The Seven

Darius names his companions once, near the very end of the Behistun text, after some seventy paragraphs in which every victory belongs to the king alone and to the favour of Ahuramazda:

Darius the king proclaims: These (are) the men who were there at that time, when I slew Gaumata the magus, who called himself Bardiya. At that time, these men strove as my followers.

Darius I, DB §68, trans. Kuhrt^[1]

Six names follow, each fixed with his father's name and the ethnic label "a Persian": Vindafarna son of Vahyasparuva; Utāna son of Thukhra; Gaubaruva son of Marduniya; Vidarna son of Bagabigna; Bagabuxša son of Dātavahya; and Ardumaniš son of Vahauka.^[1] The word rendered "followers" is Old Persian anušiyā, and the framing is part of the message: helpers, not partners, admitted into the record only as an appendix, and immediately fenced with an obligation laid on posterity. "You, who shall be king hereafter, take good care of the family of these men," the next paragraph commands;^[1] the Babylonian version words the charge "Fully protect these men and take care of their descendants".^[4]

Herodotus tells the story from the other end, as a conspiracy assembled link by link. "Otanes then took to himself two Persians of the highest rank whom he thought worthiest of trust, Aspathines and Gobryas, and told them the whole story";^[2] each of the three then recruited one more, Intaphrenes, Megabyzus and Hydarnes, and Darius, arriving from Persia where his father was governor, was co-opted last (3.70). The two lists, one carved within a few years of the event, the other written down in Greek two or three generations later, agree to a degree that has anchored the study of Herodotus's eastern sources since the decipherment. Amélie Kuhrt's judgement is representative: "Herodotus' names match perfectly, save for Aspathines and the parentage of Otanes".^[3] The standard commentary counts the same way: "six names out of seven in Herodotus correspond to names found among the seven names of the Bisitun inscription".^[6] Intaphrenes is Vindafarna, Otanes is Utāna, Gobryas is Gaubaruva, Hydarnes is Vidarna, Megabyzus is Bagabuxša, and even a patronymic checks out in the next generation: Gaubaruva son of Marduniya would in turn name his own son Mardonius, in the Persian fashion of repeating names across alternate generations.^[4]

The agreement cuts both ways. Positively, it proves that a substantially accurate account of who struck down the king in 522 was still circulating, and reachable by a Greek researcher, nearly a century later. Herodotus had no access to the inscription itself; as Maria Brosius puts it, "the story of the seven Persian nobles must have circulated within the Persian empire and survived for almost a century before Herodotus wrote down his version of the events of 522".^[7] The channels can be guessed at. The great families themselves kept traditions, and parts of Herodotus's narrative read like their self-advertisement: Matt Waters notes that the prominence of Otanes in the story, and the privileges reserved for his house, suggest "a pro-Otanes source" behind this stretch of the account.^[8] One live conduit is even named in the text: recounting the honours of the house of Megabyzus, Herodotus reports that "Megabyzus' son was that Zopyrus who deserted from the Persians to Athens",^[2] a great-grandson of one of the Seven living in Athens while the historian was at work.

Negatively, the agreement is not independent confirmation of what happened, only of who was involved; the family traditions and the royal monument descend from the same interested milieu, a point that matters greatly for the impostor question (see the Accession of Darius). And the number itself invites suspicion, since seven is a favourite round figure in Persian storytelling. Detlev Fehling, the most systematic sceptic of Herodotus's source citations, made the necessary concession himself: "there must from time to time be the possibility that a correct number is also a typical one. For example the Seven Years War really lasted seven years".^[9] Here the inscription arbitrates: counting Darius, the conspirators of 522 really were seven.

The one discrepancy has generated a literature of its own. Behistun's sixth helper is Ardumaniš son of Vahauka; Herodotus has instead Aspathines, whom he places not at the margin but in the founding trio of the plot. Even the Persian form of the odd man out took a century of scholarship to fix: the traces were long read Ardumaniš, then re-read Ardimaniš on the strength of the Babylonian spelling, before Rüdiger Schmitt's re-examination of the rock settled the reading Ardumaniš after all, a name whose etymology, unlike those of the other six, remains uncertain.^[10]

