Ctesias, The Persica

Ctesias of Cnidus was a Greek physician who lived for years at the very centre of the Achaemenid world, at the court of the Great King, and who then wrote its history in twenty-three books. He is, on paper, the classical source we should most want: an insider where Herodotus was an outsider, a man who tended the King's own body and enjoyed the confidence of the King's mother, who claimed to have read the royal records and wrote in avowed correction of Herodotus. And he is, by the near-unanimous verdict of antiquity and of modern scholarship alike, the least reliable of the major Greek writers on Persia: so sensational, so chronologically confused, and so often demonstrably wrong that his unreliability is proverbially said to make Herodotus look a model of accuracy. The paradox is the whole interest of him. His Persica is lost; what survives is an epitome and a scatter of fragments; and the reader who would use him must learn to separate the priceless from the preposterous line by line.

The man from Cnidus

Ctesias came from Cnidus, a Dorian city on the coast of Caria in south-western Asia Minor, and belonged to its famous school of physicians, which traced its art to the healing god Asclepius himself. The date of his birth is unknown, perhaps around 441 BCE. He reached the Persian court, on the ordinary reconstruction, after 405 BCE, and was received by Darius's distant successor, Artaxerxes II Mnemon (405/4–359/8 BCE), on the strength of his medical skill, in the line of Greek doctors who had served the King before him. Diodorus Siculus reports that he came to Persia as a prisoner of war, and that he lived at court for seventeen years; the Encyclopaedia Iranica treats the seventeen years as probably an exaggeration, but the fact of a long residence is not in doubt (Schmitt). He was the King's own physician; he treated the royal family; and, most consequentially for his book, he won the particular trust of the terrifying queen-mother Parysatis, who became one of his chief informants.

His one securely dated moment is a great one. In 401 BCE, when the King's brother Cyrus the Younger rose in revolt and the two armies met at Cunaxa near Babylon, Ctesias was present, and he healed the wound that Cyrus dealt Artaxerxes in the battle. Xenophon, who marched with Cyrus's Greeks, names Ctesias himself as his authority for what happened on the Persian side (Anabasis 1.8.26). Afterwards, with Parysatis's encouragement, he showed many kindnesses to the captured Spartan general Clearchus, who gave him a signet ring in friendship before his execution; and in the years that followed he served as the King's go-between with the Athenian admiral Conon and on an embassy toward Sparta, until he was tried at Rhodes for serving Persian interests. He then settled again in his native Cnidus, and it was there, after 397 BCE, that he wrote his books, trading on the cachet of the man who had been physician to the King of Kings.

The Persica: twenty-three books

The Persica was conceived as a history of the Near East from the legendary Assyrian king Ninus down to Ctesias's own day, closing in the eighth regnal year of Artaxerxes II, 398–397 BCE. It ran to twenty-three books. The first six stood almost apart: books 1–3 on the Assyrians, books 4–6 on the Medes, so distinct that by the beginning of the Christian era a separate edition of them circulated under the title Assyriaká, and Photius's epitome, beginning at book 7, seems to have worked from a copy that had lost the first volume. The remaining seventeen books were the Persica proper, the history of the Persian empire from the rise of Cyrus the Great to the author's own time.

The proportions are revealing, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica lays them out precisely (Schmitt). Five books (7–11) were given to Cyrus the founder, by Ctesias's time already a figure of legend about whom he could embroider at will. Fully four or five books (19–22 or 23) covered only the first eight years of Artaxerxes II, the years Ctesias himself had witnessed. And a mere seven books (12–18) had to carry the whole 125 years between the death of Cambyses in 522 and the end of Darius II in 404 BCE. Within that compressed span the imbalance only deepened: the entire reign of Darius I and Xerxes, the age of the Persian Wars, was treated in just two books, while four went to Artaxerxes I. The shape of the work tells its own story. Ctesias wrote most fully where he could gossip, and hurried past the great matters of state.

The claim to the archive, and against Herodotus

Ctesias's advertised advantage over Herodotus was access. He claimed, in the words the Encyclopaedia Iranica draws from Diodorus, to have based his history on the basilikai diphtherai, the "royal parchments" or leather record-books "in which the Persians kept a written account of their old history according to a certain law" (Schmitt, summarizing Diodorus 2.32.4). It is a tantalising claim: the Achaemenid chancery did keep records, and a Greek at court who could reach them would be a witness beyond price. But the claim will not quite bear its own weight. A second passage in Diodorus (2.22.5) reports the facts "in the form given in the royal records according to what the barbarians say", that is, at second hand, on the say-so of Persian informants, not from Ctesias's own reading of the documents. Whether he consulted any archive himself is genuinely doubtful; much of what he offers as court history reads as what he was told, above all by Parysatis, rather than what he read.

