How formidable was the Achaemenid empire between the accession of Artaxerxes I and the reign of Artaxerxes III, and is the traditional narrative of decline sustained by the evidence?
The later Achaemenids from Artaxerxes I to Artaxerxes III (465-338 BC): the Peace of Callias question; Persian gold as the arbiter of Greek politics from the Peloponnesian War to the King's Peace of 387/386 BC; the satraps' revolts and the loss and reconquest of Egypt (404-343 BC); court intrigue, succession and Cyrus the Younger's revolt (Cunaxa 401 BC); the reassertion under Artaxerxes III Ochus; and a critical assessment of the 'decline' thesis
A focused HSC Ancient History answer on the later Achaemenid empire from Artaxerxes I to Artaxerxes III (465 to 338 BC) - the debated Peace of Callias, Persian gold as arbiter of Greek politics, the King's Peace of 387 to 386 BC, the loss and reconquest of Egypt, Cyrus the Younger and the Ten Thousand, and a critical test of the decline thesis.
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What this dot point is asking
This slice of the Persia period covers the "middle" of the empire's story, from the accession of Artaxerxes I in 465 BC to the death of Artaxerxes III in 338 BC, the century usually cast as the long Achaemenid decline. You are asked to survey the key developments - the debated Peace of Callias, the way Persian gold arbitrated Greek politics from the Peloponnesian War to the King's Peace, the loss and reconquest of Egypt, and the court intrigues and revolts (above all Cyrus the Younger and the march of the Ten Thousand) - and then to do the historian's job on all of it: test the "decline" thesis against the evidence, distinguish the hostile Greek record from Persian reality, and reach a judgement rather than tell a story.
The answer
From Artaxerxes I to the peace with Athens - the Peace of Callias question (465-449 BC)
Artaxerxes I (reigned 465-424 BC) came to the throne after the assassination of his father Xerxes. His reign saw the last open fighting of the fifty-year Greco-Persian conflict: after Athenian-led victories, above all the double land-and-sea victory at the Eurymedon River (c. 466 BC) and a campaign in Cyprus in which the Athenian commander Cimon died (450 BC), hostilities wound down.
Tradition holds that a formal treaty, the Peace of Callias (c. 449 BC), then ended the wars. Named after its Athenian negotiator Callias son of Hipponicus, it is reported to have barred Persian forces and warships from the Aegean coast (leaving the Greek cities of Asia Minor free of Persian interference) in return for Athens keeping out of the King's territory. The problem is that the peace is genuinely contested: Thucydides, the best contemporary source, never mentions it; the fourth-century historian Theopompus claimed the treaty document was a later forgery; and it is attested mainly by later writers such as Diodorus. Whether or not a formal treaty existed, open warfare between Athens and Persia effectively ceased around 449 BC.
Persian gold and the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC)
For most of the great war between Athens and Sparta, Persia watched its two enemies wear each other down. That changed under Darius II (reigned 423-404 BC). From 412-411 BC his satraps in Asia Minor, Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, struck a series of treaties with Sparta: Persia would fund a Spartan fleet, and in return Sparta recognised the King's claim to the Greek cities of Asia Minor. This was the turning point. Athens, its treasury drained after the Sicilian catastrophe of 413 BC, could not match a navy paid for out of the King's revenues. When Darius sent his son Cyrus the Younger west as overall commander (c. 407 BC) to back the Spartan admiral Lysander wholeheartedly, the balance tipped for good. Athens surrendered in 404 BC. The war was, in a real sense, decided by Persian gold - the recurring theme of the whole period.
Court, succession and Cyrus the Younger - Cunaxa and the Ten Thousand (404-401 BC)
Achaemenid successions were rarely clean, and Darius II's death in 404 BC triggered the period's most famous crisis. His elder son took the throne as Artaxerxes II Mnemon; his younger son, Cyrus the Younger, satrap and commander in Asia Minor, refused to accept it and raised a rebellion. In 401 BC Cyrus marched east from Sardis with a Persian army and some ten thousand Greek mercenaries. At Cunaxa, near Babylon, the Greeks routed the troops facing them, but Cyrus was killed charging at his brother, and with his death the revolt collapsed.
The stranded Greek mercenaries - the Ten Thousand - then fought their way north through hostile country to the Black Sea. One of their leaders, the Athenian Xenophon, recorded the ordeal in the Anabasis, our single most vivid narrative of the period. The episode cut two ways: it advertised both the reach of Persian wealth and the striking vulnerability of the Persian heartland to a disciplined Greek force, a lesson not lost on later Greeks.
