Amestris' Revenge (I): Violence among Xerxes' Women

Occupying pride of place in Robert Rollinger's list of acts of violence perpe­trated by royal women is Herodotus' story, which occupies the closing episodes of his History of the Persian Wars (9.109-11).

A Woman's Place is in the House: Royal Women of Judah and Their Involvement in the House of David (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).

9 Sarah Melville, The Role of Naqia/Zakutu in Sargonid Politics (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1999).

10 L. Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and ‘Beyond Harem Walls: Ottoman Royal Women and the Exercise of Power', in A. Walthall (ed.), Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 81-94.

11 See especially J. Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 87-155; on the concept of amphimetric (mothers of sons set against other mothers of sons) disputes see D. Ogden, Polygamy, Prostitutes and Death: The Hellenistic Dynasties (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 1999).

Amestris and her bitter struggle with Artaynte, the rival mistress.^[735] The exciting, almost breathless, narrative runs thus:

Amestris, Xerxes' wife, gave him a long robe of well-woven colours; it was very beautiful and she had created it with her own hands.

Amestris sent for soldiers from the royal bodyguard and had Masistes' wife dreadfully mutilated: her breasts, nose, ears, and lips were cut off and thrown to the dogs; then her tongue was torn out and, in this dire state, she was sent home.

This masterful Herodotean novella is probably based on a Persian oral tradition (after all, Herodotus certainly did not provide an eyewitness account) but it must have had a historical background insofar as we know that some kind of dispute between Xerxes and his brother ended in the downfall of Masistes and his family.^[736] Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg argued that the tale was based on an indigenous Persian tradition in which Masistes tried to usurp his brother's throne, and it is certainly true that elements of Herodotus' account have a special meaning when read in a specifically Iranian context.^[737] She is clearly right, given that the story is packed with Persiocentric themes: for instance, Artaynte's desire to possess the beautiful garment made by Amestris is best interpreted when we acknowledge that it was the king's own robe which she cherished. The royal robe was a powerful symbol of legitimate Achaemenid kingship and by demanding this symbolic vestment Artaynte laid claim to sovereignty, not for herself, of course, for it was impossible in the Persian tradition for a woman to reign in her own name, but for her already powerful family (and it is possible that the name of her father, Masistes, derives from the Old Persian madista - ‘the greatest' - giving an added historical dimension to the Herodotean tale of court intrigue).^[738]

In the story, when Amestris hears of Artaynte's request she bides her time (for a year, Herodotus says) until the occasion is right for revenge. But then she acts swiftly - and with a bloody and chilling finality. Amestris is intent on securing the succession of her son Darius and she reads Artaynte's request for the robe for the treacherous act that it surely is, yet her wrath does not focus on Artaynte herself (because she is Prince Darius' wife and therefore the possible mother of a future Achaemenid heir), but on Artaynte's (unnamed) mother - Amestris' equal in dynastic terms.

Ancient Iranians would have understood the details of this grisly story well, for there was a long tradition of treating the bodies of vanquished foes with acts of demonstrative cruelty. Images of a ‘Persian peace' propagated by the Achaemenid kings on the reliefs at Persepolis belie the fact that as the

heirs of the great Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Persians readily inherited many kinds of savage punishment techniques documented in Assyrian and later neo-Babylonian chronicles, such as impaling, decapitation, burning, whip­ping, strangling, stoning, castration, blinding, cutting of a living body in two, cutting off nose, ears, lips, hands, arms, snipping out the tongue, branding, flaying, crucifixion and skinning alive.

When the city of Tela was attacked by Ashurnasirpal II, the king recorded its destruction and the violence which followed thus.

I approached the city of Tela. The city was well fortified; it was surrounded by three walls. The people put their trust in their strong walls and their large number of troops and did not come down to me (i 115). They did not submit to me. In strife and conflict I besieged (and) conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen, (and) cattle from them. I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive: from some I cut off their arms (and) hands; from others I cut off their noses, ears, (and) extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living (and) one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city, (ii 1) I burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt, (and) consumed the city. (A.0.101.1 i 113-ii 1)^[739]

In his monumental Bisitun Inscription, Darius the Great boasts of how the Median pretender Fravartish ‘was captured and brought to me. I cut off his nose, his ears, and his tongue, and I tore out one eye, and he was kept in fetters at my palace entrance, and all the people beheld him' (Darius Bisitun Inscription, Column II, § 32). The same fate is reserved for the traitor Cicantakhma the Sagartian (§ 33).

Female victims, we can be certain, did not escape lightly. The Hebrew prophecies of Amos record that in revenge for the city holding out against the Assyrians, the deported women of Samaria were speared with fishhooks through their noses and their breasts were mutilated (Amos 4:2-3); the same prophet recalls how the Ammonites cut off the breasts and ripped open the stomachs of pregnant women in the city of Gilead (Amos 1:13). The same act is recorded by Hosea (13.16):

The people of Samaria must bear their

guih...

They will fall by the sword;

their little ones will be dashed to the ground,

their pregnant women ripped open.

The image is employed by the chroniclers of 2 Kings (8.11) and, as Mordechai Cogan has demonstrated, it was used in an Assyrian poem, probably dated to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I (1114-1076 bce), in which a court poet praises the actions of the victorious king:

He slits the wombs of pregnant women

He blinds the infants

He cuts the throats of their strong ones.

