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, 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] Each throne-name carried a programme. Old Persian Dārayavauš was read by Rüdiger Schmitt as "Holding firm/retaining the good", beside Xšayaṛšan "Ruling over heroes" for Xerxes and Ṛtaxšaça "Whose rule is through Truth" for Artaxerxes.^[1] To take the name of the empire's organiser was itself an act of legitimation for a son who had won the throne by force.

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 tale of the three kings is almost entirely Ctesias's, and its shape carries the marks of the propaganda that circulated after Ochus's victory. The winner comes out spotless; the losers are drunkards and schemers of doubtful birth. The bias shows most plainly 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".^[3] The story, plainly hatched in Ochus's circle, turned the disposal of the royal dead into a verdict on Sogdianus's right to rule, for the conduct of a father's funeral fell to the legitimate heir. Polyaenus adds that in these months Ochus proclaimed the royal mourning "according to Persian custom" and sealed documents with his father's seal, acting the successor before he had won.^[3]

Against all this Pausanias preserves a countervailing scrap from the opposite tradition, in which "Darius, illegitimate son (nothos) of Artaxerxes, with the support of all of the Persian people (ho Person demos), dethroned Sogdianus, legitimate son (gnesios) of Artaxerxes".^[4] Here it is Sogdianus who is the true son and Ochus the usurper carried by the mass. Which brother was the more legitimate depended on who was telling the story, and the surviving version is the winner's. Herodotus had recorded a Persian rule (nomos) barring illegitimate sons from the throne, but the events of 424 show that no such rule had binding force: the contest was among nothoi, and what decided it was the backing of the aristocracy and the army, not the purity of a claim.^[3]

What lifts the succession of 424 out of pure court-legend is that its chronology can be checked against dated cuneiform tablets. 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 ever appears there in a dating formula.^[5] The silence shows only that neither short-lived claimant's writ ran in the scribal centres of the south, where Ochus's support was strongest; it does not by itself establish every part of Ctesias's story. A three-cornered contest of the kind he describes is compatible with the tablets, and the named partisans provide the stronger corroboration.

More striking still, a large number of the men Ctesias names as partisans of the rivals reappear as estate-holders in the Babylonian tablets, which argues for his essential reliability in this instance.^[5] Menostanes, Sogdianus's most loyal follower, is the Manuštanu of the Murašû records, styled mār bīt šarri, "royal prince"; when he fell, his estates passed to Artoxares, plainly as a reward for going over to Darius.^[3] The correspondence between the Greek narrative and the documents is close enough to confirm both. The prosopography of the Murašû archive even fixes individual figures of the tale to the year 424/423.^[1]

That the reign is legible chiefly through such controls reflects the poverty of continuous narrative for the later empire. Ctesias, the one Greek to write on internal Persian affairs, survives only in summary and excerpt, and his interest ran to court scandal, palace intrigue and exotic punishment more than to policy. He gives Darius II almost no space of his own: in the Persica the king shares a single book with Xerxes II and the short-lived Sogdianus.^[6] For the rest, the Greek sources follow the reign only where it touched 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.^[3] 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.^[3]

The consolidation had a marriage policy behind it. To bind the powerful house of Hydarnes to the crown at this dangerous moment, 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.^[3] The one surviving Hydarnid of note, a brother of Stateira, later turns up in the entourage of Tissaphernes. The lesson the crown drew was that a great house raised by marriage could as easily become a rival, and Darius and Parysatis, themselves half-brother and half-sister, restored endogamy as the rule.^[3] Their own union was meant to rebuild the dynastic stock, and from it came the next king, Arsaces, and his rival Cyrus.

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.^[3] 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.

