names of the later kings fall into the series Ochus, Arses (also rendered Arsaces or Arsicas), Ochus, Arses.^[1] On taking power he set the private name aside and ruled as Darius, the first king for whom the adoption of a throne-name is securely attested. The custom of exchanging a birth-name for a regnal one is confirmed independently in Greek writers and in Babylonian astronomical and chronicle texts; only the throne-names appear in the royal inscriptions, while the collateral tradition preserves the private names of Artaxerxes I to III and of Darius II and III alike.^[1] Schmitt interprets Old Persian Dārayavauš as "Holding firm/retaining the good", beside Xšayaṛšan, "Ruling over heroes", for Xerxes and Ṛtaxšaça, "Whose rule is through Truth", for Artaxerxes.^[1] By adopting the name of the empire's organiser, Ochus associated his contested accession with an established model of legitimate kingship.

The Greek epithet Nothos, "the bastard", fixed on him the fact that his mother was one of Artaxerxes I's Babylonian concubines rather than a wife of royal blood. In his own inscriptions the illegitimacy is invisible: he styles himself, in the words of his forebears, the son of Artaxerxes and an Achaemenian, and claims the throne by descent and the favour of Ahura Mazdā.^[2]

According to Ctesias, Artaxerxes I died on the same day as his wife Damaspia, leaving a single legitimate son, who took the throne as Xerxes II.^[3] Several of the dead king's sons by Babylonian concubines had ambitions of their own. The first to move was Sogdianus, son of Alogune, who with the courtiers Pharnacyas and Menostanes conspired against his half-brother; forty-five days into the reign Xerxes was killed, "while he lay drunk in his palace", and Sogdianus seized the title and made Menostanes his chiliarch.^[3] A third brother, Ochus, son of the concubine Cosmartidene, held the satrapy of Hyrcania and had married a half-sister, Parysatis, daughter of yet another Babylonian concubine, Andia. Ochus refused Sogdianus's summons, drew the important men to his side, among them Arbarius, commander of Sogdianus's cavalry, Arsames the satrap of Egypt, and the eunuch Artoxares, and soon took power as Darius II.^[3] Sogdianus gave himself up on the new king's assurance and was executed "after reigning 6 months 15 days".^[3]

The account of the three kings is almost entirely Ctesias's. Briant argues that it preserves propaganda circulated after Ochus's victory: the successful claimant is cleared of direct wrongdoing, while his defeated brothers appear as a drunkard and a schemer of doubtful birth.^[4] The same tendency appears in the omens Ctesias reports. When Sogdianus set a courtier, Bagorazus, to drive the funeral chariot bearing the bodies of Artaxerxes I and Xerxes II, the animals were said to balk until the murdered heir was honoured: "In fact, the mules that drew the funeral chariot, as if they had been waiting for the remains of the son [Xerxes] as well, refused to move; but when Xerxes' body arrived, they moved on in high spirits".^[4] Briant assigns the story to Ochus's supporters, who used the funeral procession to challenge Sogdianus's legitimacy because responsibility for a father's burial belonged to the heir. Polyaenus adds that Ochus proclaimed the royal mourning "according to Persian custom" and sealed documents with his father's seal before he had secured the throne.^[4]

Pausanias preserves a counterclaim. He calls Darius an illegitimate son, nothos, of Artaxerxes and says that he acted "with the support of all of the Persian people" (ho Persōn dēmos) to depose Sogdianus, whom the passage calls Artaxerxes's legitimate son, gnēsios.^[5] This version assigns the stronger birth-claim to Sogdianus rather than Ochus. Herodotus had recorded a Persian rule (nomos) barring illegitimate sons from the throne, but Briant argues that the contest of 424 was decided by aristocratic and military support among rival sons rather than by a rule of birth alone.^[4]

Dated cuneiform tablets provide an independent chronological control on the succession. The Babylonian documents place Artaxerxes I's death between 24 December 424 and 10 January 423, when Ochus was already recognised in Babylonia as Darius II; neither of his two short-lived brothers appears there in a dating formula.^[6] This absence establishes only that the documents do not recognise Xerxes II or Sogdianus. It does not verify the sequence of conspiracies reported by Ctesias. The named supporters of the rivals provide a separate and stronger comparison.