On the second point there is no doubt at all. Ctesias wrote in open opposition to Herodotus, whom he branded a liar and a spinner of yarns, and set himself up as the possessor of more authentic information. He kept to the Ionian tradition and, Photius reports, wrote in the Ionic dialect, if not exactly like Herodotus then at least in certain words, the very form of the polemic imitating the man it attacked. Yet the correction repeatedly fails against the Iranian evidence. The sharpest test is the roster of the Seven who slew the Magus and made Darius king. Herodotus's list (Otanes, Intaphrenes, Gobryas, Hydarnes, Megabyzus, Aspathines) agrees, in all but one name, with Darius's own Behistun inscription (DB 4.83–86: Vindafarnā, Otāna, Gaubaruva, Vidarna, Bagabuxša, Ardumaniš). Ctesias's list (Onaphas, Idernes, Norondabates, Mardonios, Barissos, and Ataphernes) does not correspond to the royal text at all (Schmitt). Where the King's own monument can be laid beside the two Greeks, it is Herodotus, the outsider, who is vindicated, and the court insider who is astray.

What the fragments preserve: the court, the women, the King's table

What, then, is Ctesias good for? For the texture of the palace, its intrigues, its feasts, its formidable women, he is unmatched, precisely because that was what he cared to record. Later authors quoting him lingered over exactly these scenes, and one of the few of his sentences to survive in something like his own words concerns the magnificence of the King's board:

"The king of the Persians, as Ctesias and Dinon relate in the Histories of Persia, supped with fifteen thousand men, and there were expended on the supper four hundred talents." (Ctesias and Dinon, in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 4.27, trans. C. D. Yonge)

Fifteen thousand fed at a sitting, four hundred talents spent: the royal table as the empire's wealth made daily spectacle. The figure is the kind of round marvel Ctesias delighted in, and it is preserved for us not in his own book but in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, who read him some six centuries later. That is how nearly all of Ctesias reaches us: as a quotation inside a quotation, chosen by a later writer for its wonder.

His surest legacy is the queen-mother. Parysatis, his patron and source, dominates the surviving court-narrative, and the poisonings, feuds and revenges the tradition attaches to her descend, through Plutarch, largely from Ctesias. Plutarch's Artaxerxes, which drew on the Persica as its main authority, gives us the scene that has fixed her forever in the imagination, the halved bird at the King's own table:

"Parysatis, cutting a bird of this kind into two pieces with a knife one side of which had been smeared with the drug, the other side being clear of it, ate the untouched and wholesome part herself, and gave Statira that which was thus infected." (Plutarch, Artaxerxes 19, trans. Dryden)

The queen-mother and the King's wife at war in the women's quarters, and the mother the deadlier: this is the world Ctesias reported, and it is at once his most vivid contribution and the source of the deepest suspicion about him. For scenes of just this kind, harem intrigue, poison plots, the escapades of eunuchs and courtesans, are also the classic material of a Greek fantasy about the decadent Oriental court, and it is never certain how much is Persian tradition and how much is the shape a Greek storyteller gives it. That the tales cluster around a real and powerful woman whom Ctesias genuinely knew is his defence; that they read as melodrama is the case against him.

The Assyrians, the Medes, and the invented past

Where Ctesias had no informant at all, he simply composed. The first six books are the plainest case. Of the Medes he knew almost nothing, not even the names of their kings, and could fill three books only by inserting elaborate romances, like the doomed love of the Median Stryangaeus and the Saka queen Zarinaea. The Assyrian books are dominated by the mythical warrior-queen Semiramis, whose foundation of Babylon and conquests of Egypt and Ethiopia transpose the real deeds of Cambyses and the Persians back into a legendary age. Most tellingly, Ctesias has Semiramis come to Mount Bagistanon (Behistun), lay out a great park around its spring, and carve on the cliff a relief of herself with an inscription "in Assyrian letters" (Diodorus 2.13.1–2). This is plainly the famous relief and trilingual cuneiform of Darius the Great, misread across the centuries and fathered on a queen of myth. It is a perfect miniature of Ctesias's method: a real Iranian monument, dimly known through Persian informants, dissolved into romance. As the Encyclopaedia Iranica stresses, this Assyrian and Median material is largely mythical, and its value is not as history but as a reflection of how the Persians of Ctesias's own day imagined their predecessors (Schmitt).