The King's Peace / Peace of Antalcidas (387/386 BC)
After 404 BC Persia turned its gold on Sparta itself. When Spartan armies began operating in Asia Minor, Artaxerxes II funded a coalition of Athens, Thebes, Corinth and Argos against her in the Corinthian War (395-387 BC); a Persian-financed fleet under the Athenian Conon destroyed Spartan sea power at Cnidus (394 BC). Then, having weakened Sparta, the King reversed his patronage once more and imposed a general settlement.
The King's Peace, or Peace of Antalcidas (387/386 BC), was brokered by the Spartan Antalcidas but dictated by Artaxerxes II. Its terms, reported by Xenophon, handed the Greek cities of Asia Minor and Cyprus back to the King, while declaring the mainland Greek cities "autonomous" - a clause that conveniently prevented any Greek power from forming a bloc strong enough to threaten Persia. It was the high-water mark of Persian influence: the Great King now arbitrated the affairs of the Greeks who had defeated his grandfather, and had recovered the Ionia lost after 479 BC, without fighting a single major battle himself.
The satraps' revolts and the loss and reconquest of Egypt (404-343 BC)
The other face of the period is genuine internal strain. Almost as soon as Darius II died, Egypt threw off Persian rule (c. 404 BC, under Amyrtaeus of Sais), and it stayed independent under native pharaohs for some six decades. Persian attempts to retake it repeatedly failed; a major expedition under Pharnabazus and the Athenian mercenary general Iphicrates broke up in 373 BC. In the west, over-mighty provincial governors rose against Artaxerxes II in the loosely coordinated Great Satraps' Revolt (c. 366-360 BC). These were real weaknesses, and they are the evidence on which the "decline" story is built.
But they should not be overstated. The satraps' revolt was poorly coordinated and ultimately collapsed, largely through the rebels' own treachery, without breaking the empire. And the loss of Egypt was, in the end, reversed.
The reassertion under Artaxerxes III Ochus (358-338 BC)
Artaxerxes III Ochus (reigned 358-338 BC) is the standing refutation of a simple decline narrative. He secured the throne by ruthlessly eliminating rival royal kin, then set about restoring central authority: he broke the independent power of western satraps and crushed a dangerous revolt of the Phoenician city of Sidon (c. 345 BC). His signal achievement was the reconquest of Egypt (c. 343 BC): after an earlier failure, and with the help of the able general Mentor of Rhodes and the eunuch Bagoas, he defeated the last native pharaoh, Nectanebo II, and returned Egypt to the empire. When Artaxerxes III was poisoned by Bagoas in 338 BC, he left a realm that was territorially reunited and militarily formidable, stretching from the Aegean to the Indus.
Assessing the "decline" thesis
The period is traditionally framed as decline, and there is real evidence for strain: violent successions, Cyrus the Younger's revolt, the six-decade loss of Egypt, the satraps' revolts. But three points cut hard against a story of terminal decay. First, the empire's reach was undiminished: for a century it dictated Greek politics by gold and diplomacy, and the King's Peace of 387/386 BC restored Persian control of Ionia. Second, its problems were reversible: Egypt was reconquered, the revolts were suppressed, and the empire stood reunited under Artaxerxes III. Third, the empire was formidable in 338 BC and fell to Alexander only a few years later (334-330 BC) in a rapid conquest that owed as much to Alexander's genius and Persian misfortune as to any long structural rot. The "decline" is, above all, a perspective problem: it is the shape our overwhelmingly Greek and hostile sources give the story, not an administrative fact of Achaemenid government.
How to read a source on this topic
The evidence for this period is overwhelmingly Greek, and that is the first thing to say about almost any source you are given. Xenophon is central: his Anabasis is a participant's account of Cunaxa and the Ten Thousand, and his Hellenica is the main narrative for the Corinthian War and the King's Peace. He is close to events and often reliable on what he saw, but he is a Spartan sympathiser who resents Persian influence, so his framing is not neutral. Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician at Artaxerxes II's court, wrote a Persica full of court gossip and is frequently fanciful; use him with heavy caution. Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) and Plutarch (Life of Artaxerxes) are much later compilers, valuable where they preserve lost sources but at several removes from events. Persian material - royal inscriptions, administrative tablets, coins (the gold daric itself) - is sparse and formulaic but is the corrective to the Greek picture.
Three habits earn marks. First, date and place the source in the tradition: is this an eyewitness Greek (Xenophon), a gossip-monger (Ctesias), a late compiler (Diodorus, Plutarch), or a scrap of Persian self-presentation? Second, separate content, reliability, usefulness and perspective: a passage may be useful for the Greek view of Persian gold while being unreliable about Persian motives. Third, when a source drives the "decline" idea, ask whether that is Persian reality or Greek literary shape - and be ready to set it against the modern revisionists.
