Sogdianus

Sogdianus belonged to the losing side of a distinction that structured the Achaemenid royal house. Artaxerxes I's wife Damaspia bore him one surviving son, Xerxes; his concubines bore him many more. Ctesias sets out the field of the coming crisis in a single genealogical breath:

Artaxerxes had 17 illegitimate sons, one of whom was Secyndianus whose mother was Alogyne, a Babylonian. And there were also Ochus and Aristes, too, whose mother was Cosmartidene: also a Babylonian. And Ochus was later king, too. He had more children in addition to those already mentioned: Bagapaeus and Parysatis, whose mother was Andia: also a Babylonian.

Ctesias, Persica F15 §47, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[2]

The crisis of 424 was thus fought out among the sons of three Babylonian concubines: Sogdianus, son of Alogune; Ochus and Arsites (Ctesias's "Aristes"), sons of Cosmartidene; and, on the margins, Bagapaeus and Parysatis, children of Andia, the daughter marrying her half-brother Ochus and standing behind his eventual victory. Only Xerxes II was the queen's son. Briant observes that wives bore the gnēsioi, the legitimate children, and concubines the nothoi, and that in principle only the former belonged to the circle of potential heirs; with the one gnēsios dead, the field of contenders was the concubines' sons.^[3] Sogdianus's position within that competition was weaker than it first appears. Ochus already held the satrapy of Hyrcania, granted by their father in his lifetime, together with a royal wife; Sogdianus, so far as the record shows, held nothing.^[2] Of his life before the crisis the sources say not a word.^[4]

Even the usurper's name is unstable. Photius's epitome of Ctesias calls him Sekyndianos (Σεκυνδιανός), Latinised as Secyndianus; Gilmore's edition of the fragments prints Sekydianos; Diodorus and Manetho call him Sogdianos, and from their form modern scholarship has made "Sogdianus" the conventional name.^[5][6] The convention has been challenged at its root: Binder notes that Ctesias's Secyndianus "on account of methodologically problematic source contamination is also known as Sogdianus in the scholarly literature", following Schmitt's analysis of the name-forms.^[7] If the Diodoran form is nonetheless genuine, it may carry a scrap of biography. Briant asks in passing: "Does his name ('the Sogdian') mean that he was born during his father's campaign in eastern Iran at the beginning of his reign?", one of several questions about the man that he concedes must remain unanswered.^[4]

Xerxes II had reigned for forty-five days when Sogdianus struck. Ctesias reports that he won over the eunuch Pharnacyas, next in influence at court after Bagorazus, Menostanes and some others, and that while the young king lay in a drunken sleep in the palace after a festival, the conspirators entered and killed him (see Xerxes II for the reign and the burial that followed).^[8] The murder made Sogdianus king, in his own eyes at least, and he moved at once to secure the instruments of power:

Secyndianus became king and Menostanes became his azabarites … And Bagorazus went away and returned to Secyndianus, and because of an old hatred which had smouldered between them the King ordered that he be stoned to death, alleging that Bagorazus had abandoned his father's corpse without his consent. The army was plunged into grief because of this. And the King gave the army gifts. But they hated him for killing his brother, Xerxes, and for killing Bagorazus.

Ctesias, Persica F15 §49, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[1]

Behind the transliterated title stands a real office: "Azabarites is a transcription of the Persian word hazarapatiš, meaning 'leader of 1,000': the title given to the commander of the royal guard", the chiliarch of the Greek writers.^[9] Menostanes was no mere courtier. Dandamaev identifies him as "the king's cousin Menostanes, the son of the Babylonian satrap Artarios", a nephew of Artaxerxes I with an estate-holding career in Babylonia that the tablets document independently.^[5] With a royal cousin as guard commander and a palace eunuch as accomplice, Sogdianus's regime was a court coalition, and the sequel showed how narrow that base was.

The stoning of Bagorazus is the turning point of the story Ctesias tells. Bagorazus was the trusted eunuch of the old reign, the man who had conveyed the bodies of Artaxerxes and Damaspia to Persis; the pretext for his execution was that he had left the late king's corpse there without Sogdianus's consent.^[1] Behind the pretext lay a question of legitimacy, since arranging a royal father's funeral was the heir's prerogative and its conduct was already contested between the brothers. In Briant's judgement, "What Bagorazus had cast doubt on was neither more nor less than the legitimacy of Sogdianus."^[4] Killing him answered the doubt with force, and it failed. The army grieved, took the new king's gifts, and hated him anyway, for the murdered brother and the murdered servant together.^[1] In a succession that would be decided by adherence rather than by right, Sogdianus had thrown away the one constituency that could keep him on the throne.

What followed was a war of nerves that never became a war. Ctesias compresses it into a few clauses:

Secyndianus sent a message summoning Ochus. And Ochus promised to come, but did not. And the same thing happened again and again. In the end, Ochus surrounded himself with a large army and it seemed likely that he would become king. Arbarius, the commander of Secyndianus' cavalry, defected to Ochus' side. Then Arxanes, the Egyptian satrap, defected, too. And Artoxares the eunuch came from Armenia to join Ochus. And they crowned him [Ochus] with the citaris against his will.

