Darius III, the Last Achaemenid King

Darius III was the last king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, ruling from 336 to 330 BCE. He came to the throne through a court crisis, lost three great battles to Alexander of Macedon at the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, and was killed by his own nobles in July 330 BCE. Almost everything known about him was written by his enemies’ historians, which makes him one of the hardest Persian kings to judge fairly.

From the side branch of the royal house

Darius was not a king’s son. Diodorus calls him the son of Arsames and grandson of Ostanes, a brother of Artaxerxes II, so he belonged to a collateral line of the Achaemenid family. Diodorus also says he made his name under Artaxerxes III by killing an enemy champion in single combat during a campaign against the Cadusians, a mountain people near the Caspian. Later Greek authors who wanted to belittle him claimed he had been a mere royal courier, or even a slave. Those stories belong to propaganda written after his defeat.

His chance came from the murders at court. The eunuch Bagoas had poisoned Artaxerxes III in 338 BCE and his son Arses in 336 BCE. With no adult heir in the direct line, Bagoas chose Darius. When Bagoas then tried to poison him too, Diodorus says, Darius found out and forced him to drink the cup himself. As king he took the name Darius, linking himself to the founder of the empire’s great age.

The empire he inherited

Darius did not inherit a ruin. The empire still stretched from the Aegean to the Indus, with its treasuries at Susa and Persepolis full. Egypt seems to have slipped briefly out of control under a local ruler named Khababash around the time of his accession, but it was in Persian hands again when Alexander arrived. In the same year that Darius became king, Philip II of Macedon sent an advance force into Asia Minor, and Philip’s murder later that year brought his son Alexander to power.

The war with Alexander

When Alexander crossed the Hellespont in spring 334 BCE, Darius left the first response to the satraps of Asia Minor. Their defeat at the Granicus opened Anatolia. Darius then backed a naval counter-offensive in the Aegean under Memnon of Rhodes, which looked promising until Memnon died in 333 BCE.

Darius led the royal army himself in November 333 at Issus. He lost, fled the field, and left his mother, wife and children in Alexander’s hands. In letters he offered ransom, then territory and an alliance. Alexander refused. While Alexander took Tyre, Gaza and Egypt, Darius raised a new army from the eastern satrapies, and in October 331 he faced Alexander again at Gaugamela, on ground he had chosen and levelled. He lost again, and the royal army never re-formed.

He fled to Ecbatana in Media (modern Hamadan), hoping to gather the eastern peoples for a third battle. In 330, as Alexander approached, he moved east. Bessus, satrap of Bactria, and other nobles arrested him and finally stabbed him; the story is told on the death of Darius III and Bessus.

A coward or an unlucky king

The Greek writers, above all Arrian, built a contrast: Alexander the bold leader, Darius the king who fled first at Issus and Gaugamela. Arrian’s verdict on him is that he was weak and incompetent in war. Other ancient writers were kinder. Diodorus and Curtius Rufus describe a king who fought bravely and was beaten by a better army and by bad fortune, and Curtius gives him dignified speeches.

Modern scholarship has moved away from Arrian’s portrait. Pierre Briant, in Darius in the Shadow of Alexander, shows how the image of Darius was built after the fact to make Alexander’s victories look inevitable. Darius chose sensible strategies: he tried to fight at sea and to stir up Greece behind Alexander, he chose open ground at Issus first (Alexander’s speed changed that) and prepared the field at Gaugamela. His real problem was a Macedonian army of a quality that no Persian king had faced, led by a commander of rare talent.

Why Persian sources are silent

No inscription of Darius III survives in Old Persian, and no Persian chronicle of his reign was ever written down. Babylonian clay tablets give dates and a few events, including an astronomical diary that mentions the battle of Gaugamela. Everything else comes from Greek and Roman historians writing centuries later, using lost accounts by Alexander’s officers. The unfinished rock tomb south of the Persepolis terrace has sometimes been linked to him, but the attribution is uncertain.

Dara in Persian memory

The Iranian tradition that reached Ferdowsi kept a very different king. In the Shahnameh he is Dara, son of Darab, and Iskandar (Alexander) is his half-brother, the son of Darab and a daughter of the Greek king Filqus (Philip). The defeat is therefore a quarrel inside the Iranian royal family, not a foreign conquest. Dara is murdered by two of his own ministers, and the dying king gives Iskandar his daughter Roshanak in marriage. This legend is discussed on Alexander the Great in Iran and on the page about Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh.