Cyrus the Younger and the Battle of Cunaxa

The Battle of Cunaxa was fought in late summer 401 BCE on the Euphrates north of Babylon, between King Artaxerxes II and his younger brother Cyrus the Younger, who had marched from Asia Minor to take the throne. The Greek mercenaries in Cyrus’s army won their part of the field, but Cyrus was killed charging at the king, and the revolt collapsed. The retreat of those Greeks, the “Ten Thousand”, told by Xenophon in his Anabasis, became one of the most famous stories of antiquity.

Why Cyrus rebelled

Cyrus the Younger was the favourite son of Darius II and Parysatis. Sent to Sardis in 407 BCE as commander of the western provinces, he had funded the Spartan fleet that won the Peloponnesian War (see Darius II). When his elder brother Arsaces became king as Artaxerxes II in 404 BCE, Tissaphernes accused Cyrus of plotting murder at the coronation. Saved by his mother, Cyrus returned west determined to take the throne.

He had money, a network of Greek friends from the war, and, Xenophon insists, the qualities of a king: generosity, courage and a reputation for keeping his word. He hired Greek soldiers in small groups through different commanders, the Spartan exile Clearchus, Proxenus of Boeotia, Menon of Thessaly and others, under pretexts such as a war against the Pisidians in the mountains or a quarrel with Tissaphernes. Sparta quietly allowed it.

The march to Babylon

The army left Sardis in the spring of 401 BCE. It crossed Phrygia and passed through the Cilician Gates into Cilicia, where at Tarsus the Greeks, suspecting the truth, refused to go further; Clearchus talked them round with tears and tricks. At Thapsacus on the Euphrates Cyrus finally told them the goal, promised extra pay, and the army followed the river south through the desert, killing wild asses and ostriches for food when supplies ran low.

Two episodes on the way show the strains in a Persian rebel army. Orontas, a Persian noble of royal blood, was caught writing to the king and was tried in Cyrus’s tent and killed. And the royal forces, instead of meeting Cyrus at the frontier, let him come: a great ditch dug across the plain to block him was left unguarded.

The battle

The two lines

The king’s army appeared on the afternoon of the expected day, Xenophon writes, first as a white cloud of dust, then as a dark mass with bronze glinting in it. In front were scythed chariots with blades on their axles. Artaxerxes held the centre with his guard of 6,000 horse, and his line was so long that his centre extended beyond Cyrus’s left wing.

Cyrus wanted the Greeks, on his right by the river, to strike at the king’s centre, where victory would be decided. Clearchus refused to leave the Euphrates and expose his flank. It was the decision that lost the battle.

The Greek victory and Cyrus’s charge

The Greeks advanced singing the war song and broke into a run. The troops facing them fled before they came within bowshot; the chariots, many without drivers, ran through gaps the hoplites opened in their ranks. Xenophon says only one Greek was hit by an arrow. The Greeks chased the enemy for kilometres, out of sight of the rest of the field.

Meanwhile, the king’s centre began to wheel round Cyrus’s left. Cyrus, with some 600 horsemen around him, charged the royal guard, broke it, and killed its commander Artagerses with his own hand. Then he saw his brother. “I see the man”, Xenophon reports him shouting. He rode at Artaxerxes and struck him through the breastplate, wounding him in the chest. Ctesias, who says he treated the wound himself, describes it. In the same moment a javelin hit Cyrus under the eye and he fell. His head and right hand were cut off, the Persian punishment for rebels.

Who killed Cyrus

Plutarch, using Ctesias, says a young Persian named Mithridates struck the first blow and a Carian soldier the second; both later boasted of it, and both died horribly at the order of Parysatis. Artaxerxes himself wished it to be known that he had killed his brother. The story of the mother’s revenge is told on the page on Women of the Achaemenid Court.

The retreat of the Ten Thousand

The Greeks returned to camp to find Cyrus dead and his Persian commander Ariaeus negotiating with the king. They refused to surrender their arms; they had won, they said. For weeks they marched north under a truce, escorted by Tissaphernes. Then, on the Greater Zab river, Tissaphernes invited the generals to a meeting and seized them. Clearchus, Proxenus, Menon and others were executed.

The army chose new leaders, among them the young Athenian Xenophon. They fought their way north through the mountains of the Carduchians, across Armenia in deep winter snow, and in early 400 BCE reached a mountain from which they saw the Black Sea; the cry “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The sea! The sea!”) became famous. From Trapezus (Trabzon) they worked their way west, and many survivors later joined a Spartan army fighting the Persians in Asia Minor.

Numbers and sources

Xenophon gives the king 1,200,000 men in four armies, of which 900,000 were on the field, and Cyrus 100,000 Asian troops beside the Greeks. No modern historian accepts these figures; armies of that size could not have been supplied on the Euphrates. Estimates of the royal army now usually run to some tens of thousands. Xenophon’s numbers for the Greeks, taken from a review, are more reliable.

The Anabasis was written decades after the event, in part to defend Xenophon’s own conduct, and it sees the battle from one wing. Ctesias saw it from the king’s side, but his work survives only in summaries and in Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes. Diodorus gives a third version based on other Greek writers.

What Cunaxa meant

For Persia, Cunaxa was a victory. The king survived, the rebellion ended in one day, and the Greeks left. But Greek writers drew a different lesson: a small Greek army had marched to the heart of the empire, beaten the troops in front of it and walked home. The orator Isocrates later used the march as proof that Persia could be conquered, and the story was known to Alexander. Historians now warn against reading the retreat as a sign of Persian weakness: the Greeks escaped, but the Persian state that let them go was strong enough to win back the Greek cities of Asia fourteen years later, in the King’s Peace. For the Persian army of the time, see the Immortals and the Achaemenid army.