ABSTRACT
For the period of 135 years, which separate the death of Xerxes from the murder of Darius III and the demise of the Achaemenid empire, the documents at our disposal for understanding the history of the Persian empire are extremely unsatisfactory. Old Persian inscriptions are limited to statements reciting the royal genealogy and building achievements (e.g. 8, nos.4; 5; 23). The surviving Persepolis archives cease early in Artaxerxes I’s reign (see Chapter 1). Although there is extensive documentation relating to the Persian administration in Babylonia and Egypt in the later fifth century, such texts by their very nature tell us relatively little about political events (see, for example, 8, nos.34; 36), although they can provide valuable additional insights on occasion or help resolve the chronology of events, as in the case of the struggle for the throne at Artaxerxes I’s death (see the notes to 8, nos.19; 20). Thucydides, in his magnificent account of the life and death struggle between Athens and Sparta, naturally mentions Persian affairs only in as much as they impinge on events in Greece. This allows us to glimpse something of Persian policies in the north-western sector of the empire, as well as tracking the growing dependence of Greek states on Persian support. Thucydides’ work breaks off in 411, but Xenophon’s story of the internecine Greek struggles from 411/10 to 362 is a stark illustration of this trend (see further Chapter 9). Diodorus, writing four centuries later, based himself on fourth-century Greek historians, whose interests were, again, limited to tracing developments in Greece. The result is that we are informed in some detail about events in this particular frontier zone (see 8, Sections A(d); B(b)). The one area which fell, at times, into both Thucydides’ and Diodorus’ purview was Egypt, which revolted between 464/3 and 454 and received military aid from Athens (8, nos.6; 7). Again, we must note that it was the Greek involvement which dictated the inclusion of this major event in the accounts of these writers, and their primary focus is on the fate of the Athenian expeditionary force rather than Egypt’s internal affairs. Ctesias, who was writing about internal matters, suffers from several shortcomings. One is the fact that he is only preserved in summaries and extracts (cf. Chapter 1). These perhaps reflect the interest of individual readers, who seem to have been particularly intrigued by the opulence of palace life, court scandals and lurid accounts of exotic punishments, of which Ctesias’ history contained an ample quota. Nevertheless, what survives of Ctesias can be valuable as in his retailing of the bloodthirsty contest for Artaxerxes I’s succession (8, nos.19-22), and his focus on regions lying generally beyond the geopolitical vision of the other historians (e.g. 8, nos.2; 9; 10).