Aspathines, by contrast, is no phantom. A high courtier of that name (Old Persian Aspačanā) stands carved on Darius's tomb at Naqš-e Rostam, one of only two attendants ever named on an Achaemenid royal monument, with a caption (DNd) identifying his office and his charge of the king's bow-case.^[11] The question is how he came to displace Ardumaniš in the Greek list, and the explanations on offer mark out the range of the possible. Pierre Briant states the minimal position: "Ardumanis and Aspathines are clearly two different people. The former is unknown elsewhere; perhaps he perished in the assault on Smerdis."^[4] Brosius builds the common mediating view on that hint: "Ardumaniš is thought to have died at some time during Darius' reign, and possibly was replaced by Aspathines, who appears alongside Gobryas on the relief and in the inscriptions of Darius' tomb at Naqš-e Rustam", so that the tradition Herodotus heard already carried the replacement's name.^[7] Waters puts the sceptical minimum: "The exception was Aspathines, who became prominent later. He was given a prominent place on Darius' tomb relief, so there is some explanation for Herodotus' confusion here."^[8] Nothing now known can decide between a formal co-optation into the circle and a simple slide of memory toward the more famous name; what the substitution proves either way is that the list Herodotus received was a living tradition, updated by the fame of the men in it, not a copy of the king's text.

The second, lesser discrepancy points the same direction. Herodotus calls Otanes a son of Pharnaspes and makes him brother of Cassandane, hence uncle of Cambyses himself; Behistun gives Utāna's father as Thukhra. Briant draws the conclusion: "the Behistun inscription proves that Herodotus's information is contrived, since Otanes' patronymic is Thukra".^[5] A family tradition that magnified Otanes had quietly grafted him onto the royal house, and Herodotus transmitted the graft.

The names themselves are a small window on the Persian aristocracy. Vindafarna means "finding glory"; Utāna "having a good offspring"; Bagabuxša something like "rejoicing Baga" or "to whom Baga bestows benefit"; Vidarna perhaps "piercing the guilty"; Aspačanā "delighting in horses"; Gaubaruva is a cattle-name whose exact sense ("devouring cattle", "herding cattle", even "having the eyebrows of cows") linguists still dispute.^[10] All six are marked "a Persian" in the king's list, and everything known of them and their sons places them in the highest nobility.^[4] Otanes appears in Herodotus as one of the wealthiest men in Persia, whose daughter Phaidyme had been wife to Cambyses and then to the man ruling as Bardiya, which is precisely why the story makes her father the first suspecter of the fraud.^[2] Gobryas was bound to Darius twice over before the coup: Darius had married his daughter, and Gobryas had married Darius's sister.^[4] He carried the tribal or clan designation "Patischorian", and on the king's tomb he bears the royal spear.^[11] Intaphrenes stands first in Darius's own list; Briant observes that "There can be no doubt that Intaphernes was an important member of the conspiracy; in fact, Darius lists him first among those he calls his followers".^[5] Hydarnes and Megabyzus are quieter figures in 522 who become dynasts through their descendants, a general of the Median campaign and satrap of Media in the one case, the conquerors of Babylon in the other.

Herodotus tells the killing as a heroic tale: seven men talk their way past the guards on their rank alone, daggers are drawn against the two magi, and in a dark inner chamber Gobryas grapples the pretender while Darius, afraid of striking his friend, is told to thrust even through both bodies.^[2] The event itself belongs to the accession crisis (see the Accession of Darius); what the tale assumes about the Seven is that they were a company of equals whose persons alone could open the palace, and that the deed was theirs and no one else's.

Ctesias of Cnidus, court physician to Artaxerxes II a generation after Herodotus, retold the same episode with the cast rewritten: "Then, seven prominent Persians banded together against the magus: Onophas, Idernes, Norondabates, Mardonius, Barisses, Ataphernes and Darius, the son of Hystaspes." His conspirators then co-opt insiders: "They exchanged oaths of loyalty, and added Artasyras, then Bagapates, who held the keys of the whole palace."^[12] Only Idernes and Ataphernes are recognisably Vidarna and Vindafarna; but Onophas matches the name Ctesias elsewhere gives a son of Otanes, and Mardonius is the son of Gobryas, so the list looks less like invention than like the same roster slipped one generation, the fathers' places taken by their more famous sons.^[3][8]

Briant has pressed a soberer question: whether seven daggers, however noble, could really overthrow a reigning king. Darius's own text says he slew Gaumāta "with a few men" in a fortress in the Median district of Nisāya, which reads less like a bedroom assassination than like the storming of a stronghold at the end of a campaign. Herodotus's later notice that Intaphrenes was arrested together with his sons and kinsmen suggests what a great Persian house could put into the field; as Briant argues, "This implies that the Seven had troops at their disposal", and the conspirators' council "was nothing other than the general staff" of a coalition of houses whose retainers could face whatever forces held to the king.^[4] On that reconstruction the Seven were not seven swordsmen but seven armies, and the palace-thriller shape of the Greek story is the work of the tradition, not of the event.

