Artaxerxes I

Artaxerxes was born around 500 BCE, a son of Xerxes I and Queen Amestris, and a grandson of Darius the Great ^[1]. His birth name in Old Persian was Artaxshacha, a royal name usually understood to mean something close to "whose reign is through truth" or "having a kingdom of justice," built on the Persian concept of arta, the cosmic order that legitimate kings were expected to uphold ^[2]. Greek authors rendered the name as Artaxerxes, and later tradition attached the Latin epithet Longimanus, "long-handed." The historian Plutarch explained the nickname by claiming the king's right hand was longer than his left, though some modern scholars read it as a figurative description of far-reaching power ^[3].

He grew up inside the Achaemenid court during the years when his father was preparing and then conducting the great invasion of Greece that ended in defeat at Salamis in 480 BCE and Plataea in 479 BCE ^[1]. Artaxerxes was not the eldest son. His older brother Darius stood first in the line of succession, which made the younger prince's eventual accession anything but predictable. Almost nothing reliable survives about his childhood education, though Persian royal sons were customarily trained in riding, archery, and the administrative habits expected of governors and future kings ^[2].

Artaxerxes came to power through one of the bloodiest palace crises in Achaemenid history. In August 465 BCE, Xerxes I was murdered in his bedchamber, and ancient accounts assign the leading role to Artabanus, a powerful courtier who commanded the royal bodyguard ^[1]. According to the fullest surviving version, preserved from the historian Ctesias, Artabanus then told the young Artaxerxes that his elder brother Darius had killed their father. Artaxerxes had Darius executed, only to learn, or claim, that Artabanus himself was the true assassin and intended to seize the throne. Artaxerxes killed Artabanus, in some accounts striking him down personally, and eliminated the conspirator's sons ^[3].

The details vary between sources and cannot all be verified, but the outcome is certain: by 464 BCE Artaxerxes I sat securely on the throne as the sixth Achaemenid king ^[4]. He still had to fight for it. His brother Hystaspes, satrap of Bactria in the empire's far northeast, refused to accept the new king and rose in revolt. Artaxerxes defeated the rebellion in two battles and confirmed his authority across the eastern provinces ^[1].

The violent beginning left a mark on how the new king governed. Rather than pursuing his father's dream of conquering Greece, Artaxerxes concentrated on consolidation: securing the loyalty of the satraps, stabilizing the treasury, and presenting himself in inscriptions at Persepolis as a legitimate heir of Darius and Xerxes who built "by the favor of Ahuramazda" ^[2].

The most serious test of the reign came from Egypt. Around 460 BCE a Libyan dynast named Inaros, son of Psamtik, raised much of the Nile Delta in rebellion against Persian rule and killed the satrap Achaemenes, who was the king's uncle ^[1]. Athens, then at the height of its naval confidence, sent a large fleet to support the rebels, reportedly diverting some two hundred ships from a campaign near Cyprus. For several years the combined Egyptian and Athenian forces controlled most of Memphis and penned the Persian garrison into its citadel ^[5].

Artaxerxes responded with both money and armies. He first attempted to bribe Sparta into invading Attica to draw the Athenians home, an effort that failed but signaled a tactic Persian kings would use repeatedly in later decades ^[5]. He then dispatched a large force under the general Megabyzus, one of the ablest commanders of the age. Megabyzus broke the siege of Memphis, trapped the Athenian expedition on the island of Prosopitis in the Delta, and destroyed it around 454 BCE. Inaros was captured and later executed, an act that ancient sources blame on the insistence of the queen mother Amestris and that reportedly angered Megabyzus, who had promised the rebel his life ^[3].

The Egyptian disaster shocked Athens, but fighting flickered on. In 450 BCE the Athenian commander Cimon led a fleet against Persian-held Cyprus and died during the campaign. Soon afterward hostilities effectively ceased. Ancient tradition speaks of an agreement often called the Peace of Callias, dated around 449 BCE, under which Athens stopped attacking the king's territory and Persia kept its fleets out of the Aegean and left the Greek cities of the Asian coast unmolested ^[6]. Historians still argue about whether a formal treaty was ever signed, since Thucydides never mentions one, but the practical result is not in doubt: after roughly half a century, the long conflict between the Achaemenid Empire and the Greeks paused, and it paused on Artaxerxes' watch ^[4].

Artaxerxes I inherited an empire stretching from the Indus valley to the Aegean and from Central Asia to Nubia, and he ran it largely through the administrative machinery built by Darius I: some twenty satrapies, a network of royal roads, and a tribute system that filled the treasuries at Susa and Persepolis ^[2]. Surviving Babylonian business archives, especially the records of the Murashu firm from Nippur, show the ordinary workings of taxation, land tenure, and credit continuing steadily through his reign, evidence of a functioning state rather than one in decay ^[4].

He was a builder in the dynastic tradition. At Persepolis he completed the great Hall of a Hundred Columns begun under Xerxes, and inscriptions in his name survive at the site ^[2]. After a fire damaged the palace of Darius at Susa, Artaxerxes carried out repairs and kept the city functioning as a principal royal residence. The court moved seasonally among Susa, Persepolis, Babylon, and Ecbatana, a rhythm that let the king display his presence across the imperial heartland ^[1].