The wars he would not tell, and the errors of chronology

On the events a historian of the empire most needs, Ctesias is at his worst. He seems to have had almost no interest in Greco-Persian relations: the conquest of Ionia, the Ionian Revolt, the whole tangle of Persian intervention in the Peloponnesian War go all but unmentioned. His account of Xerxes' invasion of Greece was, in one modern verdict the Encyclopaedia Iranica records, "little more than a string of absurdities" (Bigwood, 1978, cited in Schmitt): he passed straight from Thermopylae to Plataea, and in a notorious blunder shunted the sea-fight at Salamis into an appendix, out of order, an error the article is careful to lay at Ctesias's own door, not the epitomator's. Whether this reflects mere incompetence or a decision to pass lightly over ground Herodotus had already covered in full is debated; the Encyclopaedia Iranica inclines to think he curtailed the great struggles because he had little to add to Herodotus, and lavished his pages instead on the harem (Schmitt). Either way, the reader who comes to Ctesias for the Persian Wars comes away empty, or worse than empty. His strength and his failure are the same fact: he wrote a history of the court, not of the empire.

The Indica and the other works

Under Ctesias's name also went a book of Indica, a single volume on India that he never visited, compiled from what he heard at the Persian court on the empire's eastern edge. It is the origin of some of antiquity's most enduring marvels: dog-headed men, the manticore, peoples whose feet served as parasols, gold guarded in the mountains, and it was quarried for centuries by writers on natural wonders. Fantastic as it is, the Encyclopaedia Iranica judges it, for all its dog-headed men, "a valuable document on pre-Alexandrian India" (Schmitt), a record of what was known and imagined of the far east before Alexander's march opened it to Greek eyes. Ctesias also wrote geographical works, a Periplous or Periēgēsis in three books, and a treatise On the Tributes throughout Asia, said to have listed the commodities rendered to the royal household from every part of the empire, though whether this last was a separate work or an excursus of the Persica is uncertain.

How the Persica survives: Photius, and the fragments

Almost none of Ctesias survives directly. The single most important witness is the Bibliotheca of the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch Photius, whose codex 72 gives a running epitome of the Persian books, 7 to the end, detailed enough, uneven though it is, to convey the shape and much of the substance of the lost original. Photius had a criterion for what he chose to summarise: he tended to pick out precisely those accounts of Ctesias that differed from Herodotus, which both preserves the eccentric and distorts the balance of what we have. Beyond Photius, the Persica lives in scattered quotations and paraphrases running from Xenophon down through Diodorus (who excerpted the Assyrian and Median books at length), Nicolaus of Damascus, Plutarch, Aelian, Athenaeus, Strabo and the Byzantine lexica and scholia. A three-book epitome made in Nero's day by Pamphile is itself lost. The definitive modern collection of every surviving scrap is Felix Jacoby's, in his Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (no. 688), by whose fragment-numbers Ctesias is universally cited; the reader who cannot quote him verbatim cites him, of necessity, by fragment. The crucial and humbling point, which the Encyclopaedia Iranica presses, is that later writers extracted by preference the incredible stories, and that the complete text is gone, so that the Ctesias we can read is a residue selected for its strangeness, the sober parts, if there were many, largely lost with the rest (Schmitt).

From liar to witness: the modern reassessment

The ancient verdict was already harsh. Plutarch, who leaned on him, still charged him with "incredible and frenzied myths"; the satirist Lucian ranked him among the great liars; Strabo and others noted his manipulation of fact. Modern classical scholarship, led by Jacoby's magisterial and severe article of 1922, hardened this into a near-dismissal: Ctesias as the ancestor of the historical romance, a poiētēs and not a historian, guilty (in Jacoby's words) of both unscrupulousness and incapacity, whose court-gossip was, by Jacoby's own back-handed concession, "the only good thing in the book." Yet the same scholarship has more recently drawn back from the harshest sentence. In recent decades, the Encyclopaedia Iranica records, Iranists have begun to argue that Ctesias "has been too harshly and often hastily condemned" by classical scholars, and that he did after all preserve genuinely valuable information on conditions within the empire and at the court, even if much of it came by hearsay and even if he freely transposed the people and events of his own day into the legendary past (Schmitt). This is the balance the present entry keeps. Read as a chronicler of events, Ctesias is treacherous and often worthless. Read as a witness to the palace of Artaxerxes II, its women, its rituals of the table, its intrigues, and, beyond that, to how the Persians of about 400 BCE told their own past, he is a source with no substitute, provided every line of him is weighed against the Iranian record and never trusted alone.