Ctesias, Persica F15 §50, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[10]

Dandamaev reads the summons as a trap that failed: Ochus suspected "that he was not being invited to Susa to adopt kingship, but to be buried", and stayed away.^[5] The defections then did the fighting. The commander of Sogdianus's own cavalry, the satrap of Egypt (Arxanes, generally identified with the Arsames of the Aramaic documents) and the influential eunuch Artoxares carried their forces and their provinces across, and Babylonia, where Ochus may already have been residing, held to him throughout.^[10][5] Briant notes that Sogdianus "very likely lived at Susa after his accession" and that, to go by Ctesias's story, "there does not seem to have been a pitched battle": the reign was decided by who arrived at whose camp.^[11] The crowning of Ochus "against his will", with the citaris, "perhaps a type of crown", belongs to the same telling: the reluctant king is a topos that clears the winner of ambition, in an account whose sympathies were settled before it was written.^[10][9]

A stray notice in Pausanias preserves the opposite claim. In his aside the roles are reversed: Darius, the illegitimate son, "dethroned Sogdianus, legitimate son (gnesios) of Artaxerxes".^[12] The inversion cannot be verified, and Briant wonders whether it echoes Sogdianus's own propaganda: "Did Sogdianus attempt to deck himself out with a (highly debatable) genetic legitimacy? Possibly, but we know nothing of him before the death of Artaxerxes."^[4] At the least, Pausanias shows that the birth-claims of 424 were argued in both directions, and that the version in which Sogdianus is simply a concubine's son with no right is the version his enemies won the ability to tell.

The end came by negotiation. Ochus, now proclaimed and renamed, approached his half-brother with sworn assurances that his advisers, by Ctesias's account, knew to be worthless:

And, on Parysatis' advice, he approached Secyndianus swearing deceitful oaths – and Menostanes advised Secyndianus time and time again not to trust his oaths and not to make a peace treaty with deceitful people. But he trusted him nevertheless and was captured and thrown into the ashes and killed after a reign of six months and fifteen days.

Ctesias, Persica F15 §50, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[10]

In the Greek of the epitome the fate is two words, εἰς τὴν σποδὸν ἐμβάλλεται, "he is thrown into the ash" (σποδός); Photius gives no chamber, heat or mechanism.^[10] Dandamaev takes the surrender as a calculated abdication in exchange for clemency; if so, the calculation was the last of Sogdianus's misjudgements, for as Dandamaev remarks, "This hope proved to be in vain", and the prisoner was put to death.^[5]

A much later Latin passage offers a possible comparison, not a description securely attached to Sogdianus. Valerius Maximus, writing under Tiberius, describes a mechanism that Stronk prints as the uncertain fragment F*15c:

Ochus, however, who later was called Darius, bound by swearing a most holy oath to the Persians that he would kill no one who had participated with him in the conspiracy against the seven magi, either by poison, or by the sword, or by any form of violence or starvation, conceived a crueler form of death, in which he could dispose of those burdensome to him without breaking the bond of faith. He filled an enclosure surrounded by high walls with smouldering ashes … he put his victims on it, after having given them plenty to eat and drink. Once, overcome by sleep, they fell from it into the treacherous heap below.

Valerius Maximus 9.2 ext. 6, trans. Stronk^[13]

The high-walled enclosure and beam belong only to this comparison. Stronk notes that no direct link to Ctesias is known and that the oath about "the seven magi" confuses Darius I with Darius II.^[14] Ctesias's epitome later says that Arsites, Artyphius and Pisuthnes were thrown into ash, establishing an ash-execution motif in its account of Darius II but not Valerius's chamber as Sogdianus's method.^[15] The secure minimum is the epitome's phrase: Ctesias has Sogdianus thrown into ash and killed.

Even the length of the reign is contested, a fair measure of how faintly it registered. Ctesias's epitome closes the account at six months and fifteen days, which Brosius rounds in reporting that "Ctesias gives his reign as six and a half months".^[10][16] Separate chronographic notices disagree by a little: Manetho's king-list, in Gilmore's summary of the apparatus, gives Xerxes II "two months, and Sogdianus seven months", and Diodorus likewise assigns Sogdianus seven months before Darius took the throne.^[6][17] Neither notice can be shown to transmit a tradition separate from Ctesias.^[7] The discrepancies cannot be arbitrated, and the honest statement is the spread itself: about half a year, ending at some point in 423, with the modern convention writing his reign as 424–423 BCE. The chronographic counts show that later traditions placed him in the royal sequence; they cannot by themselves establish a contemporary kingship.^[6][7]

Against Ctesias's seven months stands the one contemporary, dated, indigenous control, and it does not contain Sogdianus. Babylonian documents, as Brosius summarises the evidence, "point to December 424 as the time of Artaxerxes's death and note the accession of Umasu, who took the throne name Darius II, by February 423": Ochus's Babylonian name was Umasu, and the scribes of the south pass from father to this son with no intervening king.^[16] Briant states the negative plainly: the reigns of Xerxes II and Sogdianus "were not officially recognized by the Babylonian scribes".^[11] The dating is tight:

the latest document for Artaxerxes I being dated to 24 December 424, and the first document for Darius II being dated to 10 January 423. That Darius's reign immediately followed that of Artaxerxes is also indicated by the fact that his accession year is equated with Artaxerxes's forty-first year. The only possibility is that Sogdianus staged a revolt, followed by that of Arsites, shortly after the beginning of Darius's reign.