The documentary record shows something the Greek melodrama does not: a queen who was a great landholder in her own right. The Murašû tablets identify "the house of Parysatis" among the holders of royal estates around Nippur, on the same footing as the satrap Arsames.^[3] That a royal woman managed her own domains, drew their revenue and disposed of it is the sober institutional reality beneath the tales of the poisoned cup. The gap between the Greek queen-portrait and the evidence of the tablets is the same problem that attends every Achaemenid royal woman (see Atossa): the sources that give them the most colour are the least interested in what they actually did.

The reign is the window through which the Babylonian countryside becomes visible. Several hundred tablets from the archive of the Murašû, a business house of Nippur, document its dealings between year 25 of Artaxerxes I (440-439) and year 7 of Darius II (417-416), with a tail of related material down to about 404.^[3] The Murašû were not bankers but managers of land: tenant-holders who did not wish to farm their plots directly entrusted them to the firm, which sublet to cultivators, sold the produce and returned the rent, so that a debt could be settled in silver against a future harvest.^[3]

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.^[7] The later classification of these plots as "bow", "horse" and "chariot" fiefs recorded the kind of service each owed. Alongside them lay "royal lands" and outright "royal gifts" (nidintu šarri) held by the great: the estates of Parysatis and of Prince Arsames, satrap of Egypt, both appear in the archive, and so do men known otherwise only from Ctesias.^[3] The Murašû tablets thus give, in fiscal detail no narrative supplies, the mechanism by which the empire turned Babylonian land into soldiers and revenue.

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.^[3] 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.^[3] What the archive leaves is the single richest view of rural society anywhere in the empire: the land held for military service, the interlock of crown estates, temple land and private plots, and the credit that let a fief-holder meet his obligation in silver. It is the concrete underside of the tribute lists, and it belongs to this reign.

Egypt yields the reign's other documentary treasure. 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.^[8] Briant reads the document not as the crown legislating a foreign rite but as the central government lending its sanction, its "royal law", to a ruling that originated with the Jerusalem authorities, who wished to unify practice across the diaspora. The empire authorised; it did not dictate.

The pragmatism had limits, as a graver episode showed. In year 14 of Darius (410), while Arsames was away in Babylonia, the priests of the neighbouring Egyptian god Khnum made common cause with Vidranga, the local Persian governor, and "they destroyed the altar house".^[9] 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.^[9] 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)^[9]

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.^[9] The concession looks like a compromise with the Khnum priesthood, for whom the slaughter of rams beside their own sanctuary was an offence. The episode shows the empire's habitual pragmatism in religion working itself out in paperwork: a local dispute over land and cult, arbitrated by the satrapal administration, settled by a licence hedged with conditions. 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.^[9]

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.^[10] 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.^[11] Both Tissaphernes and his neighbour Pharnabazus sent embassies to Sparta, each hoping to bring the Spartan fleet into his own province, and the crown found itself courted by the very power it meant to use. In the summer of 412 Tissaphernes and the Spartan Chalcideus struck the first of three treaties. Its opening clause restored the crown's claim in the plainest terms:

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^[12]

The agreement was revised in the winter of 412-411 and finalised early in 411, the last version made in the name of the king and his sons and preserved, remarkably, in a Lycian inscribed copy overseen by a local dignitary at Caunus.^[5] The successive drafts differed little in substance, but the first version's sweeping grant of "whatever the king's ancestors had", which could be read to hand Sparta's own allies in Europe to Persia, drew objection: the Spartan commissioner Lichas denounced the terms as outrageous, only to have to swallow them, telling the Milesians that they "ought to show a reasonable submission to Tissaphernes and to pay him court, until the war should be happily settled".^[3] For all their solemnity the treaties bound Sparta to recognise Persian sovereignty over the Asian coast in return for money and ships, and they favoured the king. The bargain was that Sparta would help Persia recover the seaboard, and Persia would fund the fleet that beat Athens.

