Child: Great King of Persia Artakshassa I Artaxerxes
Mother:
Marriage(s) and Relationships: Child:Great King of Persia Darius IINotes: Great King of Persia 465-523 BC.
Source: Leo van de Pas.
Artaxerxes I to Darius III:
The death of Xerxes was a major turning point in Achaemenid history.
Occasional flashes of vigour and intelligence by some of Xerxes'
successors were too infrequent to prevent eventual collapse but did allow
the empire to die gradually. It is a tribute to Cyrus, Cambyses, and
Darius that the empire they constructed was as resilient as it proved to
be after Xerxes.
The three kings that followed Xerxes on the throne--Artaxerxes I (465-425
BC), Xerxes II (425-424 BC), and Darius II Ochus (423-404 BC)--were all
comparatively weak individuals and kings, and such successes as the
empire enjoyed during their reigns were mainly the result of the efforts
of subordinates or of the troubles faced by their adversaries. Artaxerxes
I faced several rebellions, the most important of which was that of Egypt
in 459 BC, not fully suppressed until 454 BC. An advantageous peace (the
Peace of Callias) with Athens was signed in 448 BC, whereby the Persians
agreed to stay out of the Aegean and the Athenians agreed to leave Asia
Minor to the Achaemenids. Athens broke the peace in 439 BC in an attack
on Samos, and in its aftermath the Persians made some military gains in
the west. Xerxes II ruled only about 45 days and was killed in a drunken
stupor by the son of one of his father's concubines. The assassin was
himself killed by Darius II, who rose to the throne through palace
intrigue. Several revolts marred his reign, including one in Media, which
was rather close to home.
The major event of these three reigns was the Peloponnesian War between
Sparta and Athens that lasted, with occasional pauses, from 460 to 404
BC. The situation was ripe for exploitation by the famous "Persian
archers," the gold coins of the Achaemenids that depicted an archer on
their obverse and that were used with considerable skill by the Persians
in bribing first one Greek state and then another. Initially, the
Persians encouraged Athens against Sparta and from this gained the treaty
of Callias. Then, after the disastrous Athenian campaign against Sicily
in 413 BC, the Persians intervened on Sparta's side. By the treaty of
Miletus in 412 BC, Iran recovered complete freedom in western Asia Minor
in return for agreeing to pay for seamen to man the Peloponnesian fleet.
Persian gold and Spartan soldiers brought about Athens' fall in 404 BC.
Despite the fact that the Persians played the two sides against each
other to much advantage, they should have done better. One observes a
certain lack of control from Susa by the king in these proceedings, and
the two principal governors in Asia Minor who were involved, Tissaphernes
of Sardis and Pharnabazus of Hellespontine Phrygia, seemed to have
permitted a personal power rivalry to stand in the way of a really
coordinated Persian intervention in the Greek war.
Artaxerxes II came to the throne in 404 BC and reigned until 359 BC. The
main events of his long rule were the war with Sparta that ended with a
peace favourable to the Persians; the revolt and loss to the empire of
Egypt; the rebellion of Cyrus the Younger, brother of the king; and the
uprising known as the revolt of the satraps.
Sparta, triumphant over Athens, built a small empire of its own and was
soon involved in a war against the Persians, the principal issue again
being the Greek cities of Asia Minor. While Sparta played one Persian
governor in Anatolia against the other, the Persians spent gold in Greece
to raise rebellion on Sparta's home ground. The Persians rebuilt their
fleet and placed a competent Athenian admiral, Conon, in command. The
contest continued from 400 to 387, with Sparta forced to act on an
ever-shrinking front. A revitalized Athens, supported by Persia, created
a balance of power in Greece, and eventually Artaxerxes was able to step
in, at Greek request, and dictate the so-called King's Peace of 387-6 BC.
Once again the Greeks gave up any claim to Asia Minor and further agreed
to maintain the status quo in Greece itself. When Egypt revolted in 405
BC, Persia was unable to do much about it, and from this point forward
Egypt remained essentially an independent state.
Cyrus the Younger, though caught in an assassination attempt at the time
of Artaxerxes' coronation, was, nevertheless, forgiven, thanks to the
pleadings of the Queen Mother, and was returned to the command of a
province in Asia Minor. But he revolted again in 401 BC and, supported by
10,000 Greek mercenaries, marched eastward to contest the throne. He was
defeated and killed at the Battle of Cunaxa in Mesopotamia in the summer
of 401. The Greek mercenaries, however, were not broken and, though
harried, left the field in good order and began their famous march,
recorded in the Anabasis of Xenophon, north to the Black Sea and home.