Five days after the killing, Herodotus reports, the conspirators met to decide what government Persia should have, and he introduces the scene with a defensive insistence that has become almost as famous as the speeches: some Greeks, he concedes, find the words incredible, but spoken they were.^[2] Otanes speaks first, for entrusting power to the Persian people at large:

What right order is there to be found in monarchy, when the ruler can do what he will, nor be held to account for it? Give this power to the best man on earth, and it would stir him to unwonted thoughts.

Otanes, in Herodotus 3.80, trans. Godley^[2]

The monarch, he goes on, "turns the laws of the land upside down, he rapes women"; the rule of the multitude, by contrast, bears the fairest of names, isonomiē, equality before the law, and does none of the things a monarch does.^[2] Megabyzus answers for oligarchy, accepting everything said against the despot but turning it on the crowd: "Nothing is more foolish and violent than a useless mob; to save ourselves from the insolence of a despot by changing it for the insolence of the unbridled commonalty—that were unbearable indeed"; power belongs instead with a chosen company of the best men, among whom, he does not neglect to add, the Seven themselves would be counted.^[2][3] Darius speaks third and last, for the rule of the one best man: such a ruler, "his judgment being like to himself, he will govern the multitude with perfect wisdom, and best conceal plans made for the defeat of enemies", while oligarchy breeds faction, faction bloodshed, and bloodshed monarchy again, and the rule of the people breeds conspiracies of the wicked until a champion rises and is made monarch, so that every road returns to the throne. He ends on the argument from origins: "tell me, whence and by whose gift came our freedom … as the rule of one man gave us freedom, so that rule we should preserve".^[2] The four conspirators who had not spoken voted with Darius.^[2]

Herodotus never let the scene go. Three books later, reporting the aftermath of the Ionian Revolt, he returns to his doubters, and his witness is the son of one of the Seven:

he did a thing which I here set down for the wonder of those Greeks who will not believe Otanes to have declared his opinion among the Seven that democracy was best for Persia: Mardonius deposed all the Ionian despots and set up democracies in their cities.

Herodotus 6.43, trans. Godley^[2]

Whether any of this was ever said in Persia is a question almost as old as scholarship on the text, and the authenticity question is weighed in full at Herodotus, The Histories: the modern consensus, stated by Waters and Asheri, is that the three speeches argue in the categories of fifth-century Greek political thought and are Herodotus's own Greek composition.^[8][6] What the scene yields for the Seven is narrower and firmer. One minority reading bears directly on the circle: on the hypothesis that Bardiya had attacked the nobility's privileges, a few scholars have taken the deliberation as a genuine aristocratic council in Greek dress.^[3] That Otanes is given the first and longest speech, meanwhile, reflects the pro-Otanes family tradition already detectable across the conspiracy narrative.^[8]

Briant displaces the question rather than answering it. Whatever was debated in 522, the political choice the Greeks imagined was never open: "what was at stake, and what the debate must have dealt with, was a dynastic problem". Cambyses and Bardiya had left no sons; the only real question was which of the victors should be king.^[4] Kuhrt's summary keeps what the scene truly witnesses for the Seven: "What the story does, very powerfully, is to emphasise the crisis created by the assassination of the reigning king."^[3]

Having lost the argument, Herodotus's Otanes withdraws from the contest for the throne on unheard-of terms: "I desire neither to rule nor to be ruled", he declares, on condition that neither he nor his descendants be subject to any of the others. The narrator adds that "Otanes took no part in the contest but stood aside; and to this day his house (and none other in Persia) remains free", within the laws of Persia.^[2] The remaining six vote him a permanent distinction, "that Otanes and his posterity should receive for themselves specially a yearly gift of Median raiment and all such presents as the Persians hold most precious",^[2] and then bind themselves together:

they decreed that any one of the seven should, if he so wished, enter the king's palace unannounced, save if the king were sleeping with a woman; and that it should be forbidden to the king to take a wife saving from the households of the conspirators.

