Xerxes II

Every narrative statement about Xerxes II descends from one text. Ctesias of Cnidus, physician at the court of Artaxerxes II in the generation after the events, told the succession crisis of 424 BCE in his Persica; the original is lost, and the relevant book survives only in the compressed summary that the Byzantine patriarch Photius made of it in the ninth century CE (Bibliotheca, codex 72), where the accession and death of Xerxes II occupy two short sections (F15 §§47–48).^[1] Diodorus and the epitomised Manetho supply separate chronographic figures, but no demonstrable independence from Ctesias and no connected account of their own. From inside the empire there is nothing: no royal inscription names Xerxes II, no tomb is assigned to him, no coin was struck for him, and no dated tablet from Babylonia acknowledges his reign.^[2] What can be said from so narrow a base is disputed at every step, including whether he should be counted a king at all.

By the dynasty's own categories, Xerxes II was the one son of Artaxerxes I born to rule. The court distinguished the children of royal wives from the children of concubines, and the distinction defined the succession:

The wives bore legitimate children (gnesioi), the concubines illegitimate (nothoi). In principle, only the former entered into the limited circle of potential heirs (Herodotus III.2). A notable exception occurred in the succession of Artaxerxes I: his wife Damaspia provided only one living legitimate son (gnesios), Xerxes II, the others having died (Ctesias §44). When Xerxes II was assassinated soon after attaining the throne, competition emerged among the nothoi, the sons of several Babylonian women (Ctesias §§44–48).

Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander^[3]

Around the single legitimate heir stood, on Ctesias's count, seventeen sons of concubines.^[4] Three of the mothers are named, and all three are Babylonian: Alogune, mother of Sogdianus; Cosmartidene, mother of Ochus and Arsites; and Andia, mother of Bagapaeus and of Parysatis, the daughter who married her half-brother Ochus.^[4] The royal inheritance system knew no rule of primogeniture; it "permitted the monarch to nominate as his successor whichever son he felt worthy of the throne", and the choice among sons had already produced dangerous contests in earlier generations.^[5] Damaspia's son needed no nomination to argue over: as the sole surviving gnēsios he was the default heir under the principle Herodotus records, and Ctesias reports his accession as automatic. What he lacked was everything else. Ochus had been given the satrapy of Hyrcania and Parysatis as a wife during his father's lifetime; the concubine's son thus entered the crisis holding a province, a royal marriage and, as events would show, the sympathy of Babylonia, while the legitimate heir is never once placed outside the palace.^[4]

Even the birth-claims did not go unchallenged. A stray notice in Pausanias reverses them, calling Sogdianus the legitimate son (gnēsios) and Darius the bastard who deposed him, an inversion Briant takes as a surviving splinter of the contest in which "each competitor was able to conduct a skillful propaganda campaign on the theme of his own legitimacy" (see Darius II).^[6] The one point on which Xerxes II's historical identity rests, his unique legitimacy, was itself a claim in that war.

Photius's epitome dispatches the accession in a single sentence:

After the death of Artaxerxes, his son Xerxes became king, who was the only legitimate son he had by Damaspia (who passed away on the same day that Artaxerxes died).

Ctesias, Persica F15 §47, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[4]

The Babylonian tablets, which never register the new king, at least date the old one's death: the last text of Artaxerxes I was written on 24 December 424, so the accession falls at the turn of 424/423.^[7] Of the reign itself nothing whatever is recorded, no appointment, no decree, no act of any kind. The epitome's next sentences are already the murder:

Secyndianus got the eunuch Pharnacyas on his side, who after Bagorazus, Menostanes and some others, was next in importance. While Xerxes was in a drunken slumber in the palace at a festival, they entered and killed him, forty-five days after his father's death.

Ctesias, Persica F15 §48, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[4]

Secyndianus is Ctesias's own form of the name conventionally written Sogdianus. The half-brother had won over Pharnacyas, ranked by the epitome among the most influential of the court eunuchs, together with others of the inner household; Dandamaev, retelling the same passage, sets the killing in the royal bedchamber at the hands of a group of court nobles.^[8] The scene admits no more precision than the epitome gives it.

The one circumstantial detail, the festival and the king's drunken sleep, has drawn a specific interpretation. Briant connects the scene with the festival of Mithra, on which, in the Greek ethnographic tradition, "only the king could become drunk": Ctesias's report that Xerxes II died "when after a festival he fell asleep drunk in his palace" would then show the conspirators striking at the one moment when the king's incapacity was ceremonial custom rather than personal failing.^[9] The identification is a modern inference; the epitome names no festival, and a king asleep drunk in his palace is also the kind of scene Ctesias's court narrative favours.

