Ctesias of Cnidus

Ctesias was a Greek physician who stayed at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes II Mnemon from 404 to 398/397.

He was born sometime after the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. in the city of Cnidus in Asia Minor where he was born into the family of the Asclepiads and studied medicine. He was the son of either Ctesiarchos or Ctesiochos, who was himself also probably a doctor as his father before him.

Ctesias of Cnidus was a Greek physician who lived in the last half of the fifth century and into the fourth century B.C.E. He seems to have studied, and possibly practiced medicine at Cnidus.

He served as royal physician to king Artaxerxes II of Persia until 398/397 B.C.E. at which point he returned to Greece where he composed works on the Persian Empire and India.

For seventeen years he resided at the Persian court as royal physician; and among the extraordinary privileges which were enjoyed by that favored class - the court physicians - Ctesias had the opportunity to search the royal archives, the records of the ancient kings; a privilege never accorded to any other Greek.

The works of Ctesias, which do not survive in their original form but only in fragments related by later authors, continue to be of vital importance for the study of the Near East and the western view of India before Alexander.

He stays until the Battle of Cunaxa (401 B.C.E.) where he was a doctor in the army of Artaxerxes II. At the battle he successfully treated the wound of Artaxerxes.

Ctesias must have served Artaxerxes’ interests well, because in 397 BC he was sent (via Cyprus and Cnidus) to negotiate with Sparta. He seems to have been captured by the locals in Rhodes, where he was tried for serving the interests of Persia; he was acquitted, however, and returned home to Cnidus later in the same year.

At the beginning of the fourth century BCE Ctesias of Cnidus wrote his twenty-three book History of Persia. Ctesias’ Persica, or History of Persia, is one of the most enticing yet most baffling of all literary works from Greek antiquity. Books I–VI included a history of Assyria and the Medes, and the last 10 books were a more detailed account from the death of Xerxes.
Ctesias of Cnidus