Artaxerxes I

Artaxerxes I was king of the Persian Empire from 465 to 424 BCE, the son of Xerxes I and Queen Amestris, who came to the throne after his father’s murder. His forty-year reign saw the crushing of the Egyptian revolt of Inaros and an Athenian army sent to help it, the end of open war with Athens, the arrival of Themistocles as a refugee at his court, and the missions of Ezra and Nehemiah to Jerusalem.

A bloody accession

In 465 BCE Xerxes was killed in his palace. The Greek accounts, which are late and contradictory, name Artabanus, commander of the royal guard, as the murderer. According to the version in Ctesias and later writers, Artabanus persuaded the young Artaxerxes that his elder brother Darius had killed their father, Artaxerxes had Darius put to death, and then, discovering the truth or sensing danger, killed Artabanus himself. Another brother, Hystaspes, who governed Bactria, seems to have resisted, and Ctesias tells of a war in the east before Artaxerxes was secure. Babylonian documents confirm the date of the change of reign but tell us nothing of how it happened.

The Greeks called him Makrocheir, “Long-hand”, which Plutarch explains literally: his right hand was longer than his left. Persian tradition remembers him as Ardeshir-e Derâzdast, the same nickname in Persian.

The revolt of Inaros

The great crisis of the reign came in Egypt. Around 460 BCE Inaros, a Libyan prince from the western delta, rose against Persian rule and won much of Lower Egypt. At Papremis, Herodotus says, the Persian satrap Achaemenes, Artaxerxes’ uncle, was killed. Inaros asked Athens for help, and the Athenians, then at war with Persia in the Aegean, sent a fleet of around 200 ships that sailed up the Nile and besieged the Persian garrison in the “White Fort” at Memphis.

Artaxerxes first tried to buy a Spartan attack on Athens. When that failed, he sent the Persian noble Megabyzus with a large army and a Phoenician fleet. Megabyzus relieved Memphis and drove the Greeks onto the island of Prosopitis in the delta, where he besieged them for eighteen months. In the end, Thucydides says, the Persians drained the channel around the island, left the Athenian ships aground and stormed the island on foot. Most of the Athenian force was destroyed, and a relief squadron that arrived later was also lost, around 454 BCE. Inaros was captured. A local leader, Amyrtaeus, held out in the marshes.

The fate of Inaros and the revolt of Megabyzus

Ctesias adds a court sequel. Megabyzus had promised Inaros his life, but Amestris, the queen mother, demanded vengeance for her son Achaemenes, and some years later Inaros was executed. Megabyzus, his word broken, rose in revolt in Syria, defeated two royal armies and was finally reconciled with the king. The story shows a reign in which the great nobles and the queen mother had a strong voice; see Women of the Achaemenid Court. For Egypt as a province, see Egypt under Persian Rule.

The end of the war with Athens

In 450 BCE the Athenian general Cimon led a fleet to Cyprus, where Persian rule depended on the island’s kings. Cimon died during the siege of Citium, but his fleet won a battle off Salamis in Cyprus. After this, open fighting between Athens and Persia stopped.

Later Greek writers describe a formal treaty, the Peace of Callias, named after the Athenian envoy who negotiated it at Susa around 449 BCE: Persian warships would stay out of the Aegean and the Persian army away from the coast, and Athens would leave the king’s lands alone. Thucydides does not mention it, and some ancient and modern critics have thought it an Athenian invention. The argument is set out on the page on the Peace of Callias. Whatever its form, peace held in practice until the satraps of Asia Minor began to meddle in the Peloponnesian War under Artaxerxes’ successor. In 440 BCE, the satrap of Sardis, Pissuthnes, gave quiet support to Samian rebels against Athens, a sign of the method to come.

Themistocles at the Persian court

The victor of Salamis ended his life in Persian service. Ostracised from Athens and then accused of treason, Themistocles fled east. Thucydides says he arrived early in Artaxerxes’ reign and wrote to the new king, offering his services and asking for a year to learn the language and customs before appearing in person. He learned Persian, was received with honour, and was given the revenues of three Greek cities in Asia Minor: Magnesia on the Maeander for his bread, Lampsacus for his wine and Myus for his food. He died at Magnesia, of illness according to Thucydides, though a story grew that he took poison rather than lead a Persian army against Greece.

The episode was not unique. Persian kings regularly took in Greek exiles, and gave them land, as a way to keep a hand in Greek affairs.

Ezra and Nehemiah

The biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah are set under a king Artaxerxes. Nehemiah describes himself as the cupbearer of Artaxerxes at Susa, who in the king’s twentieth year, 445 BCE if this is Artaxerxes I, gave him leave to go to Jerusalem as governor and rebuild its walls. Ezra’s mission is dated to “the seventh year of Artaxerxes”, which would be 458 BCE under Artaxerxes I, but some scholars place it under Artaxerxes II, in 398 BCE. Both books show the Persian king supporting the temple community of Judah, continuing the policy that began with Cyrus and the return of the Jews.

The empire at peace

Inside the empire, the reign was a time of consolidation. At Persepolis, Artaxerxes completed the great Hall of a Hundred Columns begun by his father, and he may have been the king who moved the audience reliefs from the Apadana to the Treasury (see the Apadana reliefs). In Babylonia, the business archive of the Murashu family of Nippur begins in his reign, showing land held by soldiers, officials and royal women, and rented out through a busy local firm. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote his account of the Persian Wars in these same decades.

Death and succession

Artaxerxes died in 424 BCE. Ctesias says his queen Damaspia died on the same day. His only legitimate son, Xerxes II, ruled for about forty-five days before he was killed by his half-brother Sogdianus, who was in turn overthrown by another half-brother, Ochus, satrap of Hyrcania. Ochus took the throne name Darius; his reign is told on the page on Darius II.

How historians judge him

Older histories, following Greek writers, presented the later Achaemenids as weak kings ruled by their courts, and Artaxerxes I as the first of them. More recent work, drawing on Babylonian and Egyptian documents, sees a capable ruler who regained Egypt, destroyed an Athenian expedition, and ended a costly war on terms that kept Persian control of Asia Minor’s interior intact.