Tissaphernes
Tissaphernes | |
---|---|
Satrap of Lydia | |
In office 415 BC – 408 BC | |
Preceded by | Pissuthnes |
Succeeded by | Cyrus the Younger |
In office 400 BC – 395 BC | |
Preceded by | Cyrus the Younger |
Succeeded by | Tiribazus |
Personal details | |
Born | 445 BC |
Died | 395 BC (aged 50) |
Military service | |
Allegiance | Achaemenid Empire |
Battles/wars | Battle of Cunaxa |
Tissaphernes (
Etymology
Čiçafarnah (čiça + farnah) "with shining splendor":[1] čiça is from the Proto-Indo-European adjective (s)koitrós 'bright';[2] farnah is equivalent to Avestan xvarənah 'fortune', 'glory', which appears as 'luminous'. čiθra means nature, specifically the animate nature.
Čiça- is the Old Persian form of the Old Iranian term Čiθra-, which is reflected in the
Family and early life
Tissaphernes was born in 445 BC. He belonged to an important Persian family: he was the grandson of
In 414 BC, Tissaphernes was assigned by Darius II to suppress the rebellion of Pissuthnes, the Persian satrap of Lydia and Ionia, and to take over his office. Tissaphernes bribed Pissuthnes' Greek mercenaries to desert him and promised that his life would be spared if he surrendered, a promise which Darius did not keep. When Darius II ordered Tissaphernes to proceed to suppress the continued rebellion of Pissuthnes' son Amorges, and also ordered him to collect the outstanding tribute from the Greek cities of Asia Minor, many of which were under Athenian protection, Tissaphernes entered into an alliance with Sparta against Athens, which in 412 BC led to the Persian conquest of the greater part of Ionia.[4]
However, Tissaphernes was unwilling to take action and tried to achieve his aim through astute and often perfidious negotiations.
Civil war
On the death of Darius II in 404 BC, Artaxerxes II was crowned king of Persia. Tissaphernes, who found out about Cyrus the Younger's plan to assassinate his brother, informed the king about the conspiracy, who then had Cyrus imprisoned. But by the intercession of his mother Parysatis, Cyrus was pardoned and sent back to his satrapy. According to Plutarch, "his resentment for [his arrest] made him more eagerly desirous of the kingdom than before."[6]
With the desire for revenge, Cyrus gathered a large army and pretended to prepare an expedition against the Pisidians, a tribe based in the Taurus mountains.
In the spring of 401 BC, Cyrus united all his forces into an army, which now included
Cyrus saw that the outcome depended on the fate of the king. He therefore wanted Clearchus of Sparta, the commander of the Greeks, to take the centre against Artaxerxes. Clearchus, out of arrogance, disobeyed. As a result, the left wing of the Persians under Tissaphernes was free to engage the rest of Cyrus' forces. Cyrus in the centre threw himself upon Artaxerxes, but was slain. Tissaphernes claimed to have killed the rebel himself.
The Greek soldiers of Cyrus, once they heard about the news of his death, realised that they were in the middle of a massive empire with no provisions, no one to finance them, and no reliable allies amongst the Persian nobles. They offered to make their Persian ally, Ariaeus, king, but he refused on the grounds that he was not of royal blood and so would not find enough support among the Persians to succeed. They then offered their services to Tissaphernes, but he refused. However, the Greeks refused to surrender to him.
Tissaphernes was left with a problem: he faced a large army of heavy troops that he could not defeat by frontal assault. He supplied them with food and, after a long wait, led them northwards for home, meanwhile detaching the Persian general
Later life and death
After returning to Asia Minor, Tissaphernes attacked the Greek cities to punish them for their allegiance to Cyrus.[5] This led to a war with Sparta beginning in 399 BC. In 396 BC, the Spartan king and commander Agesilaus II led a campaign to free the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Tissaphernes at this point proposed an armistice and solemnly ratified a truce, which he instantly broke when Persian reinforcements arrived. Agesilaus thanked Tissaphernes for having put the gods on the side of the Greeks by committing perjury, and let it be known that he now planned to lead his troops against Caria. When Tissaphernes gathered his troops to meet this supposed Carian invasion, Agesilaus instead successfully attacked the Persian province of Hellespontine Phrygia. In 395 BC, Agesilaus let it be known that his next target would be the rich land around the Lydian city of Sardis. Tissaphernes, believing that if Agesilaus really intended to attack Sardis he would not have said so, assumed that this time Agesilaus would finally attack Caria, so Tissaphernes concentrated his troops in that area, but Agesilaus successfully attacked Sardis just as he said he would.[4]
At last, the fall of Tissaphernes came about when the Persian king yielded to the representations of Pharnabazus II, strongly supported by the chiliarch (vizier) Tithraustes and by the queen-mother Parysatis, who hated Tissaphernes as the principal cause of the death of her favourite son Cyrus. Tithraustes was sent to assassinate Tissaphernes, who was lured to Ariaeus' residence in Colossae and slain in 395 BC.[5]
Legacy
Encyclopædia Iranica comments that:
Tissaphernes has been described, on the one hand, as impetuous and forthright, on the other, as a liar and treacherous deceiver (to Xenophon, he seemed "the supreme example of faithlessness and oath-breaking in the Anabasis"). Nevertheless, as one scholar has noted, "it is only fair to him to say . . . that in an epoch when disloyalty was becoming the normal he remained the most loyal subject of the two Kings whom he served". That Tissaphernes appeared to the Greeks as one of their most dangerous enemies and no doubt the model of an unscrupulous diplomat is not surprising; this bias has so deeply marked Greek traditions that it now seems nearly impossible to form a balanced judgment about him, especially as no Persian sources are available and the pertinent sections of the Lycian Xanthos stele are not yet understood.[1]
Following the death of Tissaphernes, Caria re-established a line of semi-independent local dynasts, still under the umbrella of the Achaemenid Empire, the dynasty of the Hecatomnids.[8]
References
- ^ a b c d ČIΘRAFARNAH, Rüdiger Schmitt, Encyclopaedia Iranica
- ISBN 0-19-929668-5), p. 329.
- ISBN 978-90-429-1833-7.
- ^ a b Smith, William (1867). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 3. Boston: Little, Brown. pp. 1154–1156.
- ^ a b c public domain: Meyer, Eduard (1911). "Tissaphernes". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 1015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ Plutarch. Ed. by A.H. Clough. "Artaxerxes," Plutarch's Lives. 1996. Project Gutenberg
- ^ Meyer 1911.
- ISBN 9780195170726.
Sources
- Schmitt, Rüdiger (1991). "ČIΘRAFARNAH". Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition. Retrieved 20 December 2013.