Amestris' Revenge (II): Avenging Sons and Daughters
Amestris also plays a major role in Ctesias' court history of the reign of Xerxes, but she becomes especially significant in her role as the mother of Artaxerxes I. In his reign she is discovered to be involved in imperial policy as she manoeuvres events from within the harem thanks to her close relationship with her son.
Ctesias recalls, for instance, that after Inarus of Lybia failed to free Egypt from Persian rule, the rebel leader and many Greek mercenaries who had aided him were brought to Persia as prisoners, but were granted amnesty and safety by the king and by his uncle, Megabyzus. But Amestris was embittered because another of her sons, Achaemenides, had died in battle against Inarus: ‘she was vexed because she had not had vengeance on Inarus and the Greeks'. Ctesias depicts her pleading with both Artaxerxes and Megabyzus to be granted the head of the rebel traitor but her appeals fell on deaf ears. However, says Ctesias, ‘because she kept bothering her son about it, she got her way'. It took Amestris five years to get her request granted and her wait, it seems, only served to increase her ardour for revenge. Consequently her treatment of the prisoners was bloodthirsty and severe: ‘She impaled [Inarus] on three stakes; and she beheaded as many Greeks as she was able to get hold of - fifty in all' (Ctesias, Fragment 14, § 39).Ctesias emphatically states that Amestris carried out this action in revenge for the death of her son, and employs the term timoresato (from timoria) to make this clear, since the word has connotations of a political or legal action. From a Greek perspective, when a person was killed he was thought to have suffered a wrong which therefore required timoria; it was the duty of his family to obtain it for him.[746] But this notion did not apply when the deceased was killed in battle.
Therefore Amestris' personal vendetta towards the killers of her son should be regarded as unjust, given that Achaemenides died in battle. This explains why Artarxerxes and Megabyzus take no action to revenge Achaemenes' death, since it occurred under the rules of war. It is only Amestris' five-year-long harassment campaign which resulted in revenge and the restoration of what she perceived to be family honour. Grief was a powerful catalyst for retribution.[747]Ctesias relates another revenge story in which Amestris figures prominently, although this time in a very different context.
When [princess] Amytis was ill - albeit only mildly and not seriously - Apollonides, the doctor from Cos, who was in love with her, told her that she would recover her health if she consorted with men because she had a disease of the womb. When his plan succeeded and he started sleeping with her, the woman began to waste away and he put an end to their sexual relations. So since she was dying she told her mother [Amestris] to take revenge on Apollonides. And her mother told King Artaxerxes everything: how Apollonides had been sleeping with her, how he then stopped after he had abused her and how her daughter had asked her to take revenge on him. And he let her mother deal with the situation herself. And she took Apollonides, bound him and punished him for two months. She then buried him alive and at this time Amytis died too. (Fragment 14, § 44)
Amestris' daughter, Princess Amytis, tricked into a sexual relationship by Apollonides of Cos, begins to waste away with illness and, as she lays on her deathbed, she tells her mother to take revenge - amunesthai - on the doctor. This word has connotations of defending honour (personal honour or family honour) and of retaliation. It is this which drives Amestris to imprison, torture (over a two-month period) and execute the doctor; his burial alive may have been intended as a sacrifice to her dead daughter (we should remember, after all, that according to Herodotus (7.114), the aged Amestris was responsible for the sacrifice of fourteen children to the gods of the underworld before her own death).
The punishment of burial alive is encountered several times in the sources. It is possible that Apollonides suffered a particularly hideous end known as the ‘Trough' or the ‘Boats':
Taking two troughs [or boats] that are made to fit together, they laid [the victim] on his back inside one of them. Then they fit the other on top so the man's head, hands, and feet stuck out while it covered the rest of his body. They gave him food, pricking his eyes to force him when he resisted. They
also poured milk and honey into his mouth and they poured it over his face. Then they turned his eyes continually to the sun and a multitude of flies settled down, covering his face. Meanwhile, inside, the man did what it is necessary for people to do when they have drunk and eaten. Worms and maggots boiled up from the decay and putrefaction of his excrement, and these ate away his body, boring into the interior. (Plut. Art. 16.2-4)
This bizarre, lingering, death, taking over two weeks to complete, can be explained through the ancient Zoroastrian notion of purity and impurity - in this case, the contrast between the purity of the milk and the revulsion of the excrement, a substance which was, according to one Zoroastrian text, a product of demons: ‘The more one's body is inhabited by demons, the more filth there is.' Therefore, as Bruce Lincoln perceptively interprets the torture, ‘[the victim's] reeking, vermin-laden excrement thus bore graphic witness to the corruption (moral and physical) of his body and the demons resident therein, chief of them all, the Lie. What was squeezed from his body... thus provided the means to convict him on all charges.'[748]
More on the topic Amestris' Revenge (II): Avenging Sons and Daughters:
- Amestris' Revenge (I): Violence among Xerxes' Women
- Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p., 2020