Ctesias

That is especially true of Ctesias of Cnidus, whose Persica is probably the best known of all lost works of antiquity, and whose life itself is among the less obscure for this period. He lived in the second half of the fifth and the first decades of the fourth century bce. Like his colleagues in Persica, he was from a city of Asia Minor which had been under Persian rule, but he also experienced Persian power in a very different way, since he lived many years at the royal court, where he served king Artaxerxes II and his mother Parysatis as their physician. There he could see some powerful people, but also humbler members of the court staff; he traveled with the king inside the empire, going from one royal residence to another; and was present at historical events such as the battle between the king and his brother cyrus the Younger at Cunaxa. He even claimed to have participated in events outside the medical field, especially in diplomatic negotiations between Greeks and Persians (Lenfant 2004: vii-xxiv).

He also composed an Indica, an alleged description of India, its animals and people, which he asserted was truthful, but the fancy of which nobody would contest: for that reason, as early as the fourth century bce, he enjoyed a very bad reputation as a liar. Surprisingly, another work, On the Tributes in Asia (Peri ton kata ten Asian phoron), is generally supposed to be very serious: it seems to have listed food products conveyed to the court from various places of the empire, and to have added ethnographical details on the regions mentioned (Lenfant 2004: clviii ff.; FF 53-54 Lenfant). But Ctesias’ major work was undeniably his Persica, which was completed after his departure from the court (398 bce) in the 390s.

The evidence for his Persica is far more copious than for any other, because of the abundance and extent of the quotations, but also the diversity of the quoting authors, who give complementary material and sometimes make mutual evaluation possible. It stands out first as being a huge work (twenty-three books, to compare with Hellani-cus’ two and Herodotus’ nine) and as covering continuously a very broad chronological scope: in fact, this history of the Persian empire went back to the supposed time of the most ancient empire of Asia, the Assyrian empire, before going through the history of the Median and Persian empires, from cyrus to the sixth year of Artaxerxes II’s reign, when Ctesias left the court.

The history of the Assyrian empire (FF 1-4) was clearly divided into two parts, one concerning the foundation of the empire and Ninus’ and Semiramis’ military expeditions and grand constructions, the other concerning a long decadence, with effeminate kings who, from Ninyas to Sardanapalus, remained confined in their palaces and indulged in a life of pleasure. The history of the Median empire (FF 5-8c*), which arose from the reaction of the male Arbakes facing the degenerate power of Sarda-napalus, gave a list of the successive kings as well as some accounts of wars between Medians and neighboring peoples, closely tied to romantic stories of revenge, sexual inversion, and hopeless love. The history of the Persian empire (FF 8d*-44b) related in great detail the rise of Cyrus and his revolt against Astyages, his accession to the throne, his conquests, and his death. It was then divided according to the nine following reigns, from Cambyses to Artaxerxes II. The account treated especially the circumstances of accession and death for each king, in particular murders and succession crises, campaigns of conquest (against Egyptians, Scythians, Greeks), local revolts, and court intrigues - such are at least the kind of vicissitudes which are mentioned by Photius in his summary. The end of the account proper was followed by a list of the relays from the west to the east of the empire, and by a list of all the kings of the three successive empires, from Ninus to Artaxerxes II (F 33). Lastly, ethnographical notations were inserted here and there in the narrative, concerning either peoples and regions of the empire, including specific animals, or court practices (Lenfant 2004: lxvi ff.; FF 10-12, 34-40, 44 and passim). Despite its apparent tripartition, the whole work deserved the title of Persica insofar as three quarters of it (Books 7-23) in fact concerned the Persian empire.

Since antiquity, it has been difficult to characterize Ctesias’ work without returning a generally harsh verdict on his historical credibility. Plutarch reproached him for incredible tales, and modern scholars do the same. It is in fact usual to distinguish in some way among the three parts, the Assyrian and Median history being broadly imaginary, the Persian history up to the Persian Wars being somewhat confused and partly informed by polemic against Herodotus, and the more recent period being more accurate and truthful. It is not uninteresting to note that this last period was precisely the longest and the most detailed (ten books from Artaxerxes I to Artaxerxes II). But even for this period, the result is a terrifying and somewhat suspect picture of Persian power, including revolts, plots, and court intrigues in which women of the royal family and eunuchs play a big part. In fact, Ctesias’ account was full of complicated and entertaining vicissitudes; many of his figures and stories seem rather stereotyped; he was not much concerned about critical inquiry; and he did not hesitate to dramatize events or to invent many details. His account can be considered in many respects sensational.