Kuhrt notes that several men whom Ctesias names among the rival factions reappear as estate-holders in Babylonian tablets, supporting his identification of participants even where his motives and court scenes remain untestable.^[7] Menostanes, Sogdianus's follower, is identified with the Manuštanu of the Murašû records, styled mār bīt šarri, "royal prince"; after his defeat, property associated with him passed to Artoxares, who had supported Darius.^[8] The prosopographical agreement links individuals in the Greek narrative to records dated around 424/423, but it does not independently confirm every episode Ctesias assigns to them.

Such comparisons are necessary because continuous narrative for the later empire is limited. Ctesias, the principal Greek writer on internal Persian affairs, survives only in summary and excerpts, and his account concentrates on court conflicts and punishments rather than administration. In the Persica, Darius II shares a single book with Xerxes II and Sogdianus, and comparatively little is said about his own government.^[9] Other Greek narratives follow the reign chiefly when Persian policy affected the Aegean.

Victory did not end the killing. Darius soon faced a further challenge from his full brother Arsites, joined by Artyphius, a son of the old rebel Megabyzus; both were put to death, along with Pharnacyas, and Menostanes chose suicide.^[10] In Asia Minor the satrap of Sardis, Pissuthnes, revolted with the help of Athenian mercenaries; Darius sent an army under three generals, Pissuthnes was betrayed and executed, and his satrapy was given to Tissaphernes, who would dominate the western frontier for the rest of the reign.^[10]

Darius also used marriage to bind the powerful house of Hydarnes to the crown. During the unsettled accession, Darius married his heir Arsaces to Stateira, daughter of Hydarnes, and his own daughter Amestris to Hydarnes's son Teritushmes. The cross-marriages were a departure from the strict royal endogamy the dynasty had practised since Cambyses, and they granted the Hydarnids an exceptional standing. That standing was soon judged too great. According to Ctesias the whole affair unravelled in violence: Teritushmes conceived a passion for his own sister and had Amestris killed, and the crown answered by destroying his entire family, a slaughter Ctesias lays at Parysatis's door.^[11] The one surviving Hydarnid of note, a brother of Stateira, later turns up in the entourage of Tissaphernes. Briant connects the destruction of the Hydarnid marriage alliance with a return to marriage within the royal family: Darius and Parysatis were themselves half-brother and half-sister, and their sons included the future Artaxerxes II and Cyrus the Younger.^[11] Endogamy reduced dependence on an allied noble house, although it did not prevent rivalry within the dynasty.

Parysatis, the king's half-sister and wife, is the most vivid figure of the reign in the Greek record, and the most distorted. Ctesias, who served at the court of her son and claims her as a patroness, made her the archetype of the cruel oriental princess: he lays to her charge a train of poisonings, mutilations and revenges, culminating in the torture of the whole Hydarnid family and, under the next reign, the murder of her son's wife Stateira.^[12] The portrait is lurid, and it belongs to a Greek tradition that read the power of Persian royal women as evidence of a court given over to the passions of the harem.

Babylonian tablets establish a different aspect of Parysatis's position. Records from the reigns of Artaxerxes I and Darius II refer to royal-family "houses", including lands of Parysatis near Nippur, and name a steward responsible for them.^[13] Briant cautions that these were not private manors in the later sense. They were revocable assignments of revenue from cadastral units that retained taxes and royal-service obligations; stewards supervised the land, workers and income on the beneficiary's behalf. One Nippur receipt records sixty kur of barley as farm rent from Parysatis's lands in year 3 of Darius and routes the transaction through her steward. It is an accounting record for an assigned revenue stream, not a deed granting a compact domain. The evidence therefore supports Parysatis's access to substantial revenues and an administrative household, not unrestricted ownership or personal management of a single territorial estate. This institutional evidence is distinct from Ctesias's stories of poisonings and revenge, which are the principal source for her court portrait (see Atossa).