The crisis had opened with two deaths in one day. Damaspia died on the day of her husband, and the pair were buried together in the royal necropolis: "On the same day that he died, his wife Damaspia also passed away. Both of them were buried at Naqsh-i Rustam" (see Naqsh-e Rostam).^[8] The duty of conveying the bodies fell to the eunuch Bagorazus: "Bagorazus took the corpses of both mother and father away to Persia."^[4] Forty-five days later the cortege acquired a third body, and the epitome attaches to it the only miracle in the story:

And so it happened that both corpses were taken away to Persia at the same time. The mules taking the carriage refused to move, as if they were waiting for the son's body. When it arrived, however, they set off enthusiastically.

Ctesias, Persica F15 §48, trans. Llewellyn-Jones & Robson^[4]

In Persian practice the burial of a dead king was the heir's charge, and the anecdote is a legitimist omen: the beasts of the funeral carriage themselves refuse to carry Artaxerxes to his tomb until his rightful successor, murdered, joins him. It is the single posthumous honour the tradition grants Xerxes II, and it cannot be innocent. The story circulated after the outcome was known; it brands Sogdianus's kingship as unnatural, and it served the eventual winner, to whose partisans Briant assigns the funeral-train propaganda.^[6] The later politics of the cortege, Sogdianus's execution of Bagorazus on a pretext connected with the burial, belong with the murderer's own reign (see Sogdianus). Of Xerxes II's own grave nothing is recorded: the corpses go to Persis, and there the trail ends.

In Ctesias's account, the forty-five-day sequence presents the mechanics of Achaemenid succession with unusual clarity. The rule that only a wife's sons could inherit made the queen's fertility a matter of state: Damaspia had provided exactly one surviving heir, and a single conspiracy therefore emptied the legitimate line at a stroke. Royal polygamy, whose purpose in Strabo's phrase was "For the sake of having many children", meanwhile stocked the court with alternatives, seventeen sons who stood outside the circle of heirs in principle and inside it in practice the moment the circle was empty.^[3] The instruments of the change were the inner household. Sogdianus reached the king by suborning Pharnacyas, whom the epitome ranks immediately after Bagorazus, Menostanes and some others in influence, and the killing was carried out in the palace by men of the king's own circle.^[4] Every later stage of the crisis turned on the same forces, defecting commanders, courtier eunuchs and the provincial base of the one brother who held a satrapy, and the winner of 424 was the claimant strongest in exactly those currencies. How much of this is Persian institution and how much Ctesias's fondness for palace conspiracy cannot be cleanly separated, since the harem plot is a signature scene of his history. The recurrence of similar scenes elsewhere in the Persica cannot demonstrate that this succession unfolded as he says.^[10]

Even the duration of the reign failed to stabilise in transmission. Ctesias's figure, carried by Photius, is "forty-five days after the death of his father".^[1] Manetho's king-list, as its epitomators preserve it, gives Xerxes II two months, with seven for Sogdianus.^[11] Diodorus carries both traditions at once: in Kuhrt's summary of the notice, "Xerxes reigned for one year, while others gave him two months, which approximates to Ctesias' account".^[12] The spread, six and a half weeks, two months, a year, measures how faintly the reign registered even in the tradition that alone preserved it: a king who left no dated acts left nothing against which his length of reign could be controlled, and the figures drifted. On the Babylonian evidence the question of length collapses into the question of reality: Kuhrt observes that any tenure Xerxes II had "must have overlapped entirely with the first two months of Darius II's acknowledged reign in Babylonia".^[12]

The absence of Near Eastern evidence was stated flatly in the nineteenth century. Gilmore's edition of the fragments observed that the two ephemeral kings appear on no Oriental monument: "not being ancestors of the succeeding kings, their names do not occur in the inscriptions of Artaxerxes II. and III."^[11] That explanation, that collateral kings drop out of later royal genealogies, accounts for the inscriptions. It does not account for the tablets. Babylonian legal and administrative documents were dated by the reigning king as a matter of daily routine, and their sequence across this transition is unbroken: no tablet after 24 December 424 is dated by Artaxerxes I, and the earliest dated by Darius II falls on 10 January 423.^[7] Scribes further equated Darius II's accession year with Artaxerxes' forty-first regnal year, treating the son's reign as following the father's immediately.^[7] Kuhrt draws the geographical conclusion: "the south Mesopotamian cities can never have been under Xerxes' control".^[12]

