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Routledge Classical Translations
Ctesias' History of Persia: Tales of the Orient
Towards the end of the fifth century BC Ctesias of Cnidus wrote his 23 book History of Persia . Ctesias is a remarkable he lived and worked in the Persian court and, as a doctor, tended to the world’s most powerful kings and queens. His position gave him special insight into the workings of Persian court life and access to the gossip and scandal surrounding Persian history and court politics, past and present. His History of Persia was completed at a time when the Greeks were fascinated by Persia and seems very much to cater to contemporary interest in Persian wealth and opulence, powerful Persian women, the institution of the harem, kings and queens, eunuchs and secret plots. Presented here in English translation for the first time with commentaries, Ctesias offers a fascinating insight into Persia in the fifth century BC.
- GenresHistoryIranNonfiction
253 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
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185 people want to read
About the author
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
20 books86 followersLloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University and a specialist in the histories and cultures of ancient Iran and Greece. He also works on dress and gender in antiquity and on the ancient world in popular culture, especially Hollywood cinema.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 29, 2024
پرسیکا پارهای از نوشتههای کتزیاس هست که احتمالا پزشک دربار داریوش بوده.
کتزیاس شخصیتیه که دربارهش خیلی کم میدونیم و داستان زندگیش هم از نکوهشگران یا ستایشگرانش در نسلهای بعدی به ما رسیده پس نمیشه واقعا مطمئن باشیم که جایگاهش در دربار هخامنشی چقدر بالا بوده (یا این که اصلا در این دربار بوده!)
نوشتههای کتزیاس هم کاملا به ما نرسیده. در واقع میدونیم که کتابی به نام پرسیکا داشته ولی خود کتاب رو نداریم. تنها بخشهایی از اون رو در دست داریم که مورخان بعدی به نقل از کتزیاس گفتن. تکهها پراکنده است. خیلی از جاها انسجامی که باید رو نداره. نمیشه هم با قطعیت گفت که چقدرش واقعا از کتزیاس بوده و چقدرش رو بهش نسبت دادند.
با این وجود، یکی از منابع ما برای هخامنشیانه. اسامی که کتزیاس نقل میکنه خیلی وقتها دقیقتر از هرودوت هستند. بعضی جاها هم با اسناد میانرودانی هماهنگه (مثلا دربارهی تشکیل دولت در ماد)
این کتاب، گردآوری همهی تکههای سخنان منسوب به کتزیاس هست. لولین جونز یکی از بهترین هخامنشیشناسهاست و کار خوبی رو درآورده.
ترجمهش هم خوب و قابل قبوله.
البته که به عنوان یک سند تاریخی (مثلا تمام اسناد دیگه!) باید با احتیاط باهاش برخورد بشه.
کتزیاس شخصیتیه که دربارهش خیلی کم میدونیم و داستان زندگیش هم از نکوهشگران یا ستایشگرانش در نسلهای بعدی به ما رسیده پس نمیشه واقعا مطمئن باشیم که جایگاهش در دربار هخامنشی چقدر بالا بوده (یا این که اصلا در این دربار بوده!)
نوشتههای کتزیاس هم کاملا به ما نرسیده. در واقع میدونیم که کتابی به نام پرسیکا داشته ولی خود کتاب رو نداریم. تنها بخشهایی از اون رو در دست داریم که مورخان بعدی به نقل از کتزیاس گفتن. تکهها پراکنده است. خیلی از جاها انسجامی که باید رو نداره. نمیشه هم با قطعیت گفت که چقدرش واقعا از کتزیاس بوده و چقدرش رو بهش نسبت دادند.
با این وجود، یکی از منابع ما برای هخامنشیانه. اسامی که کتزیاس نقل میکنه خیلی وقتها دقیقتر از هرودوت هستند. بعضی جاها هم با اسناد میانرودانی هماهنگه (مثلا دربارهی تشکیل دولت در ماد)
این کتاب، گردآوری همهی تکههای سخنان منسوب به کتزیاس هست. لولین جونز یکی از بهترین هخامنشیشناسهاست و کار خوبی رو درآورده.
