Tomyris

Herodotus places the Massagetae east of the Caspian, "towards the east and the sunrise", beyond the river he calls the Araxes and opposite the Issedones, and reports that some Greeks reckoned them a Scythian people.^[2] Modern accounts locate them on the Central Asian steppe, usually toward the Jaxartes, the Syr Darya of modern Kazakhstan.^[3] For the steppe peoples and the Massagetae's place among the Saka, see the Saka. They were nomads of the classic steppe pattern: they sowed nothing, living from their herds and from fish, and their drink was milk; they fought as horsemen and foot, with bow, spear and battle-axe; and they worshipped the sun as their only god, sacrificing horses to him, the swiftest of creatures for the swiftest of divinities.^[2] Their customs, their weapons and the long-debated question of their relation to the Saka of the Persian royal lists belong with the history of the steppe peoples as a whole.

Over this people Herodotus sets "a queen, called Tomyris, whose husband was dead", ruling in her own right.^[4] He presents her rule without comment, as if a widow's sovereignty over a steppe nation needed no explanation. The commentators caution against building on that silence. Nothing in the customs Herodotus ascribes to the Massagetae suggests any privileged position for their women, and reconstructing steppe institutions from such stories is hazardous; the tale works instead on a Greek storytelling assumption, that marriage to a widowed queen carries her kingdom with it.^[5]

Herodotus opens the campaign with the conqueror's state of mind. Cyrus by 530 had overthrown three kingdoms, and the historian gives his motives as confidence grown past measure: "first, his birth, whereby he seemed to be something more than mortal man, and next, his victories in his wars; for no nation that Cyrus undertook to attack could escape from him."^[4] His first move against the Massagetae was a proposal of marriage. Tomyris saw through it: Cyrus "sent a message with a pretence of wooing her for his wife, but Tomyris would have none of this advance, well understanding that he wooed not her but the kingdom of the Massagetae".^[4]

The political shrewdness is the first quality the narrative grants her. The commentary tradition spells out the mechanism the story assumes, comparing the tale of Gyges, who took the kingdom of Lydia with the murdered king's widow: Cyrus's suit, on this reading, was a bid to take the Massagetae by marriage rather than war.^[5] The scholarship reads the episode the same way. Jacobs and Gufler observe that Herodotus presents a king of nearly seventy proposing marriage to the queen "with the aim of getting her kingdom as a dowry", turning to war only when she refused; Waters suggests the offer sought "a diplomatic victory through a dynastic marriage".^[6][3] Annexation by wedding having failed, Cyrus marched to the Araxes and began bridging it, with towers set on the pontoons.^[4]

While the bridge was building, Tomyris sent a herald with her first speech:

Cease, king of the Medes, from that on which you are intent; for you cannot know if the completion of this work will be for your advantage. Cease, and be king of your own country; and be patient to see us ruling those whom we rule. But if you will not take this counsel, and will do all rather than remain at peace, then if you so greatly desire to essay the strength of the Massagetae, do you quit your present labour of bridging the river, and suffer us to draw off three days' journey from the Araxes; and when that is done, cross into our country. Or if you desire rather to receive us into your country, do you then yourself withdraw as I have said.

Herodotus, Histories 1.206, trans. Godley^[7]

The speech carries more than defiance. Her address, "king of the Medes", is itself a barb: in Herodotus only hostile foreign messengers address the Persian king so, a title that is technically correct while withholding recognition of his full status.^[5] The substance is a warning against expansion joined to an offer of scrupulous fairness: each ruler to keep to a kingdom of their own; and, if Cyrus must fight, a clean battle on whichever bank he chooses, with a three days' withdrawal to let the crossing pass unmolested. The nomad queen offers open war on equal terms, and the sequel turns on the Persians' refusal of those terms.

Cyrus put the choice to his chiefs, who urged him to let Tomyris and her army cross into Persian ground. Croesus the Lydian, kept at court since his own fall, argued the other side, warning of the wheel of human fortune yet urging Cyrus onward all the same, since retreat before the Massagetae would mean losing face to a woman; he proposed the stratagem:

I counsel you to cut up the flesh of many of your sheep and goats into portions unstintingly, and to cook it and serve it as a feast in our camp, providing many bowls of unmixed wine withal and all manner of food. Then let your army withdraw to the river again, leaving behind that part of it which is of least account. For if I err not in my judgment, when the Massagetae see so many good things they will betake them to feasting thereon; and it will be for us then to achieve mighty deeds.

