Artaxerxes II

The future Artaxerxes II was born in 453 BCE and given the name Arses (also rendered Arsaces or Arsakes). He was the eldest son of Darius II and Queen Parysatis, herself a daughter of Artaxerxes I, which meant the boy carried royal Achaemenid blood on both sides ^[1]. He grew up in an empire that stretched from the Aegean coast of Anatolia to the Indus valley, administered through a network of satraps who governed provinces in the king's name.

Court tradition placed heavy expectations on a crown prince. Arses received the education typical of Persian nobility, and before his accession he was married to Stateira, daughter of the nobleman Hydarnes, a match that bound a powerful aristocratic family to the royal house ^[2]. The marriage would later become a source of bitter conflict within the palace, because Parysatis came to loathe her daughter-in-law and the family she came from.

One fact of his upbringing shaped everything that followed: his mother favored her younger son, Cyrus, called Cyrus the Younger. Ancient writers, drawing on court gossip preserved by the Greek physician Ctesias who served at the Persian court, record that Parysatis pressed Darius II to name Cyrus heir on the argument that Cyrus had been born after his father became king while Arses had not ^[1]. Darius refused, and when he died in 404 BC the elder son took the throne under the regnal name Artaxerxes.

The reign began with an assassination plot. According to Plutarch, whose Life of Artaxerxes is the fullest surviving ancient account, Cyrus the Younger planned to murder his brother during the coronation ceremony at Pasargadae. The satrap Tissaphernes exposed the scheme, and only the tearful intervention of Parysatis saved Cyrus from execution ^[2]. In a decision he would come to regret, Artaxerxes not only spared his brother but sent him back to his command in western Anatolia.

Cyrus used that command to prepare open war. He quietly assembled an army that included more than ten thousand Greek mercenaries, veterans of the Peloponnesian War looking for pay, and in 401 BC marched east into Mesopotamia ^[3]. The brothers met at Cunaxa, north of Babylon. The Greek hoplites on Cyrus's right wing swept the troops facing them from the field, but the battle turned on a single moment: Cyrus charged directly at his brother, wounded him, and was then killed in the melee. Ancient sources disagree about who struck the fatal blow, and Artaxerxes reportedly punished men who claimed the credit he wanted for himself ^[2].

The aftermath produced one of the most famous stories in Greek literature. The stranded mercenaries, later known as the Ten Thousand, refused to surrender, and after their generals were seized and executed at a parley arranged by Tissaphernes, they fought their way north through Mesopotamia and the Armenian highlands to the Black Sea. One of their elected leaders, the Athenian Xenophon, recorded the march in his Anabasis, a firsthand narrative that remains a primary source for the empire Artaxerxes ruled ^[3]. The escape embarrassed the crown, but the essential outcome stood: the rebellion was dead, and Artaxerxes held the throne without a rival.

Victory at Cunaxa did not end trouble in the west. Sparta, which had backed Cyrus, sent armies into Anatolia to detach the Greek cities of the coast from Persian control, and from 396 BC the Spartan king Agesilaus campaigned there with real success ^[4]. Artaxerxes answered with a weapon cheaper than armies: gold. Persian money helped push Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos into the Corinthian War against Sparta in 395 BC, forcing Agesilaus home to defend his own alliance ^[4].

The king also rebuilt naval power. He placed the exiled Athenian admiral Conon alongside the satrap Pharnabazus at the head of a Persian fleet, and in 394 BC that fleet destroyed Spartan sea power at the Battle of Cnidus ^[4]. Persian ships then raided the coasts of Laconia itself, and Persian funds paid for the rebuilding of the Long Walls of Athens, a striking reversal for a king whose predecessors had burned the city.

The diplomatic capstone came in 387 or 386 BC with the agreement known as the King's Peace, or Peace of Antalcidas after the Spartan envoy who negotiated it. Its terms, issued in the king's name, declared that the cities of Asia and the islands of Clazomenae and Cyprus belonged to Persia, while the other Greek cities were to be autonomous ^[5]. Exhausted by decades of war, the major Greek powers accepted. Without fighting a single pitched battle in Europe, Artaxerxes had recovered the Anatolian seaboard lost since the days of Xerxes and made himself the arbiter of Greek affairs. Historians of the period count the settlement among the clearest Artaxerxes II achievements, a demonstration that Persian influence could rest on subsidy and arbitration as effectively as on invasion ^[6].

The western triumph had a costly counterpart on the Nile. Around the time of Artaxerxes's accession, Egypt broke away under the rebel Amyrtaeus, ending more than a century of Persian rule there, and it stayed independent for the rest of the reign ^[6]. A major expedition launched in the mid 370s BC under the satrap Pharnabazus and the Athenian mercenary general Iphicrates pushed into the Delta but collapsed amid flooding, disease, and quarrels between the commanders ^[6]. The loss of Egypt's grain and tribute was a standing wound in imperial finances and prestige.