Herodotus 3.84, trans. Godley^[2]

Taken at face value, the compact would make the Achaemenid king first among seven peers, his person accessible and his marriage bed controlled by the aristocracy. Some such dependence at the start of the reign is entirely credible: Wiesehöfer holds that "at the beginning of his reign, Darius depended on the support of his fellow conspirators", precisely because he was not the obvious heir.^[13] But the two named privileges fare badly against the record. The right of entry was dead within a few years, as the fate of Intaphrenes shows. And Darius's marriages, which Herodotus himself lists, ignored the marriage rule from the first: the new king took Atossa and Artystone, daughters of Cyrus, then Parmys, daughter of Bardiya, and, besides the daughter of Gobryas married before his accession, only one conspirator's daughter, Phaidyme, herself inherited from the two kings before him.^[2] The pattern, as Briant reads it, is dynastic through and through: Darius married into the line of Cyrus to fuse his new house onto the old, and conceded nothing to the six; even Phaidyme's case follows the custom by which a new king took over his predecessors' wives rather than any obligation to Otanes.^[5] Wiesehöfer draws the same conclusion: "the privileges (and powers) of the fellow conspirators must soon have ceased to be as exclusive" as they may briefly have been.^[13]

How the six who would accept the throne chose among themselves is pure folktale in the telling: the man whose horse neighed first after sunrise would be king, and Darius's groom Oibares fixed the contest, in one version by letting Darius's stallion cover a mare at the appointed spot the night before, in another by hiding his hand, rubbed on the mare, in his trousers until the moment came. Herodotus knows both versions, a sure sign the story had circulated and forked before it reached him.^[2][8] At the neigh, thunder cracked from a clear sky, and the five others dismounted and prostrated themselves before him, the gesture the Greeks knew as Proskynesis.^[2] Darius was even said to have raised a stone relief of a horseman inscribed: "Darius son of Hystaspes, aided by the excellence of his horse" (Herodotus supplies that the name of the horse followed) "and of Oebares his groom, won the kingdom of Persia".^[2] No such monument survives, and Briant remarks that "no one could believe that Darius's accession to power was due exclusively to a ruse", and that "The motif of hippomancy was added afterward because it meshes neatly with the notion Darius wished to propagate", his personal election by the god.^[4] The tale's value for the Seven is its assumption, shared with the compact, that in the interregnum the six stood as formal equals whom only an omen could rank.

The compact's right of entry has a sequel, and it is the political education of the whole circle. Herodotus places it "immediately after the rebellion": Intaphrenes came to the palace for an audience, and "claimed his right to enter unannounced, as one of the seven; but the gate-warden and the messenger forbade him, the king being, they said, with one of his wives". Suspecting a lie, he "cut off their noses and ears, then strung these on his horse's bridle and bound it round the men's necks, and so let them go".^[2] Darius's response measures how raw the new king's power still was: "fearing that this might be a conspiracy of the six", he "sent for each severally and questioned him, to know if they approved the deed". Assured they did not, he seized Intaphrenes with his sons and male kin and condemned the house entire.^[2] Herodotus gives the coda to Intaphrenes's wife, whose daily weeping at the gates moved Darius to grant her one life of all the condemned. She chose neither husband nor son:

another husband I may get, if heaven so will, and other children, if I lose these; but my father and mother are dead, and so I can by no means get another brother; that is why I have thus spoken.

The wife of Intaphrenes, in Herodotus 3.119, trans. Godley^[2]

Darius, pleased by the reasoning, spared her brother and her eldest son; the rest died. The logic reappears, transposed, in Sophocles's Antigone, whose heroine defends her defiance in nearly the same words, one of the clearest crossings between Herodotus's Persian stories and Athenian tragedy, whichever direction the borrowing ran.^[14]

This is the same Intaphrenes who heads Darius's list at Behistun and who, in November 521, had commanded the army that crushed the second Babylonian revolt for his king (DB §50).^[1][5] Within a few years the first of the Seven was dead at the king's order, with his house around him. Briant allows the episode a double reading: either the privilege of access was real and Darius, still unsure of his grip, destroyed the man who stood on it; or Intaphrenes was flaunting insubordination against a protocol the king had already restored over his old confederates. "Even given the hypothesis that Darius's authority was still tentative, we are led to the conclusion that the initial privileges were quickly revoked."^[5] Wiesehöfer draws out the other lesson, that the offence of the head of a house doomed everyone belonging to it, a principle of collective liability that ran through Persian punishment of the great.^[13]

Older reconstructions made the Seven a standing organ of the empire: seven great houses with constitutional privileges, a council the king was bound to hear, even a permanent college of seven royal judges. The evidence, pressed, gives none of this back.