ترجمهش هم خوب و قابل قبوله.
البته که به عنوان یک سند تاریخی (مثلا تمام اسناد دیگه!) باید با احتیاط باهاش برخورد بشه.
July 1, 2017
I've been fascinated with Ctesias since I first encountered him while working on a paper in my Thucydides grad course on the Pentacontaetia (the 50 ish years between the end of the Second Persian War and the beginning of the 2nd Peloponnnesian War). I ran into him on the subject of King Xerxes I assassination, but was fascinated by the idea of a Greek writing a Persica (history of Persia). So, I was excited when I ran into the collected fragments of Ctesias' history at my local university library.
This collection is introduced by an interesting discussion of Ctesias' place as a Greek historian. He did not have a great reputation, even in antiquity, being considered as rather more interested in wonders and court intrigues (especially involving women!) than was suitable in a Greek writer. That focus made sense, given that Ctesias, by his own evidence, spent seventeen years in Persian court, so he had first hand evidence for much of what he writes about. Llewellyn-Jones does his best to redeem Ctesias' literary value, although resorting to considering him a fiction writer as much as a historian. I, personally, think that the it is difficult to make such pronouncements considering just how little of this source survives. The introduction, however, is a good one and deserves to be read with attention as an excellent statement of the scholarly issues about Ctesias.
The fragments themselves are preserved in many different forms from Byzantine precis to virtually rewritten sections of other people's histories to even a very small amount in papyrus form. They range from a snippet of information to extensive narrative. They are interesting as a counter-weight to the other recognized sources for the period- Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon. Some of the information seems exaggerated for effect and he did have the reputation of really stressing the pathos of many of his more dramatic sense. Thus, Plutarch remarks drily about Ctesias' account of the usurper Cyrus' death that Ctesias finally did kill the man, but slowly as if by a blunt sword.
This volume is worth reading for those interested in the interaction of the Greeks with the Persians. It gives an alternative perspective on that relationship and is definitely worth consulting.
This collection is introduced by an interesting discussion of Ctesias' place as a Greek historian. He did not have a great reputation, even in antiquity, being considered as rather more interested in wonders and court intrigues (especially involving women!) than was suitable in a Greek writer. That focus made sense, given that Ctesias, by his own evidence, spent seventeen years in Persian court, so he had first hand evidence for much of what he writes about. Llewellyn-Jones does his best to redeem Ctesias' literary value, although resorting to considering him a fiction writer as much as a historian. I, personally, think that the it is difficult to make such pronouncements considering just how little of this source survives. The introduction, however, is a good one and deserves to be read with attention as an excellent statement of the scholarly issues about Ctesias.
The fragments themselves are preserved in many different forms from Byzantine precis to virtually rewritten sections of other people's histories to even a very small amount in papyrus form. They range from a snippet of information to extensive narrative. They are interesting as a counter-weight to the other recognized sources for the period- Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon. Some of the information seems exaggerated for effect and he did have the reputation of really stressing the pathos of many of his more dramatic sense. Thus, Plutarch remarks drily about Ctesias' account of the usurper Cyrus' death that Ctesias finally did kill the man, but slowly as if by a blunt sword.
This volume is worth reading for those interested in the interaction of the Greeks with the Persians. It gives an alternative perspective on that relationship and is definitely worth consulting.
July 30, 2025
I had no idea who Ctesias was until I read Landmark Herodotus and he was mentioned in some footnotes. Instantly I grew interested and came across this. Llewellyn-Jones has an excellent introduction to help you understand just how Ctesias has been viewed in antiquity and even modern day, and how he’s essential for Persian studies. I really enjoyed reading it and was happy to see the fragments pieced together as closely as the original work must’ve been!
December 20, 2025
This book delivers exactly what it promises, all the extant fragments of Ctesias, which must be understood here as meaning paraphrases and testimonia. This includes the entire, unfortunately inferior, summary of the Semiramis romance by Diodorus Siculus, which I had previously read before in Diodorus Siculus' own book and on which I shall speak soon enough. For students of Persian history, this book shall be useful for everyone gathering up sources for the Achaemenid Empire, for there are in fact things that only Ctesias wrote down.