Historians and the debate
The older reading, inherited from the Greek sources and dominant into the mid-twentieth century, treated the later Achaemenid empire as a study in decline and decadence - a court of intrigue and eunuchs, a fraying periphery, an empire ripe for Alexander. That picture has been substantially overturned. Pierre Briant (From Cyrus to Alexander, 2002) reconstructs the empire on its own administrative and documentary terms and argues that its institutions remained robust to the end; the "decline" is a Greek theme, not an Achaemenid fact. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg named the underlying fault as "Hellenocentrism", the error of seeing Persia only through hostile Greek eyes. Amelie Kuhrt (The Persian Empire, 2007) and Josef Wiesehofer (Ancient Persia, 1996) likewise stress the empire's stability, wealth and reach. Use them to qualify, not replace, the evidence of strain: the revolts and successions were real, but the empire that recovered Egypt and dictated the King's Peace was not collapsing.
Practice questions
Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.
foundation4 marksSource A: an ExamExplained reconstruction of the kind of royal declaration issued at the close of the King's Peace (in the style of the terms preserved by Xenophon): "King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in Asia should be his, and that the other Greek cities, both small and great, should be left independent. Whichever side does not accept this peace, upon them I will make war, by land and by sea, with ships and with money."
Using Source A and your own knowledge, outline what this evidence suggests about Persian power in Greek affairs by 387 BC.
Show worked solution →
1 mark: identifies that the King (Artaxerxes II) is dictating, not negotiating - the Greek cities of Asia are simply declared to be "his", restoring Persian control of Ionia lost after 479 BC.
1 mark: identifies the "autonomy" clause - the mainland Greek states are to be left independent, which in practice broke up rival power blocs and left no Greek strong enough to challenge Persia.
1 mark: identifies the threat of force "with ships and with money" - Persia backs the settlement with both its fleet and, crucially, its gold, the real instrument of its influence.
1 mark: notes the nature of the source - this is a reconstruction in the manner of the terms Xenophon reports (Hellenica), Persian royal self-presentation, so it shows how the King wished to be seen as arbiter of Greece, not a neutral record.
Marker's note: full marks require the recovery of Asian Ionia AND the point that Persia arbitrated by money and diplomacy rather than conquest; a response that only paraphrases the source caps at 2 marks.
foundation4 marksOutline the sequence of events from Cyrus the Younger's revolt to the retreat of the Ten Thousand.Show worked solution →
1 mark: on the death of Darius II (404 BC), his elder son became Artaxerxes II; the younger, Cyrus, satrap and commander in Asia Minor, raised a rebellion to seize the throne.
1 mark: Cyrus marched east from Sardis in 401 BC with a Persian army and a large force of Greek mercenaries (the Ten Thousand).
1 mark: at Cunaxa, near Babylon, in 401 BC the Greeks won their part of the field, but Cyrus was killed charging his brother, so the revolt collapsed.
1 mark: the stranded Greek mercenaries fought their way north to the Black Sea; Xenophon, one of their leaders, recorded the march in the Anabasis.
Marker's note: rewards the correct order and the key names/date (Cunaxa 401 BC, Xenophon's Anabasis); do not confuse Cyrus the Younger with Cyrus II the Great.
foundation5 marksOutline how Persia influenced the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) between Athens and Sparta.Show worked solution →
1 mark: for most of the war Persia stayed on the sidelines while Athens and Sparta exhausted each other.
1-2 marks: from 412-411 BC the satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, on behalf of Darius II, made a series of treaties with Sparta, agreeing to fund a Spartan fleet in return for recognising Persian claims to the Greek cities of Asia Minor.
1 mark: Persian gold let Sparta build and man the navy that could finally beat Athens at sea; Cyrus the Younger's later backing of the admiral Lysander was decisive.
1 mark: the war ended in 404 BC with Athens' defeat - an outcome bought substantially with Persian money, which is why Persia is often called the arbiter of the war.
Marker's note: rewards naming the satraps or the 411 BC treaties and the causal link (Persian money to a Spartan fleet), not just "Persia helped Sparta".
core6 marksExplain why the existence and terms of the Peace of Callias (c. 449 BC) are debated by historians.Show worked solution →
1 mark: sets the context - after Athenian and allied victories over Persia, above all the double victory at the Eurymedon (c. 466 BC) and the Cypriot campaign in which Cimon died (450 BC), a formal peace is said to have been struck c. 449 BC, named after its Athenian negotiator Callias son of Hipponicus.
