The World

Queen Parysatis guided the dynasty for decades. In 423, she had helped her husband-brother Darius II win the throne, overcoming a challenge from another brother whom she had killed using a special Persian method: suffocation in cold ashes that were heaped inside a specially built tower into which the victim was placed. She and Darius had successfully increased Persian power over Greece, but she had a weakness: mother of thirteen children, she passionately loved her son Cyrus, whom she had appointed as satrap of the west: there he fell in love with an enslaved golden-haired Greek girl, Aspasia, whose chastity and beauty dazzled him. While Parysatis favoured Cyrus, Darius groomed another son, Artaxerxes, for the throne – and he too fell in love. But his choice was dangerous for Parysatis: Stateira was the daughter of a powerful clan. When her father and brothers crossed the king and Parysatis, they ordered the entire clan buried alive. But Artaxerxes successfully begged for his wife Stateira to be allowed to live. Naturally she remembered the killing of her family. For twenty years, the two women watched one another.

In 404, when Darius died, the gentle Artaxerxes, married to Stateira, succeeded, while the queen mother groomed her favourite son Cyrus, then aged twenty-two, who sounds like a charismatic sociopath, to seize the throne. Two years later, Cyrus hired 12,000 Greek mercenaries under an Athenian aristocratic adventurer, Xenophon, and marched on Persia, but when the brothers met in battle the young challenger was unhorsed and then beheaded.^* Parysatis watched the killers present her darling’s head and hand to Artaxerxes.

Parysatis never got over Cyrus’ death, and awaited her vengeance: she won Cyrus’ killers in games of dice. One was skinned; another forced to drink molten lead; and the third was killed by scaphism, in which the victim was enclosed between two boats while force-fed honey and milk until maggots, rats and flies infested their living faecal cocoon, eating them alive.

Artaxerxes inherited his brother’s breathtakingly beautiful Greek lover, Aspasia, who was brought to him gagged and tied. He had her freed and rewarded: he waited many years for her to finish grieving for Cyrus.

His mother Parysatis vied with his wife Stateira, who as the mother of three sons was growing in prestige. Stateira cultivated popularity by appearing in a carriage with the curtains open, delighting the public, and made clear that she despised the many cruelties of the old queen. While Artaxerxes fathered 115 children by his concubines, he really loved a beautiful eunuch. When the youth died of natural causes, he asked Aspasia to wear his robes; his grief touched her. ‘I come, O King,’ she said, ‘to comfort your grief.’ They become lovers, finally.

The queen mother and the queen respectfully circled one another, watched by the king: both were extremely vigilant of poison. All autocracies – from the courts of ancient Persia to those of twenty-first-century dictators – run on personal power and access that make competition among the first circle both intimate and vicious. Poison is the ideal weapon at such close quarters, measured and ambiguous – killing the family way. The Persian court was especially watchful, the cupbearer and food taster key positions at court, while the punishment for poisoning was grinding a culprit’s face and head between two stones until they were reduced to jelly. For special occasions, the king kept a rare Indian poison – and its antidote.

Stateira’s rising power may have been the catalyst for Parysatis, who doubtless regarded herself as guarding the king and dynasty from a deep threat: the two queens often dined together with extreme caution.

Now, in her Susa palace, Parysatis served Stateira a roast fowl, and had her female slave smear the Indian poison on one side of the carving knife so that when she carved the roasted bird, she was able safely to eat her own half. Stateira, reassured, then ate hers and died in agony, able to recount what had happened to the outraged king, whose antidote presumably failed to work. After torturing the servants and grinding the slave to jelly, Artaxerxes exiled his nonagenarian mother.

Artaxerxes turned his attention to Greece, playing off Sparta and Athens until in 387 he imposed the King’s Peace which recognized Greek autonomy but established him as the ultimate arbiter of the Hellenic world. Artaxerxes had succeeded where Xerxes and Darius had failed, ruling with an iron will from Egypt and India to the Greek world – where no power was so influenced by Persia as Macedonia.

The Argeads of Macedonia had thrived in the interplay of Persia, Athens and Sparta: King Archelaos leveraged their appetite for shipbuilding timber to build his mountainous, goat-infested fiefdom into a regional force for the first time, aided by his gold and silver mines. But in 399 when Archelaos was out hunting, three courtiers stabbed him to death.