His reign is also notable for what might be called political hospitality. When the Athenian statesman Themistocles, architect of the Greek naval victory at Salamis, was ostracized and then condemned at home, he fled east and was received at the Persian court. Ancient writers disagree about whether he arrived under Xerxes or Artaxerxes, but Thucydides, the earliest and best source, places his reception under Artaxerxes I, who granted him the revenues of Magnesia on the Maeander and other cities in Asia Minor ^[5]. The man who had broken the Persian fleet lived out his days as a pensioner of the Persian king, a turn of events that Greek authors themselves found remarkable.

Few Achaemenid rulers appear so prominently in the Hebrew Bible. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah describe a King Artaxerxes who authorized two missions to Jerusalem, and most scholars identify him with Artaxerxes I ^[7]. According to Ezra, in the king's seventh year (about 458 BCE on the usual reckoning) the priest and scribe Ezra traveled from Babylon to Jerusalem carrying royal letters that supported the Temple cult and empowered him to teach and enforce the law of his God ^[7].

The second mission is more securely anchored. Nehemiah, described as cupbearer to Artaxerxes at Susa, obtained the king's permission in his twentieth year (about 445 BCE) to go to Jerusalem as governor of the province of Yehud and rebuild the city's ruined walls ^[7]. The narrative preserves small, believable court details, including the king asking why his servant looked sad, and it fits the wider Achaemenid practice of ruling subject peoples through local elites and tolerating, even sponsoring, local religious institutions ^[4].

For Jewish history the consequences were lasting. The missions associated with Ezra and Nehemiah shaped the restored community of Judah, its walls, its governance, and its relationship to the Torah, and they did so under Persian authorization. Among the more striking Artaxerxes I facts is that a king remembered in Greek sources mainly for wars and palace intrigue is remembered in the biblical tradition as an enabler of Jerusalem's rebuilding ^[7].

The later decades of the reign were quieter but not untroubled. Around 449 BCE the general Megabyzus, angry over the execution of Inaros, revolted in his satrapy of Syria and twice defeated royal armies sent against him, according to the account derived from Ctesias ^[3]. What followed was characteristic of Artaxerxes' style: instead of a fight to the death, the king negotiated. Megabyzus was pardoned, temporarily exiled after a later quarrel, and eventually restored to favor. The episode suggests a ruler who preferred managed reconciliation with powerful nobles over destructive civil war ^[1].

In foreign policy the king watched the Greek world drift toward the great war between Athens and Sparta that broke out in 431 BCE. Both sides courted Persia. Thucydides records that a Persian envoy, Artaphernes, was intercepted by the Athenians in 425 BCE carrying letters from the king to Sparta complaining that Spartan ambassadors never said the same thing twice ^[5]. Artaxerxes committed to neither side, conserving Persian strength while the Greek powers wore each other down, a policy his successors would exploit.

Artaxerxes I died at Susa in 424 BCE after a reign of about forty one years ^[1]. The stability he had maintained did not survive him. His only legitimate son, Xerxes II, was murdered within weeks by a half brother, Sogdianus, who was in turn overthrown and killed by another half brother, Ochus. Ochus took the throne name Darius II and founded the line that ruled until the empire's final decades ^[4]. Artaxerxes was buried in a rock-cut tomb at Naqsh-e Rustam near Persepolis, alongside the tombs of Darius the Great and Xerxes ^[2].

Any balanced Artaxerxes I biography has to weigh an unglamorous truth: his greatest achievement was continuity. He took over an empire reeling from a regicide and a failed invasion of Greece, and he handed on, forty years later, an empire intact, solvent, and at peace with its most persistent enemy ^[4]. The defeat of the Egyptian revolt and the destruction of the Athenian expedition in the Delta rank among the most decisive Persian military successes of the fifth century BCE, and the settlement with Athens, whatever its formal status, held in essentials for decades ^[6].

Ancient reputations treated him kindly. Plutarch grouped him among kings noted for gentleness and greatness of spirit, and the Greek tradition generally contrasted his moderation with the harshness attributed to his father ^[3]. The biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah preserve an even warmer picture, of a monarch willing to fund and protect the religious life of a small subject people at the empire's western edge ^[7].

Modern historians add nuance to both portraits. Scholars such as Pierre Briant have cautioned that much of the colorful narrative comes from Ctesias, a court physician writing decades later whose reliability is questionable, and that the documentary record from Babylonia and Persepolis shows routine administration more than personality ^[4]. Yet even on the driest reading, the list of Artaxerxes I achievements is substantial: a suppressed rebellion in Egypt, a stabilized western frontier, completed monuments at Persepolis, and a succession of quiet years in which the largest state the world had yet seen simply worked. In an era when empires often lived and died by battlefield glory, Artaxerxes I demonstrated the less visible skill of keeping one alive ^[1].