The Murašû archive provides unusually detailed evidence for the Babylonian countryside under Darius II. Several hundred tablets from this Nippur business house document dealings between year 25 of Artaxerxes I (440-439) and year 7 of Darius II (417-416), with related material continuing to about 404.^[14] The firm managed land rather than functioning as a bank: holders who did not cultivate plots directly entrusted them to the Murašû, who sublet to cultivators, marketed produce and returned rent; debts could consequently be settled in silver against future harvests.^[14]

Much of the land they handled belonged to a system of military tenure. Under the "land-for-service" principle, well attested in the archive, the crown granted parcels to soldiers and their families in return for military obligation, the holders grouped into units called ḫaṭru, some of them named for the ethnic contingents that worked them, Arabs, Armenians, Carians, Indians, Lydians and others.^[15] The later classification of these plots as "bow", "horse" and "chariot" fiefs recorded the kind of service each owed. The records also distinguish "royal land" and royal grants (nidintu šarri). Revenue assignments associated with Parysatis and the royal prince Arsames appear alongside people also named by Ctesias.^[16] Because military lots retained service and tax obligations even when their revenues were assigned to a royal beneficiary, the tablets document how land tenure supported both military recruitment and crown income.

The same records sketch the administrative frame above the fiefs. Babylonia in these years was governed for the crown by a Persian satrap, the Gubaru attested until about 417, under whom Babylonian officials such as Belšunu, styled "governor" (pīḫatu) of Babylon between 421 and 414, managed the city and its district; Belšunu's own archive runs from 438 to 400 and shows a local notable rising in Persian service.^[14] The Murašû firm's dealings taper off after year 7 of Darius and cease around 404, probably with the dissolution of the business rather than any upheaval in the countryside, since the Murašû were only one house among several operating in the region.^[14] Taken together, the records distinguish land held for military service, crown and temple property, private plots and the credit arrangements through which holders met obligations in silver. They document provincial administration at the level of individual leases and payments, a scale largely absent from Greek narrative.

A second large documentary group comes from Egypt. On the island of Elephantine, at the empire's southern frontier opposite Aswan, a garrison of Judaean soldiers had long served the Persian crown and worshipped their god Yahu in a temple of their own. The community's papyri show the imperial administration involved in its religious life well before any crisis. In 418 a certain Hanani, possibly the brother of Nehemiah, arrived from Jerusalem carrying instructions on the correct observance of the festival of unleavened bread, the so-called Passover papyrus; the letter states that the order came from the king and had been sent to Arsames, the satrap of Egypt.^[17] Briant argues that the crown did not devise the ritual rule. In his interpretation, the Jerusalem authorities formulated the instruction and central government gave it the force of "royal law" across the diaspora.^[18]

In year 14 of Darius (410), while Arsames was away in Babylonia, the priests of the neighbouring Egyptian god Khnum secured the cooperation of Vidranga, the local Persian governor, and "they destroyed the altar house".^[19] Vidranga's son Nafaina brought troops and levelled the temple of Yahu, carrying off its fittings.

The community petitioned for redress, and the papyri preserve the campaign in their own voice. They wrote first to the high priest at Jerusalem, who did not answer; then, in 407, to Bagohi, governor of Judah, and to the sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria, reminding the authorities that they had been three years in mourning, without offering or incense in the ruined sanctuary.^[20] To establish their right they reached back to the conquest, in a passage that is also a rare Judaean memory of Cambyses:

Already in the days of the kings of Egypt our fathers had built that temple in the fortress of Yeb, and when Cambyses came into Egypt he found that temple built, and the temples of the gods of Egypt all of them they overthrew, but no one did any harm to that temple.