Two considerations keep the silence from being a simple disproof. News of a royal death moved at the speed of the roads: in the Nippur countryside, Dandamaev notes, "the scribes continued for some time to date the documents to the reign of Artaxerxes after he had died", so the transition is smeared rather than clean, and a proclamation made in distant Persis could in principle fall below the Babylonian documentary horizon altogether.^[8] And an argument from silence is only as strong as the record's habit of speaking. Here the habit can be tested, and the test is what gives the silence its weight. When this king's grandfather Xerxes I was assassinated in 465, the event, as Brosius notes, was substantial enough to be recorded in the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries: a fragmentary entry ends, "Xerxes – his son murdered him".^[13] The same scholarly tradition that logged one palace regicide beside its eclipses has left no surviving word on the murder of Xerxes II or on the usurpation and violent death of Sogdianus. The silence of 424/423 is not the silence of scribes who ignored such things.

Two readings of this evidence stand against each other, and the difference decides whether the Achaemenid king-list for 424 has one entry or three.

The case for keeping Xerxes II a king rests on proposed correspondences between Ctesias's courtiers and the Babylonian archive. The strongest proposed identification is Menostanes with the archive's Manuštanu: Ctesias makes Menostanes a son of Artarios, while the tablets make Manuštanu a member of the royal house and a son of Artaremu.^[14] Other shared names may belong to namesakes rather than to Ctesias's courtiers. Kuhrt nevertheless judges the proposed correspondences, together with the transfer of Manuštanu's estates to an Artoxares, as support for Ctesias's essential reliability in this instance; Binder warns that neither homonymy nor an interpretation framed by Ctesias establishes identity or plot.^[2][10] On that basis she reconstructs a divided proclamation:

Artaxerxes' only surviving legitimate son, Xerxes, was simultaneously pronounced king elsewhere (presumably in Fars), although he was rapidly eliminated by his half-brother, Sogdianus, who must then have ruled contemporary with Ochus for a few months.

Kuhrt, The Persian Empire^[2]

On this reading the Babylonian record and the Greek narrative describe different places. Babylonia acclaimed Ochus at once; Persis crowned the legitimate heir; the empire briefly had rival kings, and the tablets register only the one who won their region. Dandamaev's political history proceeds on the same essential trust, and the standard handbooks keep the reign: Brosius writes without qualification of "the murder of the king's son and heir Xerxes II after only 45 days of rule".^[8][7]

The sceptical case was put most sharply by Carsten Binder in the 2021 Companion, for whom "a fundamental skepticism" toward the Greek court tradition "should be the dominant approach":^[10]

If one assesses the relative merits of these two strands of the tradition, the fact that the non-Greek sources know nothing of either a Xerxes or a Secyndianus/Sogdianus should tip the balance. The chronology of the Babylonian scribes is very reliable, and so we are forced to ask how they could have dated documents to the reign of Darius II as legitimate king already in February if Xerxes and Secyndianus had held power at least until June or July 423 BCE.

Binder, A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire^[10]

The prosopographical defence, Binder argues, proves less than it seems: "It is methodologically unsound, however, to assume the historicity of the entire narrative on the basis of such details and then to interpret other sources according to the Greek tradition. Circular reasoning is the result", and given "the demonstrably romantic character of Ctesias' Persica", whoever lists Xerxes II and Sogdianus between Artaxerxes I and Darius II "does so on very tenuous evidence".^[10] Taken alone, he concludes, "Nothing in these sources testifies against a smooth transfer of power from Artaxerxes I to Darius II".^[10]

Between the poles stands a reading that keeps the crisis while giving up the second reign. Brosius, accepting the tablets' timeline, concludes that they leave room for Sogdianus, and after him Arsites, only as rebels rising against a Darius already reigning, and points to the mustering of the king's levies at Uruk in 422/1 as a possible echo of the upheavals.^[7] On her reconstruction the murdered heir keeps his forty-five days while the seven months of Sogdianus dissolve into a rebellion inside Darius II's first year.

The balance, as it stands, is narrow. No common minimum includes all of Ctesias's people or a violent transition. The Manuštanu–Menostanes identification has genealogical support; the remaining name correspondences may be homonyms, and the tablets do not attest murder or usurpation. Nor does independent evidence establish that Xerxes II exercised a recognised kingship anywhere, for any length of time. Modern king-lists conventionally retain him with a disputed reign of about forty-five days. A dated tablet, diary entry or document naming a king Xerxes between Artaxerxes I and Darius II would change the evidential balance; none is known.