Ctesias as Historian of the Persian Wars

Abstract

THE BATTLE OF PLATAEA according to the history of Ctesias of Cnidus preceded the battle of Salamis. This egregious blunder, which is certainly an error of the historian, not of Photius, to whom we are indebted for a summary of this part of the work, is a famous one.' Yet despite it Ctesias' version of the Persian Wars did not fail to impress certain authors of the ancient world, although most avoided his grosser errors. Nor have some modern scholars, ransacking all the late sources in the search for fresh insights, found it unprofitable reading.2 An examination of the account in its entirety should reveal how hazardous is the procedure of picking out seemingly attractive details without close scrutiny of the whole, and will perhaps tell us a little about how history was sometimes written in the fourth century. Almost nothing is known about Ctesias' life beyond the bare facts that he was a native of Cnidus and spent some seven years as physician at the court of Artaxerxes II, before leaving Persia in 398/7. We have no information as to when he was born. However, since he seems to have written his Persica between 398/7 and circa 390, i.e., more than thirty years after the date normally accepted as the date of the publication of Herodotus' Histories, he can scarcely have had much contact with men

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