It has been frequently compared with Herodotus’ history and considered as a vain mixture of plagiarism and polemic (Jacoby 1922). As it happens, Ctesias is the first author of Persica to take up the challenge of a Persian history after Herodotus. Even if he sometimes refuted Hellanicus, his main rival was obviously Herodotus, who not only was his nearest predecessor but whose outstanding work had probably already overshadowed earlier Persica. Their works indeed had common features: both dealt with Median kings, Persian history since Cyrus, and the Greco-Persian Wars; both had descriptive, ethnographical notations; and neither rejected muthoi, paradoxical, irrational phenomena or entertaining court tales. Ctesias’ polemic against Herodotus was explicit and obviously an important feature, but it cannot explain all differences. In fact, only a third of Ctesias’ Persica had a common subject with Herodotus, and one cannot assert (as does Jacoby 1922: 2046-2047) that Ctesias would have written the same without having lived in Persia (Lenfant 1996). Quite the reverse: even if fancy played a part, Ctesias was obviously inspired by his own experience at the royal court and what he could see and hear there from Persian and Greek people alike (Lenfant 2004).

Furthermore, as a writer of Persica, he did not have the same objective as Herodotus. First, we have no trace of large ethnographical excurses on subject peoples like Lydians or Egyptians. Second, Greco-Persian relations had in Ctesias’ Persica a rather marginal place, including for the period he shared with Herodotus: the Persian Wars were dealt with far more briefly (two books only from Cambyses to Xerxes), which could certainly be a reaction to Herodotus (Drews 1973: 105), but can also be explained by a focus on the Persian world itself. In fact, this focus accounts for what is unparalleled in Herodotus, i. e., the prehistory of the empire (Assyrian history) as well as the continuation until contemporary times, beyond the Persian Wars - something Herodotus had not undertaken, although he survived that event by some fifty years.

The marginal place devoted to the Greco-Persian Wars is also due to the time and place in which Ctesias lived: he wrote nearly a century after the Persian Wars and could see at the Persian court that Greeks were not the main concern there. Ctesias innovated against both earlier Persica and Herodotus by writing a history of Persia that went beyond the Persian Wars and their aftermath, and was not motivated by that event. He was the first to show Greeks that Persians had an internal history mainly independent from theirs, and that the Persian Wars had been an event among many others, and one which Persians had overcome very well.

Concerning the contents of his Persian history, Ctesias has been regularly blamed for having developed sensational aspects, court intrigues, and ‘‘petite histoire’’ (e. g., Drews 1973). He has even been criticized for not giving a study of Persian administrative organization (Momigliano 1975b: 132-134) and for neglecting the account of Greco-Persian relations (Drews 1973: 106-107); with the revival of Achaemenid studies, he was also made responsible for later developments that gave rise to the myth of Persian decadence (Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1987; contra, Lenfant 2001) and for being a forerunner of modern orientalism (Briant 1996: 16). As a matter of fact, Ctesias did not have the same objectives as certain modern historians, nor did he enjoy the same distance. As for ‘‘petite histoire,’’ court intrigues are closely tied to his own experience. In his account, they seem to culminate in the time when he lived at court; and when he describes cruel tortures or the bloody rivalry between the wife and the mother of the king, we have no reason to doubt their historicity. Intrigues may have been a part of everyday life for Ctesias in the court and they probably also influenced his view of earlier history. In addition, one should be aware that such an impression is exaggerated through the selection made by authors like Plutarch and Photius. Not all the material in Ctesias’ work aimed at sensationalism: the enumeration of relays that marked out the empire from Ephesus to India, the list of the kings who had succeeded at the head of Asia, or the treatise On the Tributes in Asia might have given modern historians more ‘‘serious’’ information, but tradition gave them up as too boring. In addition to selection, one must take into account that the way in which the original text is reproduced - which is rather a way of transforming it - can change any author into an ingenuous or untruthful one, insofar as it abandons every expression of critical distance (Lenfant 1999). Furthermore, even the fragments show that his history was not restricted to court intrigues (Stevenson 1997). It was in fact a most disparate work.

Ctesias’ Persica may certainly be considered by modern historians disappointing, especially in the altered form through which we can approach it, and all the more frustrating that, for the most part, it cannot be cross-checked with Near Eastern evidence or replaced by any evidence at all. But it is also interesting to look at it in its own cultural context, as a first Greek attempt to give the largest picture of Persian power from an Asiatic point of view and over its whole history.