Worse followed in Anatolia during the 360s BC, when several western governors rose in the loosely connected uprisings that modern scholars call the Revolt of the Satraps. Figures such as Datames of Cappadocia and Ariobarzanes of Hellespontine Phrygia defied the crown, at times with Egyptian and Greek encouragement ^[5]. The rebellions never merged into a single front, and mutual betrayal did much of the king's work for him. By the end of the decade royal authority had been restored across the west, though the episode exposed how much the empire depended on the loyalty of powerful provincial families.

Pirouettes of alliance marked these years. States that had fought Persia accepted its gold; satraps who rebelled were sometimes pardoned and restored. The pattern says something about the king's method. Artaxerxes preferred patience, negotiation, and selective punishment to grand campaigns, and the approach, whatever the Greeks thought of it, kept an enormous and diverse empire intact for forty-six years ^[1].

No Persian court is better documented, or more darkly portrayed, than that of Artaxerxes II. Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek doctor who attended the royal family, and later Plutarch and Deinon preserved a stream of palace stories dominated by Parysatis, the queen mother. She avenged Cyrus's death by contriving the destruction of those blamed for it, and the tradition holds that she eventually poisoned Queen Stateira at a shared meal, an act for which the king banished her for a time to Babylon before recalling her ^[2]. Readers should treat such tales with care, since Greek writers relished stories of Persian court cruelty, but the outline of a household riven by rivalry is consistent across the sources.

The king fathered a very large family; ancient authors credit him with well over a hundred children by his wives and concubines, a figure that cannot be checked but reflects the scale of the royal household ^[2]. The succession bred its own tragedies. His eldest son Darius, formally named heir, was executed after being drawn into a conspiracy against his father, and another son, Ariaspes, died amid the intrigues that followed. The ruthless younger son Ochus outmaneuvered his brothers and eventually succeeded as Artaxerxes III ^[1].

In religion Artaxerxes II made a change visible in the stone record. Earlier Achaemenid royal inscriptions invoke Ahuramazda alone among named gods; his inscriptions at Susa and elsewhere add Anahita and Mithra, asking the three together to protect his buildings ^[7]. The Babylonian priest Berossus later wrote that this king set up cult statues of Anahita in major cities of the empire, from Babylon and Susa to Sardis and Bactra ^[7]. Scholars still debate what the shift meant for Persian religious practice, but it marks the reign as a moment when the monarchy publicly broadened its divine patronage.

He was also a builder. At Susa he restored the great palace of Darius I after fire damage and added a new palace and columned hall, and construction is attested at Ecbatana as well ^[7]. These projects kept the dynasty's ceremonial centers in working splendor through the longest reign in Achaemenid history.

The final decade of the reign was shadowed by the succession crisis. Plutarch presents an aging king worn down by the plot of his son Darius and by the deaths that followed, ruling on while Ochus cleared his own path to the throne ^[2]. Whatever the personal cost, the administrative machine held: the satrapal revolts had been contained, the Greek cities still looked to the Persian court to referee their disputes, and tribute continued to flow from the provinces that remained loyal.

Artaxerxes II died in 358 BCE, having reigned since 404 BC, roughly forty-six years, longer than any other Achaemenid ruler ^[1]. His rock-cut tomb was carved not at Naqsh-e Rostam, where Darius I and his immediate successors lay, but into the mountainside directly above the terrace of Persepolis, a choice his successors repeated ^[7]. Ochus took the throne as Artaxerxes III and quickly showed a very different temperament, opening his reign with a purge of royal relatives and later reconquering the Egypt his father had been unable to recover.

Greek writers gave Artaxerxes II the surname Mnemon, usually translated as "the mindful" or "of good memory," and Greek literature fixed his image for posterity: the king who nearly lost his crown to a bolder brother, the master of a court ruled by formidable women, the paymaster of Greek politics ^[2]. Because Xenophon marched against him and Plutarch wrote his biography, he is among the few Persian kings whom ancient European readers felt they knew as a person.

Modern historians read the reign differently. Pierre Briant and other specialists in Achaemenid history point out that a supposedly weak king recovered the Anatolian coast, imposed the King's Peace, survived every internal challenge, and handed his heir an empire still intact from the Aegean to Central Asia ^[6]. The losses were real, above all Egypt, but the durability was more remarkable. Assessed on results rather than on Greek anecdote, the record invites a more generous verdict, and any balanced Artaxerxes II biography has to weigh both.

His reign also left durable religious and archaeological traces: the elevation of Anahita and Mithra in royal inscriptions, the restored palaces of Susa, and the tombs above Persepolis ^[7]. Students searching for Artaxerxes II facts encounter him at the crossroads of two literatures, Greek and Persian, and that double perspective is itself part of the legacy. Few ancient rulers were watched so closely by their enemies, and fewer still governed so long under that gaze ^[1].