Herodotus, Histories 1.207, trans. Godley^[8]

Croesus reappears here in his Herodotean role of wise adviser, and the commentators note the irony that this time the sage counsel is disastrous: it was Croesus's advice to cross the Araxes, and his own ruin had begun with just such a river-crossing against Cyrus.^[5][3] Cyrus took the advice, told Tomyris he would cross, sent Croesus back to Persia in the care of his heir Cambyses, and took his army over the bridge. Herodotus marks the passage with the verb used for yoking oxen, and on the far bank sets the dream of the winged son of Hystaspes overshadowing Asia and Europe (see Darius I); in Greek literary terms the subjugation of the river was an act of profound hubris, anticipating Darius's later crossing of the Bosporus and Xerxes' of the Hellespont, and the transgression of a natural boundary between peoples is the moral hinge on which the whole logos turns.^[3][5]

Cyrus advanced a day's journey beyond the Araxes and did as Croesus had counselled, spreading the banquet and withdrawing with the sound part of his army, leaving the useless behind:

...a third part of the host of the Massagetae attacked those of the army who were left behind and slew them despite resistance; then, seeing the banquet spread, when they had overcome their enemies they sat down and feasted, and after they had taken their fill of food and wine they fell asleep. Then the Persians came upon them and slew many and took many more alive, among whom was the son of Tomyris the queen, Spargapises by name, the leader of the Massagetae.

Herodotus, Histories 1.211, trans. Godley^[9]

The trick is precisely engineered for its victims. The Massagetae are milk-drinkers, and the wine is deliberately served unmixed; a people with no experience of it drink it as they would milk, and are helpless. Hartog, in the classic structural reading of Herodotus's steppe logic, traces the pattern of the drink through the whole story: wine is the marker of settled civilisation, the same instrument by which Cyrus had once won the Persians themselves for revolt, feasting them after a day of forced labour, and here it works as what Tomyris will call a drug, a pharmakon that conquers where arms had not.^[10]

When the news reached her, Tomyris sent her second speech, the one that defines her:

Bloodthirsty Cyrus, be not uplifted by this that you have done; it is no matter for pride if the fruit of the vine—that fruit whereof you Persians drink even to madness, so that the wine passing into your bodies makes evil words to rise in a flood to your lips—has served you as a drug to master my son withal, by guile and not in fair fight. Now therefore take this word of good counsel from me: give me back my son and depart unpunished from this country; it is enough that you have done despite to a third part of the host of the Massagetae. But if you will not do this, then I swear by the sun, the lord of the Massagetae, that for all you are so insatiate of blood, I will give you your fill thereof.

Herodotus, Histories 1.212, trans. Godley^[11]

Every element of her indictment answers something in the narrative. The charge is guile against fair fight, the exact inversion of the open battle she had offered at the river; the instrument condemned is wine, the settled world's drink turned weapon; and the oath is sworn by the sun, the one god Herodotus allows her people. Even her taunt of blood-hunger reaches back over the conqueror's whole career. She asks for restraint as much as revenge: the return of her son and a Persian withdrawal would end the matter.

Cyrus, Herodotus says, "cared nothing for it". Spargapises, sobering into captivity, asked to be freed of his bonds, "but no sooner was he loosed and had the use of his hands, than he made away with himself".^[11] The suicide forecloses the bargain: with her son dead, nothing remains of her demand except the oath.

Such was the end of Spargapises. Tomyris, when Cyrus would not listen to her, collected all her power and joined battle with him. This fight I judge to have been the stubbornest of all fights that were ever fought by men that were not Greek; and indeed I have learnt that this was so. For first (it is said) they shot at each other from a distance with arrows; presently, their arrows being all shot away, they rushed upon each other and fought at grips with their spears and their daggers; and for a long time they battled foot to foot and neither would give ground; but at last the Massagetae had the mastery. There perished the greater part of the Persian army, and there fell Cyrus himself, having reigned thirty years in all save one.

Herodotus, Histories 1.214, trans. Godley^[12]

Then comes the image by which the whole tradition remembered her. Tomyris had a skin filled with human blood and searched the Persian dead for the king's corpse; finding it, she thrust the head into the skin and spoke over it her third and last speech: "Though I live and conquer thee, thou hast undone me, overcoming my son by guile; but even as I threatened, so will I do, and give thee thy fill of blood."^[12] The gesture completes the story's own logic. In Hartog's reading, Cyrus the drinker of wine "is in truth a drinker of blood" in the queen's eyes, and so is served blood as if it were the unmixed wine of his own trick: the skin of blood answers the banquet, and drink is repaid with drink.^[10] In this version the Persians lose the king's body itself along with the battle, a detail the other traditions contradict.^[6] It is at this point that Herodotus, having given the queen her revenge, steps back and admits that other stories were told (see Cyrus the Great for the death as an event in the reign).

The rivals are not variations on the Herodotean tale; they are different stories, and none of them contains Tomyris. In Ctesias, Cyrus marches against the Derbices and their king Amoraeus, whose ambush of elephants breaks the Persian cavalry; an Indian javelin takes the fallen king in the thigh, and he dies in camp days later, but only after his Saka ally Amorges arrives with twenty thousand horsemen, the battle is won, the enemy king killed and the land surrendered, and Cyrus has settled the succession with deathbed instructions to his sons.^[13] The Saka in this telling fight for Cyrus rather than against him; and Ctesias supplies his own steppe warrior-queen elsewhere in the same work, Sparethe the wife of Amorges, who raised an army of hundreds of thousands against Cyrus in an earlier war and was reconciled through an exchange of prisoners. In Ctesias's telling the warlike Scythian queen recurs — a type he had already given to Zarina in the Median history — and the death of Cyrus takes a wholly different shape.^[13][14] Berossus placed the king's death among the Dahae, naming no enemy leader at all, and a brief notice in Diodorus likewise sets the death in Central Asia; Xenophon, remaking Cyrus as the philosopher-king of the Cyropaedia, discarded the battlefield altogether and let him die serenely in Persia, announcing to his sons that "the end of my life is now at hand".^[5][14][15]

