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The Battle of Cunaxa was fought in 401 between
Cyrus the Younger
and his elder brother Arsaces, who had inherited the Persian throne as
Artaxerxes II in 404.
The great battle of the revolt of Cyrus took place 70 km north of Babylon, at
Cunaxa on the left bank of the Euphrates. The main source is Xenophon, a Greek
soldier who participated in the fighting. Cyrus gathered an army of Greek
mercenaries, consisting of 10,400 hoplites and 2,500 light infantry and
peltasts, under the Spartan general
Clearchus, and met
Artaxerxes at Cunaxa. He also had a large force of levied troops under his
second-in-command Ariaeus. The strength of the Achaemenid army was 40,000 men.
When Cyrus learned that his elder brother, the Great King, was approaching with
his army, he drew up his army in battle array. He placed the Greek mercenaries
on the right, near the river. In addition to this they were supported on their
right by some cavalry, 1,000 strong, as was the tradition of battle order in
that day. To the Greeks, this was the place of honor. Cyrus himself with 600
body guards was in the center, to the left of the Greek mercenaries—the
place where Persian monarchs traditionally placed themselves in the order of
battle. Cyrus' Asiatic troops were on the left flank. Inversely, Artaxerxes II
placed his left on the river, with a unit of cavalry supporting it also.
Artaxerxes was in the center of his line, with 6,000 units of Persian cavalry
(which were some of the finest in the world) which was to the left of Cyrus,
his line being so much the longer. Artaxerxes line overlapped Cyrus' line quite
significantly, since he was able to field many more troops. Cyrus then
approached Clearchus, the leader of the Greeks, who was commanding the phalanx
stationed on the right, and ordered him to move into the center so as to go
after Artaxerxes. However, Clearchus, not desiring to do this—for fear of
his right flank—refused, and promised Cyrus, according to Xenophon, that
he would "take care that all would be well". Cyrus wanted to place
him in the center as the Greeks were his most capable unit, and were thereby
most able to defeat the elite Persian cavalry and in the process kill the Great
King, thereby gaining the Persian throne for Cyrus. Clearchus refused this
owing to the insecurity that the Greeks had for their right flank, which tended
to drift and was undefended, as the shields were held in the left hand. That
Clearchus did not obey this order is a sign of the lack of control that Cyrus
had over his army, as a couple of other occasions throughout this campaign
prior to the battle reveal also. Before the final attack began, Xenophon, the
main relater of the events at Cunaxa, who was probably at the time some kind of
mid-level officer, approached Cyrus to ensure that all the proper orders and
dispositions had been made. Cyrus told him that they had, and that the
sacrifices that traditionally took place before a battle promised success. The
Greeks, deployed on Cyrus's right and outnumbered, charged the left flank of
Artaxerxes' army, which broke ranks and fled before they came within arrowshot.
However, on the Persian right the fight between Artaxerxes' army and Cyrus was
far more difficult and protracted. Cyrus personally charged his brother's
bodyguard and was killed by a javelin, which sent the rebels into retreat. (The
man who threw the javelin was known as Mithridates and he would later be
executed by scaphism because he took the kill from Artaxerxes). Only the Greek
mercenaries, who had not heard of Cyrus's death and were heavily armed, stood
firm. Clearchus advanced against the much larger right wing of Artaxerxes' army
and sent it into retreat. Meanwhile, Artaxerxes' troops took the Greek
encampment and destroyed their food supplies.
Aftermath
Satrap Tissaphernes
invited the Greek generals to a feast, then had them arrested and executed.
According to the Greek soldier and writer Xenophon, the Greek heavy troops
scattered their opposition twice; only one Greek was even wounded. Only after
the battle did they hear that Cyrus himself had been killed, making their
victory irrelevant and the expedition a failure. They were in the middle of a
very large empire with no food, no employer, and no reliable friends. They
offered to make their Persian ally Ariaeus king, but he refused on the grounds
that he was not of royal blood and so would not find enough support among the
Persians to succeed. They offered their services to Tissaphernes, a leading
satrap of Artaxerxes, but he refused them, and they refused to surrender to
him. Tissaphernes was left with a problem; a large army of heavy troops, which
he could not defeat by frontal assault. He supplied them with food and, after a
long wait, led them northwards for home, meanwhile detaching Ariaeus and his
light troops from their cause. The Greek senior officers foolishly accepted the
invitation of Tissaphernes to a feast. There they were made prisoner, taken up
to the king and there decapitated. The Greeks elected new officers and set out
to march northwards to the Black Sea through Corduene and Armenia, to reach the
Greek colonies on the shore. Their eventual success, the march of the Ten
Thousand, was recorded by Xenophon in his Anabasis.
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