betrayed leaders of the Greeks. At this moment Ctesias, the Cnidian
Greek, was his court physician and no friend either to Cyrus or to
Spartans; he was even then in correspondence with the Athenian Conon who
would presently be made a Persian admiral and smash the Spartan fleet.
Of his history of Persia some few fragments and some epitomized extracts
relating to this time have survived. These have a value, which the mass
of his book seems not to have had; for they relate what a contemporary,
singularly well placed to learn court news, heard and saw. One gathers
that king and court had fallen away from the ideas and practice of the
first Cyrus. Artaxerxes was unwarlike, lax in religion (though he had
been duly consecrated at Pasargadae) and addicted to non-Zoroastrian
practices. Many Persians great and small were disaffected towards him
and numbers rallied to his brother; but he had some Western adventurers
in his army. Royal ladies wielded almost more power at the court than
the Great King, and quarrelled bitterly with one another.

Plutarch, who drew material for his life of Artaxerxes not only from
Ctesias, but also from authorities now lost to us, leaves us with much
the same impression of the lords of the East at the close of the fifth
century B.C. Corrupt and treacherous central rule, largely directed by
harem intrigue; an unenthusiastic body of subjects, abandoned to the
schemes of satraps; inefficient and casually collected armies in which
foreign mercenaries were almost the only genuine soldiers--such was
Persia now. It was something very unlike the vigorous rule of Cyrus and
the imperial system of the first Darius--something very like the Ottoman
Empire in the eighteenth century A.D.--something which would collapse
before the first Western leader of men who could command money of his
own making and a professional army of his own people.