The king's own monuments set the tone. At Behistun two armed figures stand behind Darius on the relief, a bow-bearer and a spear-bearer; Wiesehöfer notes they "have been assumed to represent two of Darius's fellow conspirators, but the inscriptions do not identify them".^[13] Briant reads the silence as policy: "if their names have not been included, even though the liar-kings are identified by name, it is because Darius, by design, did not wish to raise these two people above anonymity".^[5] Herodotus's collective term for the conspirators, the protoi, "the foremost", describes a court elite, not a college: Briant grants that the small group of the foremost was often convened, "But it would be a mistake to conclude that the membership of the council was imposed on the king", whose counsellors served at his pleasure.^[5] The biblical book of Esther, with its "seven administrators of Persia and Media who had privileged access to the royal presence and occupied the leading positions in the kingdom", has often been called in as confirmation of a standing Seven; Briant observes that the same book gives its king seven eunuchs and Esther seven maids, a patterning of sevens that betrays literary stylisation rather than institutional memory, and the scattered evidence for royal judges shows appointments and dismissals at the king's sole discretion, never a hereditary bench of the seven houses.^[5]

Briant's summary is categorical: "It thus does not appear that the families of the Seven were granted exceptional status in perpetuity by the Great Kings." What favours the descendants enjoyed were royal gifts of the ordinary kind, and "the phrase seven families after 520 is in large part illusory (we should speak of six families after the elimination of Intaphernes and his circle!)".^[5] Even the one charming corporate distinction preserved in later sources bends the same way:

To the seven Persians who killed the magi the privilege was granted that they and their descendants should wear their headdress tilted forward over the forehead; for this, so it appears, was their secret sign when they undertook their act.

Plutarch, Moralia 820d^[15]

A tilted tiara is an honour a king confers, not a power he concedes; Briant's phrase for the position of Gobryas and Aspathines on the royal tomb, "closer to court nobility than to clan nobility", fits the whole afterlife of the Seven.^[5]

The upper register of Darius's tomb façade at Naqš-e Rostam carries, uniquely among the royal tombs, two labelled courtiers. The captions are terse. DNc: "Gobryas, a Patischorian, spear-bearer of Darius the King." DNd, in Kent's rendering: "Aspathines, bowbearer, holds the battle-ax of Darius the King."^[11] Kent's "bowbearer" has not survived scrutiny. The Elamite version styles Aspathines a lipte kuktira and the Old Persian a vaçabara, and Rykle Borger showed that the caption's second clause means that he holds the king's bow-and-arrow case, not that "bow-bearer" was his title; the Babylonian rendering of the same title, ustarbaru, points to "garment-bearer". Kuhrt accordingly translates: "Aspathines, the 'garment-bearer' (i.e. chamberlain), holds Darius the king's bow-and-arrow case."^[3][16] Wouter Henkelman, who settled the philology, also fixed the sense of such titles at court:

these designations are probably not expressions of actual duties, but, given the status of Gobryas and Aspathines, honorary titles bestowed on privileged court officials, possibly implying some ceremonial obligations. From this perspective 'garment-bearer' should not be taken too literally, but be interpreted as 'chamberlain'.

Henkelman, An Elamite Memorial (2003)^[16][17]

What lifts Aspathines out of the world of story altogether is the Persepolis archive. There a magnate written Ašbazana, the Elamite spelling of Aspačanā, issues orders at the summit of the administration, and the identification with the Aspathines of DNd is generally accepted: Henkelman's study makes him the successor, after an interval, of Parnakka himself as head of the Persepolis economy.^[16] Brosius assembles the dossier: "Aspathines is attested in texts from Persepolis as a high Persian official who served under Darius I and is attested until the third year of Xerxes' reign"; a treasury text records him directing the treasurer Baradkama over silver for hundreds of workmen; and he sealed with his own personal seal (PTS 14*), whose Elamite inscription names him son of a certain Pani[…]pi, a patronym which at least disposes of the old guess that his father was the Prexaspes of Herodotus's Cambyses narrative. His own son Prexaspes, in turn, "was an admiral in Xerxes' fleet in 480".^[7]

Of all the men in either list, the one whose reality is most richly documented, in stone, on clay and in glyptic, is precisely the one Darius does not name among his helpers; and Kuhrt draws from the tomb the modest, sufficient conclusion: "Aspathines does not appear in Darius' account, but in Herodotus, and his naming on the tomb indicates his prominent position."^[3] The Greek list erred, if it erred, in favour of the empire's own hierarchy.