What the versions share is a theatre and a date. All the battlefield traditions put the last campaign on the Central Asian steppe; Herodotus's twenty-nine-year reign and Ctesias's thirty agree within a year; and the Babylonian record fixes the death independently of them all: the business tablets stop dating by Cyrus's reign in August 530, and Cambyses's first dated text follows before that month is out.^[14] On everything else, the enemy, the river, the manner of death, the fate of the body, the outcome of the battle, they cannot be reconciled. For the queen the arithmetic is stark: she exists in one version of a story told in at least four. Asheri's judgement in the standard commentary is blunt: the version chosen by Herodotus "has no more historical value than the others", and no eastern source relates the circumstances of Cyrus's death at all.^[5]

Even where the Herodotean version prevailed, it would not hold still. Justin's Latin epitome of Pompeius Trogus tells the war with the details rearranged: the enemy are simply "Scythians", the queen's unnamed only son dies in the massacre at the captured camp rather than by his own hand, and Tomyris, "not alarmed like a woman at the approach of an enemy", lures Cyrus into a defile and destroys king and army in an ambush, two hundred thousand Persians falling, "a triumph in which this also was remarkable, that not a man to tell of such a massacre survived". The severed head goes into a vessel of blood with the taunt, "Satiate thyself with blood for which thou hast thirsted, and of which thou hast always been insatiable."^[16] Justin frames her ambush as a deception answering the Persians' own, deceit repaid in kind; and in Polyaenus's handbook of stratagems the borrowing is completed, for there the wine-trick belongs to Tomyris herself, who feigns retreat, abandons her camp with its stores of wine, and cuts down the Persian army in its drunken sleep, Cyrus falling with it. The commentary tradition registers the same inversion in Frontinus.^[17][5] The retellings behave like what the story had become: a moral exemplum and a tactical anecdote, its ownership of the decisive trick passing freely between the antagonists.

Modern scholarship is near-unanimous about the character of the Herodotean narrative. Waters calls it "a Greek cautionary tale on the limits and consequences of hubris, to which even Cyrus was answerable", and adds that the tale, in more versions than Herodotus's, "tapped into Greek mythology of the Amazons, a legendary race of warrior women, so the usual caveats must be applied to assessment of a compelling story".^[3] The pattern is visible at every joint: the yoked river and the violated boundary; the warner unheeded; the wise adviser whose advice destroys; the trick with the wine; the vow sworn and exactly fulfilled. Herodotus's Tomyris also keeps recognisable company. She stands with Artemisia and the legendary Semiramis among the warrior queens through whom Greek writers imagined the East, a company in which Waters places her directly.^[18] The commentary presses the suspicion to its sharpest point: it is "impossible to determine the historicity of this queen", and Herodotus may have wanted precisely the contrast between Cyrus's seeming more than mortal and his death at a woman's hands.^[5] Hartog's structural analysis reaches a similar end by another route, showing the whole episode organised around Greek oppositions of wine and milk, guile and fair fight, so tightly that no element of the tale stands free of the reading.^[10]

Against this stands what no scholar doubts: the campaign was real. Cyrus marched into Central Asia in 530 and did not come back, a fact anchored by the Babylonian tablets and accepted by every ancient tradition however much they disagree about the rest. Briant observes that the circumstances of the death were surrounded almost at once by legend, "so forcefully did the conflict between the glorious conqueror and Queen Tomyris strike people's imagination", and reads the expedition as evidence of the real difficulty the empire faced in holding its Central Asian dominion.^[19] The honest range of positions is therefore narrow but real. At one end, Tomyris is a Greek construction through and through, the woman the moral pattern required; at the other, a steppe ruler of some kind stands behind the tale, her name and her war remembered and reworked in the telling; between them, a real disaster on the frontier crystallised a legend that borrowed whatever it needed. The evidence that would decide among these, any eastern account of the campaign, any document naming her, does not exist and is unlikely ever to. She is best described as what the sources actually give: a figure of the literary tradition, attached to a historical war.

The queen's later fortunes ran through the moralists and the painters. Ammianus Marcellinus, in the fourth century CE, still cited Cyrus and Darius as great kings whose hubris brought them to bad ends, "a lesson straight from Herodotus", though he moved the march against Tomyris and the Massagetae to a crossing of the Bosporus, garbling the geography entirely.^[20] More than a thousand years on, the scene the tradition had always favoured found its painter: in the early seventeenth century Rubens envisioned the scene as Queen Tomyris and the Head of Cyrus, a demonstration, as Waters puts it, of the story's staying power.^[20]