Article

Definition

A piece of propaganda cannot exist in a vacuum; it is a communication between two parties. Propaganda consists of three elements: the message, be it text, speech, image, or performance; the sender, who is responsible for the creation and distribution of the message; and the recipient, at whom the message is aimed. In order to distinguish between persuasion and propaganda, we define the sender as a member or representative of a political group with a “clear institutional ideology and objective” and that follows “a careful and predetermined plan of prefabricated symbol manipulation.”

Taking the Bisotun inscription of Darius the Great as an example, Darius’ claim to the throne is based on three points:8 his dynastic heritage (“From ancient times our family has been kings … There are eight in my family who formerly have been kings; I [am[ the ninth; [thus altogether] nine, now as ever, are we kings” 9 ), his moral standing (“For that reason Ahuramazda and the other gods who are brought me aid, because I was not disloyal, I was no follower of the Lie, I was no evil-doer, neither I nor my family, but I acted according to righteousness, neither to the powerless nor to the powerful did I do wrong, and the man who strove for my royal house, him I treated well, who did harm, him I punished severely” 10) and his victories (“Proclaims Darius, the king: This is what I have done by the favor of Ahuramazda in one and the same year, after that I became king: Nineteen battles I have fought. By the favor of Ahuramazda I defeated them and captured nine kings” 11). These claims are not offered as a rational argument for why the Persians ought to recognize Darius as their rightful king. They are intended to exploit the ideological beliefs (in this case, the culturally determined notions of kingship, as well as religious beliefs and fears of disorder) of the recipients in order to force them into acceptance without ever making a rationally sound argument at all. This closing off of reason and autonomous decision-making is the essential difference between “persuasion” and “propaganda.”

Oppenheim argued that royal inscriptions were primarily ceremonial (Oppenheim, “Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires,” 116‒18), and Garelli argued that royal inscriptions and palace reliefs were the result of the king’s ego, and any influence they had on others was secondary (Garelli, “La propaganda royale assyrienne,” 25‒7). Finkelstein ruled out the possibility of the use of propaganda in the ancient world because this term “presumes a situation or context where a number of competing ideologies or sources of authority seek the allegiance or loyalty of large masses of persons.” Thus the Ancient Near East had what he calls “polemic” texts, but not propaganda (Finkelstein, “Early Mesopotamia, 2500‒1000 B.C.,” 53‒4, Ellul, Propaganda, 4).

Propaganda is an official public message by which the sender exploits the beliefs and emotions of the recipients in order to cause the recipient to think a certain way, or to take a certain action, which benefits the sender. In what follows, we will see that the three reports of the Death of Cyrus the Great meet this definition, and are therefore best understood as propaganda. We have no Persian textual sources describing the death of Cyrus, so we must rely solely on our Greek historians. First, Herodotus says that there are many versions of Cyrus’ death, but that the most plausible is that he was captured and killed during a pointless war against the nomadic, savage Massagetae. Second, the Cyrus of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia learned from a dream that his time had come. After three days of sickness, he summoned his two sons to his side and divided the kingdom between them. Following a thoroughly Greek meditation on morality and the immortality of the soul, Cyrus died. Finally, in Ctesias’ Persika, we see hints of death both on the battlefield and in bed. In one fragment, Cyrus was captured by the Saka, but survived. In a different fragment, Cyrus was wounded while at war with the Derbices, but survived long enough to return to Persia. Again, he divided the empire between his sons before his death (Burstein, The “Babyloniaca” of Berossus, 29). Berossus 3.5.1 states that Cyrus died nine years after the conquest of Babylon (that is, in 530), in battle “on the plain of the Daas.” These three versions are irreconcilable: Cyrus cannot die in bed and in battle. But rather than try to isolate the “historical kernel” of this episode, we will attempt to reconstruct the original context of these three versions in order to understand their function as propaganda.