2 marks: states the reported terms - the King agreed to keep his forces and fleet away from the Aegean coast (the Greek cities of Asia Minor left free of Persian interference), and Athens agreed not to campaign in the King's territory.
2 marks: explains the ancient doubt - Thucydides, our best contemporary source, never mentions such a treaty; the fourth-century historian Theopompus argued the document was a later forgery (partly because it was inscribed in a script not yet in use in 449 BC); the peace is attested mainly by later writers such as Diodorus.
1 mark: explains the modern division - some historians accept an informal understanding that ended open warfare, others reject a formal treaty; either way it marks the effective end of the fifty years of Greco-Persian conflict.
Marker's note: rewards naming the negotiator and at least one concrete ground for doubt (Thucydides' silence or Theopompus' forgery claim), and treating the peace as contested rather than certain.
core6 marksSource B: an ExamExplained paraphrase of the kind of judgement a Greek observer of the early fourth century BC might record about Persian policy: "The King had learned that he need not fight the Greeks himself. He had only to send gold now to one city, now to another, so that whichever grew strong was pulled down by its neighbours, and in this way, spending darics rather than blood, he recovered the cities of Asia that his fathers had lost."
Using Source B and your own knowledge, explain how it presents the nature of Persian power in Greece in this period.
Show worked solution →
1-2 marks: describes the content - the source claims the King (Artaxerxes II) controlled Greece not by armies but by subsidy, funding rival cities in turn so that no single Greek power could dominate, and thereby regaining the Asian Greek cities.
2 marks: explains the mechanism with own knowledge - this "gold, not blood" policy is borne out by the Persian funding of Sparta from 411 BC, then the switch to backing Athens, Thebes, Corinth and Argos against Sparta in the Corinthian War (395-387 BC), culminating in the King's Peace of 387/386 BC that returned Ionia to Persia.
2 marks: evaluates the source - it is an owned reconstruction of a Greek perspective, so it usefully conveys how Greeks understood (and resented) Persian influence, but it is a Greek judgement that may exaggerate Persian cunning and understate real Persian weaknesses such as the loss of Egypt.
Marker's note: top responses connect the source's "gold not blood" idea to concrete evidence (the 411 BC treaties, the Corinthian War, the King's Peace) and comment on its Greek perspective, rather than paraphrasing it.
core6 marksExplain how Artaxerxes III Ochus reasserted Persian power between 358 and 338 BC.Show worked solution →
1 mark: sets the problem inherited - by 358 BC the empire had lost Egypt (independent since c. 404 BC) and had been shaken by the revolts of western satraps (the Great Satraps' Revolt, c. 366-360 BC).
1-2 marks: describes his consolidation of the centre - Artaxerxes III secured the throne by ruthlessly eliminating rival royal kin, then broke the power of over-mighty satraps and crushed a major revolt of the Phoenician city of Sidon (c. 345 BC).
2 marks: describes the reconquest of Egypt - after an earlier failure, in c. 343 BC Artaxerxes III, aided by the general Mentor of Rhodes and the eunuch Bagoas, defeated the last native pharaoh (Nectanebo II) and returned Egypt to the empire.
1 mark: assesses the result - by his death in 338 BC (poisoned by Bagoas) the empire was reunited and militarily formidable, which is a direct argument against a simple story of terminal decline.
Marker's note: rewards the reconquest of Egypt (c. 343 BC) and at least one other act of consolidation, and the judgement that the empire was strong, not collapsing, in 338 BC.
exam15 marksTo what extent was Persian gold, rather than Greek arms, the decisive force in Greek political history between 431 and 386 BC?Show worked solution →
A strong response argues a clear "to what extent" judgement across the period, using dated evidence and named sources, not a narrative of battles.
- Thesis
- Persian money was a genuinely decisive force - it bought the fleet that ended the Peloponnesian War and dictated the terms of the King's Peace - but it worked only because the Greeks were already divided; gold shaped outcomes, it did not simply cause them.
- Argument line 1: gold decided the Peloponnesian War
- From the treaties of 411 BC the satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, and then Cyrus the Younger, subsidised the Spartan fleet; Athens, without a comparable treasury after the Sicilian disaster (413 BC), could not match a navy paid for by the King. The war ended in 404 BC substantially because of Persian darics.
- Argument line 2: gold engineered the Corinthian War and the King's Peace
- When Sparta over-reached, Artaxerxes II funded a coalition of Athens, Thebes, Corinth and Argos against her (Corinthian War, 395-387 BC); the naval victory at Cnidus (394 BC) was won by a Persian-funded fleet under Conon. The King then reversed his patronage and imposed the King's Peace (387/386 BC), recovering Ionia - arbitration by money.