Herodotus closes his account of the coup with a festival. After the killing, the Persians at large fell on every magus they could find, and thereafter, he says, they kept the day as "the greatest holy day that all Persians alike keep", the feast the Greeks rendered as the Magophonia, the killing of the magi, and for its duration no magus dared show himself out of doors.^[2] Ctesias, who lived seventeen years at court, corroborates the feast's existence in his own idiom: "The feast of the Magophonia is celebrated by the Persians on the day upon which Sphendadates the Magus was put to death".^[12][18] The general slaughter, however, does not survive comparison with Behistun, where a single magus dies with his chief followers, in Media. Mary Boyce's judgement is severe: "since in fact his story can be tested against the Behistun account, it can be seen to be fiction; for Darius tells only of the killing of a single Magus". She allows the festival itself, comparing it to Guy Fawkes Day, an annual state celebration of a killing that legitimated the regime: "It seems possible, therefore, that Darius, as part of his propaganda, did in fact brazenly found a feast to celebrate 'the killing of the Magus'".^[18] An alternative line, going back to Josef Markwart and endorsed by Muhammad Dandamaev, holds that "the origin of the idea of a national day for molesting the magi can be related to an incorrect interpretation of the Old Persian name of one of the months", Bāgayādiš, the month of a great festival that happened to coincide with the killing of Gaumāta; on this view, "the conspirators chose this day in order to catch Gaumata and his court unawares", and the Greek Magophonia is a false etymology grown into an ethnographic marvel.^[19] Either way, the anniversary of the Seven's deed was kept in the Persian calendar, and the Greeks knew it.

The fates of the six ran the full range of service and ruin. Otanes, his house's freedom notwithstanding, promptly commanded the conquest of Samos for Darius, which shows what that freedom was worth in practice; the exemption, whatever it meant, did not extend to declining the king's wars.^[2][8] Gobryas put down the late Elamite revolt for the king (DB §71), counselled him on the Scythian steppe, and appears in the flesh in the Persepolis archive: "In February–March 498, bearing an authorization from the king, he made use of the royal road between Susa and Persepolis", drawing lavish travel rations, an old man still at the centre of the court; his son Mardonius commanded at Plataea.^[5] Hydarnes served against the Median rebels, and "some Persepolis tablets attest that he was the satrap of Media under Darius"; the Hydarnes son of Hydarnes who led the Immortals into Greece in 480 is plausibly his son.^[5] The house of Megabyzus produced the most spectacular arc: his son Zopyrus took Babylon for Darius, earning the king's famous verdict that "There never was in Darius' judgment any Persian before or since who did better service than Zopyrus, save only Cyrus";^[2] his grandson Megabyzus married a daughter of Xerxes and then, in Ctesias's telling, raised the one great noble revolt of the fifth century before an uneasy reconciliation; and that man's son Zopyrus ended as an exile in Athens.^[5]

The Seven endured above all as ancestry. Herodotus already identifies men as sons or grandsons of the conspirators; Diodorus preserves the official genealogy of the kings of Cappadocia, who "say that they trace their ancestry back to Cyrus the Persian, and also assert that they are descendants of one of the seven Persians who did away with the Magus", through an Anaphas whom the legend equips with Otanes's role and a tribute-free satrapy.^[20] Polybius reports of the ancestor of Mithridates of Pontus that "He boasted of descent from one of the Persian Seven who had killed the magus"; Strabo derives the Orontid dynasts of Armenia from Hydarnes; Diodorus makes the fourth-century satrap Rhosaces, and Curtius the Persian grandee Orsines who met Alexander, descendants of the Seven likewise.^[20] Briant's dissection of these claims, tracing how the Cappadocian version rewrites Otanes into a kinsman of Cyrus exactly as Herodotus's source had already begun to do, ends in a clean formula: "the traditions of the families of the Seven were systematically used later on for dynastic legitimation".^[5] By the Hellenistic age, descent from one of the Seven had become a credential, exactly as descent from a Companion of Alexander would be in the same courts a little later. That is the institution the Seven finally founded. It was a title of nobility, never the council beside the throne that older scholarship imagined, and it proved far more durable than the privileges of 522, because it asked nothing of the king.