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Ctesias' Persica and Its Near Eastern Context by Matt Waters

2017; Classical Association of Canada; Volume: 71; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/phx.2017.0014

1929-4883

Thomas Harrison,

Ancient Near East History

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 405 inscription found at the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoios (IG VII 4137) which concerns a consultation of the oracle of Trophonios in Lebadea by Kalliklidas, a Lokrian from Opous, on behalf of the Boiotian koinon. While the subject of the consultation is the sanctuary of Zeus Trophonios and Apollo Ptoios, the koinon uses the oracle to attempt to resolve its own internal problems. This a very useful volume for everyone interested on Boiotian history, epigraphy, and archeology. Â Ecole Franc Ëaise d'AthÁ enes Yannis Kalliontzis Ctesias' PERSICA and Its Near Eastern Context. By Matt Waters. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 2017. Pp. xiii, 159. Ctesias of Cnidus has struggled in reputational terms. Having confused the order of the battles of the Greco-Persian wars, and included an (apparently) eye-witness account of a hybrid animal called a Martichora (part-man, part-lion, with poisonous stingers emitted from its tail) gifted to the Persian king by the Indians, he has frequently been condemned as a mere fabulist. Even his claim to have served as a doctor in the court of the Persian king (Artaxerxes ii) has been doubted. Through the work of Dominique Lenfant, Jan Stronk, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Christopher Tuplin, and others, the last fifteen years have seen a significant reappraisal, however.1 In particular, the attempt has increasingly been made to see Ctesias in his own terms: not as a historian but as something more closely approximating a writer of historical fiction, anticipating the development of the ancient novel. Matt Waters’s new book is a significant addition to that recent literature. Waters sets out in particular to show how Ctesias adapted Near Eastern material for his Greek readership. He does this through a set of case studies: the representation of the numerous eunuchs in Ctesias’ work (Chapter One); his characterization of the semi-mythical Semiramis (Chapter Two); his account of the rise of Cyrus (compared with that of Herodotus; Chapter Three); and, finally, a collection of short narratives such as the story of the warrior queen Zarinaia (Chapter Four, “The Inverted Hero’s Many Faces”). Waters takes a judicious approach to the problem of identifying the Persica from the very contrasting fragments of Photius and Diodorus, among others. He is sensibly alert, for example, to the possibility that the overwhelming presence of eunuchs (and their characterization as double-dealers) in Photian fragments is in part the result of this author’s Byzantine court context. He claims to give emphasis to Ctesias’ literary presentation, yet he is also frequently drawn into narrower historical questions. Not the least of these is the heated debate on the historicity of “literal eunuchs” in the Achaemenid, or more broadly the ancient Near Eastern, world. Does, for example, the presence of both bearded and unbearded figures in Assyrian art signify the presence 1 See, for example, D. Lenfant, Ctésias de Cnide. La Perse. L’Inde. Autres fragments (Paris 2004); C. J. Tuplin, “Doctoring the Persians: Ctesias of Cnidus, Physician and Historian,” Klio 86 (2006) 305–347; L. Llewellyn-Jones and J. Robson (eds.), Ctesias’ History of Persia: Tales of the Orient (London 2010); J. P. Stronk, Ctesias’ Persian History 1: Introduction, Text, and Translation (Düsseldorf 2010). 406 PHOENIX of eunuchs alongside other members of court, or were the beards in fact false beards, markers of status rather than of masculinity (27)? As for the main purpose of the book, the cumulative case made by Waters for the need to examine Ctesias’ work against a Near Eastern background is highly persuasive. His paraphrases of the Ctesian narratives are regularly interspersed with Near Eastern antecedents and parallels, and it is in these parallels that the heart of the book can be found. (It is unclear, however, why biblical parallels, such as the presence of eunuchs in the Book of Esther, are excluded from discussion [7].) Waters is arguably less successful, however, in developing his interpretations of such Near Eastern parallels. This is, in large part perhaps, a matter of presentation. The retellings of Ctesian narratives are if anything even more convoluted than the twists, turns, and tangles of the fragmentary originals (this is perhaps especially so in the more...