The true value of this book, however, comes in the form of its excellent, nearly 90 page long intro - it summarizes decades of Ctesias' research and the conclusions of more recent, more nuanced Ctesias scholarship which places it in its proper space and context and reveals that Ctesias, far from being an "Orientalist" romance-writer, was not only a valuable witness to events in Artaxerxes II's court, but more importantly in my eyes is the very important argument, which is persuasively argued, that his Persica was a book written about Persia from the Persians' point of view, which is to say, based on the oral storytelling traditions of the Near East and thus modeled upon Near Eastern models - if you have read the Mesopotamian Chronicles, you know that they are not "proper history" in our historiographic sense.
This is relevant, because although the book says nothing about it, it finally made me understand the origin of the Semiramis romance and mythology, something that I have always found very mysterious because how could Shammuramat, an obscure Assyrian queen, become a figure associated with the feats of what appear to be a romance version of Ashurbanipal, and beyond? Well, with this new scholarship reaching such conclusions, I have something of an answer: Shammuramat became a figure of legend, most likely, by virtue of being the only woman recorded in ancient Mesopotamia as going into combat; the rest is likely a mixture, then, between Semitic myths of Ishtar (and her cognates like Ashtarte and specially Atargatis) and that characteristically Indo-European mechanism by which divine mythology is turned into heroic epic, as seen in the Indian Mahabharata. This explains the parentage of Semiramis as being the daughter of Atargatis, a late Ishtar-type syncretic goddess - something that demands explanation because Ishtar and her cognates have no sons or daughters (contrary to what the ignorant say about supposed "mother-son couples" in these ancient cults). Likewise, Arjuna, the supreme warrior, is the son of Indra, the warrior god, and corresponds with his mythic deeds in epic. The romance of Semiramis then, can be explained: the ravenous sleeping with handsome young man followed by burying them alive in mounds is nothing but a "mortalized", historicized version of Dumuzi's fate in multiple poems, while her conquering of foreign lands resembles narrative poems of conquest such as Inanna and Ebih.
With this in mind, I kept in mind for any possible Indo-European mythological motifs that appeared in the still pseudo-historical, legendary narrative sections of the Persica: The story of Parsondes, something almost resembling a force-feminization fetish story (read it yourself if you think I am being cheeky), covered in the Median History section of the book, immediately stood out to me as characteristically Indo-European mythology: the warrior who must dress as a woman, a figure seen in Achilles, Herakles, Arjuna, Thor, etc. This basically confirmed my suspicion that the origins of the early books of the Persica, and thus the Semiramis legends, have their origin in Indo-Iranian oral epic!
Ctesias' historical writing is also valuable, although it only survives in paraphrases here all collected for use for the historian or student of the Achaemenid Empire: if it seems like he focuses too much on eunuchs and the court intrigues of women, this is not because he was invoking Persian effeminacy, or because he, in fact, "invented Orientalism" as some scholars have claimed, but the simple reality of court intrigues in an absolutist monarchy, which is not a xenophobic fantasy but a simple reality. Ctesias actually avoids tales of the "debauched" Persian princess entirely, Parysatis here is a ruthless schemer, not a decadent sybarite.
It is for this most stimulating intro, as well as for being a great edition period of its material, even if it may not be the most electrifying in the form its remains have come down to us (though from the few bits we can read from Ctesias himself and the opinion of ancient stylists on him it certainly seems like the original was electrifying), that this book gets such a shining recommendation from me, elucidating as it is on the formation of history and "history" in the Ancient Near East in the classical era. Highly recommended.
The true value of this book, however, comes in the form of its excellent, nearly 90 page long intro - it summarizes decades of Ctesias' research and the conclusions of more recent, more nuanced Ctesias scholarship which places it in its proper space and context and reveals that Ctesias, far from being an "Orientalist" romance-writer, was not only a valuable witness to events in Artaxerxes II's court, but more importantly in my eyes is the very important argument, which is persuasively argued, that his Persica was a book written about Persia from the Persians' point of view, which is to say, based on the oral storytelling traditions of the Near East and thus modeled upon Near Eastern models - if you have read the Mesopotamian Chronicles, you know that they are not "proper history" in our historiographic sense.