Brosius, A History of Ancient Persia (2021)^[16]

The silence admits a defence. Babylonian dating was a local habit as much as an imperial register: Dandamaev points out that Nippur scribes went on drawing up tablets in Artaxerxes's name for a while after the king was dead, and a claimant whose authority ran at Susa or in Persis, and never in Mesopotamia, would leave nothing in archives that obeyed his rival.^[5] This is the shape of Kuhrt's reconstruction: while Babylonia acclaimed Ochus at once, Xerxes II was proclaimed in Fars, and Sogdianus, having eliminated him, must on this reckoning have held a parallel kingship beside Ochus's for some months, a rump rule in the old heartland that the southern scribes never had reason to acknowledge.^[18]

Yet the silence is unusually loud, because the same scribal tradition had registered the previous regicide. When Xerxes I was murdered in 465, a fragmentary entry in the Babylonian astronomical diaries recorded it without euphemism: "On the fourteenth(?) day of the month Ab (= July/August), Xerxes – his son murdered him".^[19] Scribes willing to log a king's murder by his son were not sparing anyone's feelings in 424; if they wrote no tablet under Sogdianus, the likeliest reason is that no authority ever required them to. The argument from silence here has unusual force, and how much force is precisely where the scholarship divides.

The tablets contain names that have been compared with Ctesias's entourage, but the proposed identifications are unequal. The strongest is Manuštanu–Menostanes. The Murašû archive styles Manuštanu mār bīt šarri, "son of the royal house", and makes him the son of Artaremu; Ctesias makes Menostanes the son of Artarios, satrap of Babylonia and brother of Artaxerxes I.^[20] Arbareme may correspond to Ctesias's cavalry commander Arbarius, but the shared name alone does not establish identity.^[11][7] Kuhrt also interprets the transfer of Manuštanu's estates to an Artoxares as a reward for rallying to Darius II; both the identification and the political explanation depend on reading the documents through Ctesias.^[18][7]

The tablets attest Manuštanu, Arbareme and Artoxares as contemporary people or names in the Babylonian record. They do not automatically identify all three with Ctesias's figures, and they attest no conspiracy, summons, oath, regicide or reign. Manuštanu's genealogy makes that pairing stronger; Binder explicitly rejects using homonymy or Ctesias-led interpretation to convert the rest into independent confirmation.^[7]

Darius II's consolidation swept away what remained of Sogdianus's party. Ctesias reports that "Pharnacyas who, along with Secyndianus, had killed Xerxes was also stoned to death", and that "Menostanes killed himself when he was being taken off to be killed"; the ash-chamber consumed the new king's next rivals in their turn.^[15] Kuhrt reads an Artoxares's later possession of the estate as a post-crisis reward; the tablets themselves do not state why it changed hands.^[18][7]

Sogdianus himself was then erased by the simplest of mechanisms: descent. The royal line ran on through Darius II to Artaxerxes II and III, and a king who is no one's ancestor is named in no one's genealogy. Gilmore's edition of the fragments already noted the consequence: no Near Eastern monument names either ephemeral king, for men who fathered no successor had no claim on the genealogies the later Artaxerxeses carved.^[6] There was no formal condemnation, no chiselled-out cartouche; unlike Gaumāta, carved under Darius I's foot at Behistun, Sogdianus received from the victor not even a monument of abuse. He survives only in the court history of his enemy's dynasty, and in later chronographers counting the months of a reign their own sources could not agree had happened.

The crisis that made and unmade Sogdianus exposes the machinery of Achaemenid succession with unusual clarity. There was no automatic devolution: the royal inheritance system "did not promote the model of primogeniture", leaving the king to nominate the son he judged worthy and every unnominated son to draw his own conclusions.^[21] The gnēsios/nothos line, which Herodotus reports as a rule (nomos) excluding bastards, proved in 424 to have no such critical force: once the one legitimate son was dead, a concubine's son took the title and another concubine's son took the empire.^[3][11] Polygamy on the royal scale kept a standing reservoir of seventeen potential claimants; the moment the narrow legitimate line failed, that reservoir became the war.^[2]

What decided the war was adherence. Briant notes that no great family tried to take the throne for itself: "the Great Ones were content to side with one or another of the contestants", a sign that both Sogdianus and Ochus were accepted as true sons of Artaxerxes, carrying a familial and therefore dynastic legitimacy that outsiders lacked.^[11] Within Ctesias's narrative, the decisive actors are guard commanders, cavalry officers and palace eunuchs. Binder's warning applies to the political pattern as well as the names: the Babylonian archive does not independently attest their roles in the plot.^[7] Read as a claim about the tradition, the story makes provincial resources and military adherence decisive; it cannot establish that this was how the succession unfolded.