Battle of Cunaxa (401 BC): Cyrus the Younger's Bid for Persia

The Battle of Cunaxa was fought in 401 BC near the Euphrates, north of Babylon, between the Persian king Artaxerxes II and his younger brother Cyrus, who had marched from Asia Minor to seize the throne with an army that included more than 10,000 Greek mercenaries. The Greeks were victorious on their wing, but Cyrus was killed in a headlong charge at his brother, and his rebellion collapsed. The battle is famous above all because one of the mercenaries, Xenophon, wrote an eyewitness account of it.

Background: two royal brothers

The Persian king Darius II (ruled 423-404 BC) and his queen Parysatis had several sons. The eldest, Arsaces, was heir to the throne, but Parysatis favoured the younger Cyrus. In 408 or 407 BC Darius sent Cyrus, then still a teenager, to western Anatolia as commander of the region, with authority over its governors.

There Cyrus worked closely with the Spartan admiral Lysander, providing the money that helped Sparta defeat Athens in the Peloponnesian War. When Darius II died in 404 BC, Arsaces took the throne as Artaxerxes II. According to Xenophon and Plutarch, the satrap Tissaphernes accused Cyrus of plotting to kill his brother at the coronation; only Parysatis’s pleading saved his life, and he was sent back to Asia Minor.

Raising the army

Cyrus secretly began to gather forces. Using his ties with Sparta and the Greek world, he hired Greek mercenaries under pretexts such as wars against neighbouring peoples or rivals. Their leaders included the Spartan exile Clearchus, the Boeotian Proxenus and the Thessalian Menon. Proxenus invited his friend Xenophon, a young Athenian, to join the expedition.

In the spring of 401 BC Cyrus set out from Sardis, claiming he was marching against the Pisidians in southern Anatolia. Only gradually did the Greeks realise that their real target was the king himself. Some threatened to turn back, and Cyrus raised their pay. He paid them in darics, the Persian gold coins. The army crossed Cilicia, Syria and the Euphrates and marched down into Babylonia.

The battle

At a review shortly before the battle, Xenophon counted 10,400 Greek hoplites (heavy infantry) and about 2,500 peltasts (light infantry), along with roughly 100,000 Asian troops and 20 scythed chariots. He reports the royal army at 1,200,000 men, of whom 900,000 took part in the battle. Modern historians regard the Persian figures as wildly exaggerated.

The armies met at Cunaxa. The Greeks stood on the right wing of Cyrus’s army, next to the Euphrates. Because the king’s army was so much larger, its centre, where Artaxerxes stood, lay beyond Cyrus’s left wing. Cyrus asked Clearchus to lead the Greeks against the king’s centre, since killing or capturing the king would end the war. Clearchus, fearing that he would be outflanked if he left the river, kept his men in place.

When the Greeks advanced, the Persian troops facing them fled almost without a fight. Xenophon says that only one Greek was hit by an arrow. Meanwhile Cyrus, with about 600 horsemen, charged the king’s bodyguard of 6,000 cavalry, scattered it, and pushed through to his brother. He wounded Artaxerxes through his breastplate, but was himself struck below the eye by a javelin and killed.

The king’s personal physician, the Greek Ctesias, later wrote that he treated the king’s wound. Artaxerxes ordered that Cyrus’s head and right hand be cut off. The Asian troops of Cyrus, led by Ariaeus, fled once news of his death spread. The Greeks, returning victorious from the pursuit, found their employer dead and themselves alone in the heart of the Persian Empire.

Aftermath

Artaxerxes demanded that the Greeks lay down their arms. They refused. Weeks of tense negotiation followed, during which Tissaphernes escorted them north along the Tigris. He then invited Clearchus and four other generals to a meeting and had them seized; they were later executed.

The leaderless Greeks elected new commanders, including Xenophon, and fought their way north through the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia in winter. In early 400 BC they sighted the Black Sea from Mount Theches, where, according to Xenophon, they cried out “The sea! The sea!”, and soon afterwards reached the Greek city of Trapezus on the coast. Their retreat is described in the March of the Ten Thousand.

The sources and their problems

Almost everything known about Cunaxa comes from Greek writers. Xenophon’s Anabasis is an eyewitness account, but it was written decades later, probably in the 370s or 360s BC, and Xenophon had reasons to present himself and the Greeks favourably. In his Hellenica he even attributes an account of the expedition to a “Themistogenes of Syracuse”, which many scholars think was a pen name for Xenophon himself.

A second, independent view comes from Ctesias, who was at the Persian court and treated the king’s wound. His Persika is lost, but Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes draws heavily on it. Ctesias gives a more dramatic, court-centred account of Cyrus’s death, involving a young Persian named Mithridates and a soldier from Caria. A third tradition, in Diodorus of Sicily, probably derives from the 4th-century historian Ephorus.

These accounts differ on numbers and details, but they agree on the main points: the success of the Greek wing, Cyrus’s reckless charge and his death in the fighting. Plutarch adds that Queen Parysatis later took revenge on those who had boasted of killing her favourite son.

Key people

• Cyrus the Younger (c. 424-401 BC): son of Darius II, commander in Asia Minor and claimant to the throne.
• Artaxerxes II (ruled 404-358 BC): Cyrus’s elder brother, who went on to have one of the longest reigns of any Persian king.
• Clearchus: Spartan commander of the Greek mercenaries, later executed by the Persians.
• Tissaphernes: satrap and enemy of Cyrus, who fought at Cunaxa and later trapped the Greek generals.
• Xenophon (c. 430-354 BC): Athenian soldier and writer whose Anabasis is the main source for the campaign.

Timeline

• 408 or 407 BC: Cyrus is sent to Asia Minor as commander and supports Sparta.
• 404 BC: Darius II dies; Artaxerxes II becomes king, and Cyrus is accused of plotting against him.
• 401 BC, spring: Cyrus marches from Sardis with his army.
• 401 BC, summer: The army crosses the Euphrates at Thapsacus and enters Babylonia.
• 401 BC, late summer or early autumn: Battle of Cunaxa; Cyrus is killed.
• 401 BC, autumn: The Greek generals are seized and executed; Xenophon is elected a leader.
• 400 BC, early: The Greeks reach the Black Sea at Trapezus.

Legacy

Cunaxa had little immediate effect on Persia: Artaxerxes II reigned for more than forty more years. But the campaign changed Greek views of the empire. The ease with which the Greek infantry had beaten the troops facing them, and their safe return through hostile country, suggested that a disciplined Greek army could defeat Persia.

Writers such as the Athenian orator Isocrates used the example to argue for a Greek war against Persia. The Spartan king Agesilaus II campaigned in Asia Minor in the 390s BC, and about seventy years after Cunaxa Alexander the Great brought down the Persian Empire. Xenophon’s Anabasis became one of the most widely read works of ancient Greek prose.

Why it matters

Cunaxa was a battle won by the losing side’s best troops and lost by the death of one man. It ended Cyrus the Younger’s attempt to take the throne, kept Artaxerxes II in power, and through Xenophon’s account gave the Greek world a vivid, lasting picture of Persia’s vulnerability.