1. The Story According to Herodotus
2. Herodotus’ account of Cyrus’ demise comes after his telling of the Babylonian conquest and description of the customs of that region. At 1.201, Herodotus begins with a description of the Massagetae homeland, which lies east of the Araxes (Oxus, modern Amu Darya) river, thus approximately modern-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The people of this region are hunter-gatherers who fornicate in the open “like animals” and smoke intoxicating leaves. Beyond this region is a flat plain, “over which the eye wanders till it is lost in the distance” (Herodotus: The Histories, 1.204). According to Herodotus, Cyrus had “many reasons” for his desire to conquer this land, but only mentions (1) his belief in his superhuman status, and (2) his belief in his invincibility. Cyrus’ opening gambit was to propose marriage to Tomyris, widowed queen of the Massagetae. She refused, so Cyrus ordered his men to bridge the Araxes. While this work was still in progress, she sent him a message advising him to be content with his conquests already won. But if he must have war, she agrees to meet him in battle a three-day march from the river, either in his land or hers. Croesus, the deposed Lydian king acting as Cyrus’ advisor, recommended that the Persians advance three days into Massagetae land, and there set up a rich banquet to distract the nomadic warriors unused to such civilized fare. Thus occupied, the Massagetae will be easy prey for the Persians. Cyrus took this advice and crossed the Araxes. In bed one night, Cyrus dreamed that he saw Darius—“who was the eldest of the sons of Hystaspes, son of Arsames, who was an Achaemenid”—with a pair of wings large enough to put both Europe and Asia in shadow.

Upon waking, Cyrus determined that the dream was proclaiming that Darius was actively plotting against him, but Herodotus intervenes to tell us that this interpretation was not quite right: the dream had been sent in order to warn Cyrus of his impending death and the subsequent succession of Darius to the throne. Once they had marched an appropriate distance from the Araxes, Cyrus sent a small detachment of troops to prepare the feast, in accordance with Croesus’ plan. Right on schedule, one-third of the Massagetae swooped in, killed the Persian soldiers, and set about the feast. Gorged on food and wine, they were killed or captured by the remaining Persians, with Tomyris’ son amongst the captives. When she heard the news, Tomyris offered the Persians a retreat without harassment in exchange for her son, but “more blood than they can drink” if they chose battle. Cyrus refused to retreat, and meanwhile, the prince killed himself in his captivity. In the ensuing battle, Cyrus was killed. When Tomyris found his corpse, she pushed his head into a wineskin filled with human blood, “and cried out as she committed this outrage: ‘Though I have conquered you and live, yet you have ruined me by treacherously taking my son. See now: I fulfill my threat: you have your fill of blood”. According to Herodotus, there are many accounts of Cyrus’ death, but this one is the most credible (πιθανώτατος).

There are reasons to be suspicious. This logos certainly fits into Herodotus’ overall narrative structure. The death of Cyrus at the hands of the Massagetae is a repeating topos of the hubris of Persian overreach: just as Cyrus meets his demise beyond the Araxes, so too does Cambyses fail in Ethiopia, Darius in Scythia, Xerxes in Greece (Immerwahr, Form and Thought, 25n31; Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 71‒89). Croesus’ discussion of strategy all find many parallels elsewhere in the History, and are therefore Herodotean creations or modifications. It is not likely, however, that he created the story from scratch. Certain elements of the tale are easily recognizable motifs that work towards Herodotus’ ideological arguments, so they can be explained as such. Other elements cannot be attributed to Herodotus, or to Greek literary culture in general. For example, the Massagetae names Tomyris and Spargapises are most likely of Iranian origin (Justi, Iranisches namenbuch, 307, 328; Altheim and Stiehl, Geschichte Mittelasiens im Altertum, 27‒8; Humbach and Faiss, Herodotus’s Scythians, 14), and are not Herodotus’ inventions. The ethnographic details about the Messagetae, especially in material culture, are broadly applicable to “Scythian” steppe culture generally (Sulimirski, “The Scyths,” 149). Again, the point is not that Herodotus’ account is correct, it is that his account is based on a core given to him by someone else, ultimately Iranian in origin.

1. In Herodotus’ account, there is more specific evidence that Darius was the sender. At 1.209, Cyrus has his dream, wherein Darius’ wings spread across both Asia and Europe. In the Histories, prophetic dreams come almost exclusively to foreign tyrants. They appear at decisive and transitional moments and offer a coded glimpse of the future (Bichler, “Die ‘Reichsträume’ bei Herodot,” 128‒9). In Greek literature, the dreams of rulers were regarded as especially significant, as they influenced the destinies of whole nations (Hollmann, The Master of Signs, 75). Cyrus’ dream during the Massagetae campaign is no different, and shows all the traits we would expect of a Herodotean dream. Yet there are signs that it may not be solely the product of Herodotus’ own imagination. Asheri identified the wings on Darius’ back as a “charismatic symbol of the king, the chosen one of Ahura Mazda (Asheri, Commentary, 215).
2. That Herodotus had at least one knowledgeable Persian informant is generally accepted today (Munson, “Who Are Herodotus’ Persians?,” 462‒70; West, “Herodotus’ Sources”; Balcer, Herodotus and Bisitun, 126‒30), and should not be particularly surprising: such a person would not have been hard for Herodotus to find. In fact, Herodotus himself tells us that Zopyrus, son and grandson of Persian satraps, lived in Athens in exile (Hdt. 3.160). On topics as politically significant as the births, achievements, and deaths of kings, Herodotus would have been listening to propaganda. We can begin by establishing the context of the propaganda. There is good reason to believe that Herodotus was receiving a narrative crafted in the relatively recent past. Cyrus, of course, did not write his own death-story, but we can be sure that his son, Cambyses, would have emphasized his father’s amazing achievements, as well as his own legitimacy. However, it is just as certain that Darius, likely a usurper from outside of the direct line of legitimate succession, would have rewritten the narrative for his own benefit, and to the detriment of Cambyses. Thus, the narrative could not be any older than the beginning of Darius’ reign, ca. 520 BCE. We know that Darius went on a propaganda spree, spreading his Bisotun text (in Old Persian, the *dipiciça-) throughout the empire. Darius also issued a new narrative of Cyrus’ death, the original now being lost to us. Most likely, it would have been an oral text, in order that it would be accessible to a large number of people. Unfortunately, this means that there was no attempt to preserve it permanently, but some portion of the narrative may have made it to Greece, and formed the core of Herodotus’ account of the death of Cyrus.

In this passage, Herodotus goes out of his way to emphasize that Darius was not, in fact, plotting to usurp the throne. Instead, the dream, which Cyrus identifies here as an infallible message from the gods, only predicts that Cyrus will die and Darius will become king. This preemptive absolution for the eventual coup can only have come from Darius’ own court (Herodotus: The Histories, 1.209‒10). After Darius’ coup, he commissioned a retelling of Achaemenid history. As his Bisotun narrative shows, he faced repeated revolts throughout his empire, and needed to establish his legitimacy so that he could maintain his rule with something other than brute force. He could not claim to be the legitimate successor of Cyrus, as Cyrus had made a great effort to publicly demonstrate his support for Cambyses, his son and designated heir. Herodotus records that Cyrus had nominated Cambyses as his successor, and Babylonian documents confirm this: Cambyses may have participated in a ritual shortly after the capture of Babylon in 539 (Nabonidus Chronicle (Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, text 7) col. 3.24‒5), and was installed as the King of Babylon during Cyrus’ reign (Peat, “Cyrus ‘King of Lands”). Rollinger argues that Darius crafted a new dynastic family tree, in which he and Cyrus shared a common ancestor, Tiespes. The most obvious display of this propaganda campaign are the three forged Old Persian inscriptions at Pasargadae attributed to Cyrus, where he claims Achaemenes as an ancestor (Schmitt, Die altpersischen Inschriften, 35‒6).

1. The Story According to Ctesias
2. Ctesias’ account is preserved only in fragments recorded by other ancient writers. Ctesias claims that, as the doctor for the Persian king Artaxerxes II, he had personal access to the king and his family members, and that he was present at the 401 BCE battle of Cunaxa, where Artaxerxes fought and defeated his brother Cyrus the Younger. The dates and length of his stay at the royal court are uncertain, as the sources are contradictory (Llewellyn-Jones and Robson, Ctesias’ History of Persia, 12‒14). Ctesias’ history ends in 398/397 BCE, and it is believed that he wrote his Persika in ca. 394. He tells us that Cyrus, while at war with the Derbices, fell from his horse and was struck by a javelin. Once he was safely in bed, he gathered his sons, appointed Cambyses as king, made Tanyoxarces master of the lands of the Bactrians, Choramnians, Parthians, and Carmanians, and declared that he would not have to pay tribute on these lands. With his last words he told them to be at peace with each other, and to honor their mother. He died two days later (F9, Photius §7‒8). Once again, this version has been heavily reworked by the author in order to give a commentary on the nature of the Persian empire, to be read by a Greek audience. But there is no reason to assume that the core of the story (Cyrus died in bed, after dividing the empire between his sons) was not from a Persian source. Instead, as we did with Herodotus, we should consider the context in which Ctesias, and later Xenophon, may have received these narratives in order to determine if they might have been pieces of propaganda. If that seems to be the case, we shall attempt to determine the sender, recipient, and message of each version.

Some scholars strongly caution using Ctesias’ Persika as a historical source, because they see it as untrustworthy or fabricated. While this approach still predominates, in recent years scholars have started to come around on Ctesias (Llewellyn-Jones and Robson, Ctesias’ History of Persia, 22‒31). We are interested in the authenticity of Ctesias’ account, not its historical accuracy; that is to say, we seek evidence that Ctesias made use of information which he received from Persian, Babylonian, or other Near Eastern sources. One argument in favor of this is that various excerpts from the Persika agree with what we know from cuneiform sources and/or archaeology. For example, Ctesias shows knowledge of the Median‒Babylonian coalition which destroyed the Assyrian empire (Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, Text 3), and his account of Darius’ rise to power has similarities with Darius’ narrative at Bisotun57—both instances where Ctesias is in closer accord with the Mesopotamian texts than is Herodotus. One might also think of the Iranian and Mesopotamian names known from cuneiform texts in Ctesias, such as Arbaces (Arbaku)58 and Parsondes (Paršandāta). A second argument concerns the possibility of Ctesias’ access to written texts at the Persian court. On two occasions Ctesias claimed to have based his narrative on “royal records,” which are called βασιλικαὶ διϕθεραὶ or βασιλικαὶ ἀναγραϕαὶ. No trace of such records have been found at any Persian administrative center. It is possible, however, that Ctesias misidentified the texts as “Persian,” when in fact they were Babylonian. The Babylonian chancery continued its chronicle tradition throughout the Persian period, and indeed into the Seleucid and Parthian ages. The composition of texts such as the Cyrus Cylinder, the Dynastic Prophecy, and the Antiochus Cylinder show that the Babylonian scribes were perfectly capable of composing narrative texts based on recorded data, in the service of the ruling dynast (Arsacids and Sasanians, 48‒60, 137‒40). In addition, the Hebrew Bible makes a few references to a Persian “book of deeds” which served to educate and entertain the royals (Stronk, Ctesias’ Persian History, 15‒21). However, even if Ctesias was unable to make use of written sources, he still would have had access to oral sources. Assuming that he did in fact spend time at the Persian royal court as a doctor, we can be sure that he would have been able to speak with the locals, even if only through a translator: what good is a doctor who cannot communicate with his patients? Ctesias cites the queen Parysatis as a source, as well as the Greek commander Clearchus; but there is evidence that he was exaggerating his own importance in the narrative, so he may not have actually spoken with these individuals (Dorati, “Ctesia Falsario?” [Ctesias the Falsifier] 37‒44, 48‒50).

However, in the Achaemenid court there would have been eunuchs, servants, bureaucrats, and all the other functionaries that remain unnamed, but nevertheless would have been priceless sources of first-hand knowledge, gossip, and folklore. This would have given him access to the accounts of past and contemporary events. With that in mind, it is reasonable to assume that Ctesias was, at least in part, reporting what he saw, read, and/or heard at Artaxerxes’ court. Although he had no specific motivation to scrupulously report the truth, he also had no clear motive to invent his narratives wholesale (Bassett, “Death of Cyrus,” 476). Another strategy was to ensure that the narrative of the battle of Cunaxa made Artaxerxes look like a heroic warrior-king. Ctesias reports that Artaxerxes, after the battle, claimed to have been the one who actually dealt Cyrus the death-blow, even though this deed actually belonged to a Persian called Mithridates, and that he silenced the men who actually killed Cyrus with lavish gifts (F20, Plutarch, Artaxerxes, 11‒13). In this version, Cyrus’ death is not radically different from that found in Herodotus. Cyrus marched against Amorges and his wife Sparethe, king and queen of the Sakae tribe. Cyrus managed to capture Amorges, but Sparethe led a coordinated counterattack and ultimately defeated Cyrus. Several Persian nobles were captured, and Amorges was freed in a prisoner exchange. Nothing further is known about this battle (F9, Photius §3). Later, while on campaign against another tribe, the Derbices, an Indian struck Cyrus with a javelin in his hip and knocked him off his horse. As Cyrus was carried from the field, Amorges, now apparently Cyrus’ vassal or ally, arrived with his Saka horsemen and led the combined Persian‒Saka army to victory.

1. The similarities between Cyrus’ birth narrative and that of the Assyrian king Sargon are striking (Drews, “Sargon, Cyrus and Mesopotamian”; Lenfant, “Ctésias et Hérodote,” especially 366‒9; and Kuhrt, “Making History”). The original tale was probably in existence by the end of the third millennium BCE, and resurfaced under Sargon II in the eighth century (Kuhrt, “Making History,” 352). The Babylonian chancery would have been well-equipped to refashion the motif for Cyrus the Great in the aftermath of his conquest of the city in 540, but the question is whether they did so. The Cyrus Cylinder does not record a narrative based on Sargon’s model, but the tale could have been preserved and spread orally. Given the frequency of the motif of the “hero abandoned as a child” across Indo-European and specifically Greek mythology (Redford, “The Literary Motif”; Lewis, “The Legend of Sargon”), we might also imagine that Ctesias created the narrative, using his own native literary models.
2. The Story According to Xenophon
3. Like Ctesias, Xenophon was also at the battle of Cunaxa, but on the other side—an Athenian serving under the Spartan mercenary commander Clearchus. After the death of Cyrus the Younger in the battle, Xenophon and the remaining Greek troops had to fight their way back to safety, an account of which became the basis for Xenophon’s Anabasis. He also wrote the Cyropaedia, a discussion of the philosophical and practical aspects of kingship, written sometime in the 360s (Tuplin, “Xenophon’s Cyropaedia,” 72). Plutarch reports that Xenophon was familiar with Ctesias’ works (Artaxerxes, 15.6). Xenophon’s account is not purely Persian propaganda; he was definitely motivated by Greek politics (Bassett, “Death of Cyrus,” 475), and the Cyropaedia especially is clearly a rhetorical project of Xenophon’s own design. This makes it even more difficult to asses the influence of Persian propaganda on the final product. According to the Cyropaedia, Cyrus, now an old man, made one last journey back to Persia. He saw a god in a dream who told him, “Make ready, Cyrus; for thou shalt soon depart to the gods” (Miller, Xenophon: Cyropaedia, 8.7.2). Cyrus then climbed to an altar on a high mountain and sacrificed to his gods. Afterwards, he gathered his nobles for one last speech.