The Anabasis of Alexander/Book III/Chapter XXII

by Arrian

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CHAPTER XXII.

Reflections on the Fate of Darius.

Alexander sent the body of Darius into Persis, with orders that it should be buried in the royal sepulchre, in the same way as the other Persian kings before him had been buried.^[1] He then proclaimed Amminaspes, a Parthian, viceroy over the Parthians and Hyrcanians. This man was one of those who with Mazaces had surrendered Egypt to Alexander. He also appointed Tlepolemus, son of Pythophanes, one of the Companions, to guard his interests in Parthia and Hyrcania. Such was the end of Darius, in the archonship of Aristophon at Athens, in the month Hecatombaion.^[2] This king was a man pre-eminently effeminate and lacking in self-reliance in military enterprises; but as to civil matters he never exhibited any disposition to indulge in arbitrary conduct; nor indeed was it in his power to exhibit it. For it happened that he was involved in a war with the Macedonians and Greeks at the very time he succeeded to the regal power^[3]; and consequently it was no longer possible for him to act the tyrant towards his subjects, even if he had been so inclined, standing as he did in greater danger than they. As long as he lived, one misfortune after another was accumulated upon him; nor did he experience any cessation of calamity from the time when he first succeeded to the rule. At the beginning of his reign the cavalry defeat was sustained by his viceroys at the Granicus, and forthwith Ionia Aeolis, both the Phrygias, Lydia, and all Caria^[4] except Halicarnassus were occupied by his foe; soon after, Halicarnassus also was captured, as well as all the littoral as far as Cilicia. Then came his own discomfiture at Issus, where he saw his mother, wife, and children taken prisoners. Upon this Phoenicia and the whole of Egypt were lost; and then at Arbela he himself fled disgracefully among the first, and lost a very vast army composed of all the nations of his empire. After this, wandering as an exile from his own dominions, he died after being betrayed by his personal attendants to the worst treatment possible, being at the same time king and a prisoner ignominiously led in chains; and at last he perished through a conspiracy formed of those most intimately acquainted with him. Such were the misfortunes that befell Darius in his life-time; but after his death he received a royal burial; his children received from Alexander a princely rearing and edncation, just as if their father had still been king; and Alexander himself became his son-in-law.^[5] When he died he was about fifty years of age.

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1. The Persian kings were buried at Persepolis. See Diodorus, xvii. 71. Plutarch (Alex., 43) says that Alexander sent the corpse of Darius to his mother.
2. In the year B.C. 330, the first of Hecatombaion fell on the first of July.
3. Darius came to the throne B.C. 336.
4. In 2 Kings xi. 4, 19 the word translated captains in our Bible is Carim, the Carians. These men formed the body-guard of the usurper Athaliah, who stood in need of foreign mercenaries. David had a bodyguard of Philistines and Cretans. The Carians served as mercenaries throughout the ancient world, as we learn from Thucydides, i. 8; Herodotus, i. 171; ii. 152; v. 111; Strabo, xiv. 2. The Lydians appear in the Bible under the name of Lud (Isa. lxvi. 19). Herodotus (i. 94) gives an account of the colonization of Umbria by the Lydians, from which sprung the state of the Etruscans. Hence Vergil (Aeneid, ii. 782) speaks of the "Lydius Tybris." See also Aeneid, viii. 479; Horace (Satires, i. 6, 1); Tacitus (Annals, iv. 55); Dionysius (Archaeologia Romana, i. 28).
5. He married Barsine, eldest daughter of Darius (Arrian, vii. 4 infra). She was also called Arsinoe and Stateira.