Petition of the Jews of Elephantine, 407 BCE (TADAE A4.7)^[20]

The double appeal, to Judah and to Samaria, and the involvement of Arsames on his return, finally worked. The satrap authorised the temple's rebuilding "as it was built before", but with a telling restriction: meal-offering and incense might resume, but not the burnt offerings of rams, oxen and goats.^[21] Briant interprets the episode chiefly as a dispute over adjoining temple lands and competing claims of royal authorisation and Egyptian law, rather than as evidence of a general policy of religious persecution. The conditioned licence shows the satrapal administration permitting reconstruction while restricting the sacrifices most likely to offend the neighbouring Khnum priesthood.^[22] The petitioners' later report that "the dogs tore off the anklet from his legs" records the fate that overtook Vidranga, though who punished him, and why, the documents do not say.^[20]

For most of the reign the crown's energy on the documented frontier was turned west. The Greek cities of Asia Minor had paid Athens, not Persia, since the mid-century settlement, and the king's right to their tribute, though never formally renounced, had lapsed in practice. The long war between Athens and Sparta gave Darius the opening to enforce it. Early in the reign the two powers had in fact reached an understanding: Andocides recalled that "We concluded a truce (spondai) with the Great King and we established friendship (philia) with him forever", a settlement negotiated by his own kinsman Epilycus.^[23] Such an accommodation left the king's claim to the coastal cities in suspense rather than surrendered, and it did not hold once Athens faltered.

After the Athenian catastrophe at Syracuse in 413 the western satraps moved. The pressure on Tissaphernes was fiscal: "The king had lately called upon him for the tribute from his government, for which he was in arrears, being unable to raise it from the Hellenic towns by reason of the Athenians", and he reckoned that by weakening Athens he would both get the tribute paid and draw Sparta into the king's alliance.^[24] Both Tissaphernes and his neighbour Pharnabazus sent embassies to Sparta, each seeking to bring the Spartan fleet into his own province. In the summer of 412 Tissaphernes and the Spartan Chalcideus concluded the first of three treaties. Its opening clause asserted the crown's claim:

Whatever country or cities the king has, or the king's ancestors had, shall be the king's; and whatever came in to the Athenians from these cities, either money or any other thing, the king and the Lacedaemonians and their allies shall jointly hinder the Athenians from receiving either money or any other thing.

Thucydides 8.18, the first treaty of 412 BCE^[25]

The agreement was revised in the winter of 412-411 and finalised early in 411; the last version was issued in the name of the king and his sons, and a Lycian inscribed copy was set up under a local dignitary at Caunus.^[26] The first version's claim to "whatever the king's ancestors had" was broad enough to raise Spartan objections because it could encompass Greek communities outside Asia. The Spartan commissioner Lichas rejected those terms, although he later told the Milesians that they "ought to show a reasonable submission to Tissaphernes and to pay him court, until the war should be happily settled".^[27] Briant interprets the final bargain as Spartan recognition of Persian authority over the cities of the Asian coast in return for the money and naval support needed to defeat Athens.^[27]

Implementation of the alliance was disrupted by competition between the king's governors. Tissaphernes at Sardis and Pharnabazus at Dascylium each sought control of the Spartan relationship and royal favour; Briant links their rivalry to the inconsistency of Persian policy.^[28] Tissaphernes, advised by the exiled Athenian Alcibiades, delayed payments and repeatedly failed to produce the promised Phoenician fleet. Alcibiades recommended keeping both Greek sides at war rather than permitting either an early victory, while Athens recovered ground between 411 and 407.^[28] The sources do not establish how far the delay reflected Tissaphernes's caution, Alcibiades's advice or instructions from Darius, but it postponed the result sought in the treaties.

Finance was the crown's principal means of intervention. Kuhrt notes the weakness of Persian naval power in the Aegean and the resulting dependence on Greek fleets to recover the coastal cities.^[29] Athenian aid to the rebel Amorges, son of the executed Pissuthnes, gave Darius an immediate grievance; Andocides later claimed that the king "provided them with 5,000 talents to underwrite the war" until Athens was destroyed.^[23] The total is a Greek estimate, but Persian subsidies to Sparta are independently central to the narrative of the war. Darius's contribution was therefore sustained finance channelled through the western command rather than a large royal field army.

In 407 Darius changed the western command by sending his younger son Cyrus to the coast with authority over the satraps. Cyrus came with a letter under the king's seal naming him, in Xenophon's report, "karanos" of the forces "whose mustering-place is Castolus", a commission that made Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus his subordinates.^[30] Cyrus paid the Spartan fleet more consistently and formed a close partnership with the admiral Lysander. Persian subsidies supported the campaign that ended at Aigospotamoi in September 405 and brought Athens to surrender the following spring.^[31]

Darius fell ill near the end of the war and recalled Cyrus to court; before leaving, the prince handed his authority and his money to Lysander.^[31] Darius died between September 405 and April 404. His elder son Arsaces succeeded as Artaxerxes II, and the court was at once thrown into crisis when Tissaphernes accused Cyrus of plotting against his brother. Cyrus was arrested and saved only by the intercession of their mother Parysatis, who sent him back to the coast, where he began to gather the army that would march on Babylon and die with him at Cunaxa in 401 (see Artaxerxes II).^[32] The succession was therefore settled in title but not in practice.

Briant suggests that Cyrus's western command may have been intended to manage the rivalry by giving the younger son high office away from court while Arsaces remained heir.^[31] Whatever its original purpose, the command gave Cyrus control of money, patronage and contacts among Greek soldiers. Parysatis's preference for him further sustained the dispute, so the arrangement did not prevent a challenge to Artaxerxes II after Darius's death.

Greek narratives provide little information about most of the empire, so their silence cannot establish political calm outside the Aegean.^[33] Isolated references attest conflict elsewhere. Xenophon notes in a single sentence that Darius put down a revolt in Media in 408, and that late in the reign the king was in north-eastern Media in connection with the Cadusians further east.^[34] Such "campaigning" against the Cadusians may reflect less a rebellion than the periodic renewal of the crown's alliance with a people whose manpower it drew on. A parchment from Egypt points to unrest in the province between 411 and 408, limited in time and place, and a Babylonian contract may hint at difficulties in the south around 407.^[34] The material is scanty, but it is enough to show a king active across a vast and varied terrain, not a ruler whose horizon stopped at the small communities of the Greek coast.

Darius II commissioned the monuments expected of an Achaemenid king. At Susa he recorded the building of an apadana and the completion of a palace begun by his father, in inscriptions that copy the formulas of Darius I almost word for word:

This palace, of stone in its column(s), Darius the Great King built; Darius the King may Ahuramazda together with the gods protect.

Darius II, D2Sa (Susa)^[35]

A companion text at Susa places him in the line of succession and credits him with finishing his father's work: "This palace Artaxerxes previously built, who was my father; this palace, by the favor of Ahuramazda, I afterwards built (to completion)".^[2] He had his tomb cut in the cliff at Naqsh-e Rostam near his father's, its façade modelled on the tomb of Darius I, whose titulary his own inscriptions echo.^[36] Briant places the reuse of Darius I's name, tomb form and titulary within the dynasty's established claims of legitimate succession; these forms were especially useful after the contested accession of 424.^[36] A Greek tradition also remembered Darius II as a just king who claimed on his deathbed to have "practised justice before all men and gods".^[37]

Greek narratives organise Darius II's reign around a violent accession, court conflict and intervention in the Peloponnesian War. Babylonian and Aramaic documents address different activities: land assignments and taxation, military obligations, petitions by temple communities, and the movement of revenue through provincial administrations. Neither body of evidence is a complete account of royal policy. Their different subjects explain why the same reign can appear court-centred in Greek narrative and administrative in documents produced within the empire.

Briant's reconstruction supports a narrower verdict: on dynastic continuity and western policy, the reign was a success for the crown.^[38] The succession, murderous as it was, produced a king who held the throne for two decades and passed it to his son; the western claim the empire had let lapse for a generation was formally re-established, and the greatest war in the Greek world was steered towards the outcome the king preferred and largely paid for. Persian subsidies, administered first through the satraps and then through Cyrus, financed the Greek fleet on which western policy depended. The limits are equally clear: competition between Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus impeded western policy, the succession remained vulnerable to rival princes, and the surviving evidence for Media and Egypt records episodes that central government did not fully control. None produced a general imperial collapse during Darius's reign. The unresolved rivalry between his sons instead transferred the dynastic conflict to the reign of Artaxerxes II.