Cogan notes that, ‘Out of the entire catalogue of the horrors of war, [the poet] singled out the attack upon the defenceless women and children; and this in order to impress upon all that the cruellest of punishments awaits those who sin against Assyria's god'.^[740] The military monarchs of the ancient Near East made frequent reference to the captive women they had taken as booty and to the girls put to death, tortured, or sent to Assyria as slaves.^{[741] [742]} The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel tells the story of the woman Oholah who encoun­tered a troop of marauding Assyrian soldiers: ‘They stripped her naked,' he tells us, ‘took away her sons and daughters and killed her with the sword' (Eze. 23:10). This violent subjugation to the enemy was immortalised in palace reliefs and one unparalleled scene shows an Assyrian attack on an Arab encampment; as the tents burn, women are corralled together and killed.

a woman.

The punishment Masistes' wife experienced was consistent with that doled out to other victims in the Near East; the sex of the victim did not act as an excuse for lighter chastisement. The difference in the story, however, is that the violence against Maisistes' wife was not the result of the consequences of the brutalities of war, but was perpetrated on the order of the vengeful Amestris. The imperial matriarch turns on a rival dynastic matron, and Amestris puts a halt to Masistes' family ambitions in a demonstrably emble­matic way: his wife's breasts - symbolising her motherhood and dynastic fecundity - are mutilated, cut off, and thrown to the dogs.

Since dogs were thought of as dirty scavengers and eaters of refuse and corpses,^[743] their presence at the denouement of Herodotus' story is particu­larly telling and can be compared to an episode in the Hebrew Bible where palace dogs are left to eat the corpse of the hated queen Jezebel (2 Kgs 9:36-7):

When they went out to bury her, they found nothing except her skull, her feet and the palms of her hands. They went back and told Jehu, who said, ‘This is the word of the Lord that he spoke through his servant Elijah the Tishbite: On the plot of ground at Jezreel dogs will devour Jezebel's flesh. Jezebel's body will be like dung on the ground in the plot at Jezreel, so that no one will be able to say, ‘This is Jezebel'.

The image of scavenger dogs feeding on corpses or mutilated body parts is a feature of ancient Near Eastern prayer and curses. Thus Esarhaddon pleads that ‘the valley be filled by [enemy] bodies and the dogs eat them', while Ashurbanipal hopes that ‘[enemy] corpses will be eaten by dogs'. An anti­witchcraft ritual envisages the following torment for a deceased individual: ‘May eagle and vulture prey on your corpse, may silence and shivering fall upon you, may dog and bitch tear you apart, may a dog and a bitch tear apart your flesh'. An Akkadian curse reads, ‘may a dog and a bitch tear you apart, may a dog and a bitch tear your flesh apart'. In a classic of Egyptian literature, The Tale of the Two Brothers, the wife of the elder brother is killed and then thrown to the dogs.^[744]

What makes Amestris' act specifically an act of revenge? After all, Herodotus does not employ any specific revenge terminology (Greek timoria) within his text; he has no need to, perhaps, given that the revenge pattern in the story is plain to see. Robert Nozick's theory of ‘revenge' certainly helps to explain the Herodotean narrative. Nozick suggests that revenge may be enacted to serve an injury, harm or slight although it need not be perpetrated in order to right a wrong. Revenge sets no limit to what is inflicted and is usually personal. Most importantly, it involves a particular emotive tone: pleasure is to be had in the suffering of another. Often the individual who thirsts after revenge will want to experience (to see, or to be present at) the situation in which the victim suffers.^[745]

The concept of revenge can be problematic, however, because of the way it intersects with notions of justice, retribution and punishment - terms which in themselves have connotations of impersonality, freedom from guilt and detachment on the part of the inflictor, especially when exacted on behalf of an institution or the state (and Amestris' vendetta against Masistes' wife can be said to serve the state in that it is ultimately aimed at securing the continuity of Xerxes' reign and the succession of Prince Darius). Strictly speaking, the drive for revenge stems from the receipt of an unpro­voked injury where instant retaliation is impossible, but in any act of aggres­sion it is often difficult to be certain that it is not part of a cycle of blow and counter-blow where the primal provocation has been lost and where inci­dents more serious than the immediate pretext have occurred. Here, there­fore, Amestris bides her time, waiting patiently for Xerxes' birthday feast, and throughout this period her sense of resentment simmers and boils until she judges the time is ripe for her plan to be put into action on an occasion when she knows that her request for Masistes' wife cannot be refused. The result of this lingering anticipation is a swift act of revenge, horrific in its extreme.

Amestris' revenge thereby follows Nozick's classification: the queen does not suffer a personal wrong by the actions of either Maisistes' wife or daughter, but her honour and standing at court is slighted by Artaynte's ambition. Amestris acts for herself and her revenge has no limits. The king does not intervene in the punishment of Masistes' wife, although, man to man, he attempts to persuade his brother to repudiate his spouse and thereby save his honour and divert further trouble.

But does Amestris' revenge fulfil Nozick's suggestion that the avenger wants to experience the suffering of the victim? Herodotus does not say as much, but he leaves us with enough implications to suggest that Amestris at least had the possibility of witnessing the act. She uses as her instruments of torture Xerxes' own bodyguards, who, hypothetically, would be expected to remain close to the king's person within the inner court and not be sent away from him on any kind of mission. So a location for the punishment of Maisistes' wife is suggested within the royal palace, and this is later confirmed by Herodotus, who notes that after the mutilation Masistes' wife was ‘sent home'. it is within the confines of his own house that Masistes therefore comes across the bloody spectacle of his wife's disfigurement. We are to presume therefore that Masistes' wife met her fate in the presence of her rival, Amestris.