Probably no other event in late Achaemenid history revealed more clearly
to the Greeks the essential internal weakness of the Achaemenid Empire
than the escape of so large a body of men from the very heart of the
Great King's domain.
Since 379 BC Greek mercenaries had been gathered together in order to
mount a campaign against Egypt. An attack in 373 failed against the
native 30th dynasty. On the heels of this failure came the revolt of the
satraps. Several satraps, or provincial governors, rose against the
central power, and one, Aroandas, a late satrap of Armenia, went so far
as to stamp his own gold coinage as a direct challenge to Artaxerxes. The
general plan of the rebels appears to have been for a combined attack.
The rebel satraps were to coordinate their march eastward through Syria
with an Egyptian attack, under the pharaoh Tachos (Zedhor), supported by
Greek mercenaries. The Egyptian attack was called off because of a revolt
in Egypt by Tachos' brother, and Artaxerxes managed to defeat the satraps
who were left alone to face the Great King's wrath. How different would
have been the wrath of Darius! Several of the satraps, including
Aroandas, were actually forgiven and returned to their governorships. In
general the impression is that, in the end, rather than fight the central
authority, the satraps were willing to return to their own provinces and
plunder there in the name of the Great King. Perhaps they saw that they
actually had more authority and more control over real events in their
own provincial territories than Artaxerxes had in his empire.
Plot and counterplot, harem intrigue, and murder brought Artaxerxes III
to the throne in 359 BC. He promptly exterminated many of his relatives
who might have challenged his rule--all to no avail, for revolts
continued to rock the empire. A fresh attempt to win back Egypt was
thrown back in 351-350. This setback encouraged revolt in Sidon and
eventually in all of Palestine and Phoenicia. Parts of Cilicia joined the
rebellion but the revolt was crushed the same year it had begun, 345 BC.
Peace was achieved only temporarily; mercenaries from Thebes and the
Argives, as well as from the Greek cities of Asia Minor, gathered for a
new attempt on Egypt, which, led by Artaxerxes III himself, succeeded in
343 BC. But the local dynasty fled south to Nubia, where it maintained an
independent kingdom that kept alive the hopes of a national revival.
Persia then misplayed its hand in Greece by refusing aid to Athens
against the rising power of Philip II of Macedon. In 339 BC Persian
troops were fighting alone in Thrace against the Macedonians, and in the
following year, at the Battle of Chaeronea, Philip extended his hegemony
over all of Greece--a united Greece that was to prove impervious to
Persian gold.
Artaxerxes was poisoned by his physician at the order of the eunuch
Bagoas. The latter made Arses king (338-336 BC) in hopes of being the
power behind the throne, but Arses did not bend easily to Bagoas' will.
He attempted to poison the kingmaker but was himself killed in
retaliation. Bagoas then engineered the accession of Darius III, a
45-year-old former satrap of Armenia. So many members of the royal house
had been murdered in the court intrigue that Darius probably held the
closest blood claim to the throne by virtue of being the grandnephew of
Artaxerxes II. Darius was able to put down yet another rebellion in Egypt
under Khababash in 337-336 BC, but the beginning of the end came soon
afterward, in May 334, with the loss of the Battle of Granicus to
Alexander the Great. Persepolis fell to the invader in April 330, and
Darius, the last Achaemenid, was murdered in the summer of the same year
while fleeing the conqueror. His unfinished tomb at Persepolis bears
witness to his lack of preparation.
Alexander did not win his victories easily, however, and the catalog of
troubles that marked the latter part of the Achaemenid
Empire--rebellions, murders, weak kings trapped in the harem, missed
chances, and foolish policies--cannot be the whole story. The sources,
mostly Greek, are often prejudiced against the Persians and tend to view
events from but a single point of view. No government could have lasted
so long, found its way somehow through so many difficulties, and in the
end actually have fought so hard against the conqueror without having
much virtue with which to balance its vices.
Achaemenid society and culture
Achaemenid society and culture was in reality the collective societies
and cultures of the many subject peoples of the empire. From this mosaic
it is sometimes difficult to sort out that which is distinctively Persian
or distinctively a development of the Achaemenid period and therefore
perhaps an early Iranian contribution to general Middle Eastern society
and culture.
Source: 2000 Britannica.com Inc
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