- Counter-argument: arms and Greek division still mattered
- Gold only worked on a Greece already at war with itself; Spartan and Theban armies still had to win the land battles, and Persia's own military limits (its failure to hold Egypt) show money was not omnipotent.
- Historiography
- Xenophon (Hellenica, Anabasis) is the key contemporary source and openly resents this Persian leverage; modern historians such as Pierre Briant read the same policy not as decadent meddling but as effective, low-cost imperial statecraft.
- Judgement
- To a large extent Persian gold was decisive at the level of outcomes - it chose the winners of both wars - but Greek arms and Greek disunity were the conditions that made the gold effective.
Marker's note: Band 6 responses reach a weighted judgement, cite dated evidence (411 BC treaties, Cnidus 394 BC, King's Peace 387/386 BC) and at least one historian, and avoid a battle-by-battle chronicle.
exam25 marksESSAY. 'The Achaemenid empire that Alexander invaded in 334 BC was not a state in decline.' Evaluate this statement with reference to the period from Artaxerxes I to Artaxerxes III and to the range of ancient and modern interpretations.Show worked solution →
A Band 6 essay sustains a judgement on the "decline" thesis, uses dated evidence, and weaves ancient AND modern historiography. Plan plus a model paragraph.
- Thesis
- The statement is largely correct: the traditional picture of a long Achaemenid decline is a Greek-derived construction, and the reign of Artaxerxes III shows an empire reunited and formidable by 338 BC. But "not in decline" must be qualified - real structural strains (recurrent revolts, the long loss of Egypt, murderous succession) were genuine, even if they never became terminal.
- Argument line 1: the evidence for "decline"
- The later Achaemenids saw repeated crises - the assassination of Xerxes (465 BC), the disputed successions, Cyrus the Younger's revolt and Cunaxa (401 BC), Egypt's secession (c. 404 BC), and the Great Satraps' Revolt (c. 366-360 BC). Greek sources (Xenophon, Ctesias, later Plutarch's Artaxerxes) present a court of intrigue, eunuchs and weakness.
- Argument line 2: the evidence against it
- The same empire dictated Greek politics for a century by gold and diplomacy (411 BC treaties; the King's Peace of 387/386 BC restoring Ionia). Under Artaxerxes III it reconquered Egypt (c. 343 BC), crushed the Phoenician and satrapal revolts, and stood reunited in 338 BC. An empire that could still project this power was not collapsing.
- Argument line 3: the problem of the sources
- Almost all our narrative is Greek and hostile - Ctesias traded in court gossip, Xenophon resented Persian leverage - so the "decadent oriental court" is partly a Greek literary type, not a measured judgement on Achaemenid administration.
- Argument line 4: the historiography
- The old "decline and decadence" reading (reflected in earlier scholarship) has been overturned by Pierre Briant (From Cyrus to Alexander, 2002), Amelie Kuhrt, Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg (the critique of "Hellenocentrism") and Josef Wiesehofer, who reconstruct a robust, wealthy, well-administered empire and argue that its fall to Alexander was contingent, not the end-point of inevitable decay.
- Model paragraph (line 2)
- The decisive case against decline is what the empire could still do in its last generation. Egypt had broken away around 404 BC and defied four decades of Persian pressure, yet Artaxerxes III reconquered it about 343 BC, restored the satrapy, and by his death in 338 BC held a reunited realm from the Aegean to the Indus. In the same span the King had arbitrated Greece itself: the King's Peace of 387/386 BC returned the Ionian cities to Persian control on terms the Great King dictated. A state that recovers a lost province by force and simultaneously umpires the affairs of its old enemies is exercising the reach of a great power, not sliding into helplessness - which is precisely why Briant insists the "decline" is a story told by Greeks rather than a fact of Achaemenid government.
- Conclusion
- The statement is sound: the empire was strong and reunited in 338 BC, and the "decline" narrative is largely a hostile Greek and older-scholarly construct now dismantled by Briant and Sancisi-Weerdenburg. The honest qualification is that recurring revolt and succession violence were real weaknesses; Alexander exploited a formidable but strained empire, not a decayed one.
Marker's note: Band 6 answers weigh both sides, name historians across the traditions (Xenophon/Ctesias for the hostile image; Briant/Kuhrt/Sancisi-Weerdenburg for the revision), cite specific dated evidence (Cunaxa 401 BC, King's Peace 387/386 BC, reconquest of Egypt c. 343 BC), and identify the decline thesis as a contestable reading rather than a fact.