Topic: court (1)

• SourceCtesias, The Persica

  The lost history of Persia by a Greek physician who served for years at the court of Artaxerxes II, the one classical author who wrote from inside the palace, and the least trustworthy of them. The Persica survives only in Photius' Byzantine epitome and scattered fragments; it is sensational, chronologically garbled, and repeatedly wrong against the Iranian record, yet it is our fullest window on the court's own tales, the royal women, and the reign of Artaxerxes II, and the modern reassessment reads it as a witness to Persian palace tradition rather than as a mere catalogue of lies.