The alliance did not run smoothly, and its friction was as much between the king's own governors as between allies. Tissaphernes at Sardis and Pharnabazus at Dascylium competed for the credit of the Spartan connection and for the king's favour, and their rivalry, useful to the crown as a check on any one satrap growing too great, made Persian policy fitful.^[3] Tissaphernes, counselled by the exiled Athenian Alcibiades, was slow to pay and slower to produce the Phoenician fleet he kept promising. Alcibiades pressed on him a policy of studied delay, that Persia should keep both Greek sides in play and let them wear each other down rather than let either win outright, and for years the war on the coast swayed back and forth while Athens even recovered ground between 411 and 407.^[3] Whether the hesitation was Tissaphernes's own caution, Alcibiades's cunning or the king's design is hard to disentangle, but its effect was to squander the advantage the treaties had won.

Behind the manoeuvring the essential fact was financial. Persia's own naval power was weak, so the crown's leverage lay in hiring whichever Greek fleet served its purpose, and its purpose was to retake the Aegean seaboard.^[5] Athenian aid to the rebel Amorges, son of the executed Pissuthnes, gave the king his grievance; Andocides remembered that the angry king then "provided them with 5,000 talents to underwrite the war" until Athens was destroyed.^[10] The figure is a Greek estimate, but the substance is not in doubt. The decisive weapon Darius brought to the Peloponnesian War was not an army but a treasury.

By 407 Darius resolved the drift by sending his younger son Cyrus to the coast with authority over the western 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.^[13] The prince threw the crown's resources behind Sparta without reserve. He formed a close partnership with the admiral Lysander, poured Persian gold into the Spartan fleet, and so underwrote the campaign that ended at Aigospotamoi in September 405 and brought Athens to surrender the following spring.^[3]

The war's end coincided with the king's. Falling ill, Darius recalled Cyrus to his sickbed; before leaving, the prince handed his authority and his money to Lysander.^[3] 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).^[6] The unresolved rivalry of the two sons was the reign's last legacy.

The decision to send Cyrus west may itself have been an attempt to manage that rivalry, giving the younger and more forceful son a great command far from the court while the elder stood first in line.^[3] If so, it miscarried on both counts. The command furnished Cyrus with the money, the Greek mercenaries and the taste for rule that made his revolt possible, and Parysatis's open preference for him ensured that the quarrel outlived the father who had failed to settle it. The arrangement therefore preserved, rather than resolved, the rivalry between the brothers.

The Greek focus on the Aegean leaves the rest of the empire in near-darkness, and it would be a mistake to read that silence as calm.^[5] Chance references show trouble 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.^[5] 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.^[5] 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 left the ordinary monuments of a legitimate 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)^[14]

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.^[3] The reuse of the founder's name, the imitation of his monuments and the recital of an unbroken descent were the standard instruments of Achaemenid legitimacy, and a king who had come to the throne over the bodies of two brothers had particular need of them. A Greek tradition, drawn perhaps from the official version, remembered him as a just king who claimed on his deathbed to have "practised justice before all men and gods".^[15]

Read through the Greek narrative alone, Darius II's twenty years look like a slack interval between the wars of Xerxes and the drama of Cunaxa: a bloody accession, a queen out of melodrama, and a long tacking course on the Aegean edge. The documents reshape that impression. The same reign that the Greeks reduce to court intrigue and coastal diplomacy is, in the Babylonian and Egyptian record, an empire running its ordinary machinery, granting and taxing land, mustering fief-holders, arbitrating between temple communities, moving tribute and silver across provinces. The contrast is not that two different empires existed but that the sources catch different faces of one.

Set beside its neighbours the reign was, on any fair measure, a success for the crown. 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. The instrument of that success was money, deployed through satraps and a royal prince to finance the Greek fleet that Persian policy needed. The recurring weaknesses are as visible, the interminable jealousy of Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, the vulnerability of every succession, the thinness of central control over distant Media and Egypt, but none of them broke the empire, and the reign hands on a state still recognisably the one Darius I had shaped. Its unfinished business was internal: Darius had left the rivalry between his two sons unresolved, and they would settle the succession by war.