This is relevant, because although the book says nothing about it, it finally made me understand the origin of the Semiramis romance and mythology, something that I have always found very mysterious because how could Shammuramat, an obscure Assyrian queen, become a figure associated with the feats of what appear to be a romance version of Ashurbanipal, and beyond? Well, with this new scholarship reaching such conclusions, I have something of an answer: Shammuramat became a figure of legend, most likely, by virtue of being the only woman recorded in ancient Mesopotamia as going into combat; the rest is likely a mixture, then, between Semitic myths of Ishtar (and her cognates like Ashtarte and specially Atargatis) and that characteristically Indo-European mechanism by which divine mythology is turned into heroic epic, as seen in the Indian Mahabharata. This explains the parentage of Semiramis as being the daughter of Atargatis, a late Ishtar-type syncretic goddess - something that demands explanation because Ishtar and her cognates have no sons or daughters (contrary to what the ignorant say about supposed "mother-son couples" in these ancient cults). Likewise, Arjuna, the supreme warrior, is the son of Indra, the warrior god, and corresponds with his mythic deeds in epic. The romance of Semiramis then, can be explained: the ravenous sleeping with handsome young man followed by burying them alive in mounds is nothing but a "mortalized", historicized version of Dumuzi's fate in multiple poems, while her conquering of foreign lands resembles narrative poems of conquest such as Inanna and Ebih.
With this in mind, I kept in mind for any possible Indo-European mythological motifs that appeared in the still pseudo-historical, legendary narrative sections of the Persica: The story of Parsondes, something almost resembling a force-feminization fetish story (read it yourself if you think I am being cheeky), covered in the Median History section of the book, immediately stood out to me as characteristically Indo-European mythology: the warrior who must dress as a woman, a figure seen in Achilles, Herakles, Arjuna, Thor, etc. This basically confirmed my suspicion that the origins of the early books of the Persica, and thus the Semiramis legends, have their origin in Indo-Iranian oral epic!
Ctesias' historical writing is also valuable, although it only survives in paraphrases here all collected for use for the historian or student of the Achaemenid Empire: if it seems like he focuses too much on eunuchs and the court intrigues of women, this is not because he was invoking Persian effeminacy, or because he, in fact, "invented Orientalism" as some scholars have claimed, but the simple reality of court intrigues in an absolutist monarchy, which is not a xenophobic fantasy but a simple reality. Ctesias actually avoids tales of the "debauched" Persian princess entirely, Parysatis here is a ruthless schemer, not a decadent sybarite.
It is for this most stimulating intro, as well as for being a great edition period of its material, even if it may not be the most electrifying in the form its remains have come down to us (though from the few bits we can read from Ctesias himself and the opinion of ancient stylists on him it certainly seems like the original was electrifying), that this book gets such a shining recommendation from me, elucidating as it is on the formation of history and "history" in the Ancient Near East in the classical era. Highly recommended.
August 28, 2013
Herodotus says that the young Persians were taught not to lie; otherwise, there were harshly punished. Our Ctesias, a Greek medical doctor from Cnidus of Asia Minor and a relative of Hippocrates, though he had spent 19 years of his life in the Persian court as a physian of the Queen Mother, Parysatis, never learned this lesson well. His most famous works, Persika and Indika, are full of lies. But people read them in the past and loved them instead of their serious drawback of being figments of an untamed imagination; writers reproduced his information widely sometimes refuting it, sometimes correcting it, sometimes basing their opinion on it but all of them knew that they were not to ignore Ctesias especially if they wanted their work to be taken seriously. We are told that Ctesias wrote beautifully- he knew how to entertain his readers- and certainly, even now, we are enchanted by his wonderful tales. Brave queens and weak kings, poison and knife, blood and conspiracies are some of the intriguing components of his work on the Persian history that have since then, created an image of the Orient as a vast land of incredible opulence and decadance.
January 19, 2017
An excellent read on an unusual ancient text!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews