Orontes I: The Great Satraps' Revolt, and the Twilight of the Achaemenid Empire

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Orontes I: The Great Satraps' Revolt, and the Twilight of the Achaemenid Empire He was a satrap who governed an empire's most vital frontier, a rebel who led the greatest internal challenge to Persian authority in a generation, and a betrayer who dissolved his own coalition for a rehabilitation that never fully arrived. Orontes I, the Bactrian-born, Hydarnid-descended governor of Armenia and supreme commander of the Great Satraps' Revolt, was one of the most consequential and most paradoxical figures of the late Achaemenid world.Born into the intersection of eastern military tradition and Persian aristocratic legitimacy, Orontes married into the Achaemenid royal house, governed Armenia for two decades, pursued the Ten Thousand through his own highlands, and manipulated the Cyprus Campaign in ways that destroyed his rival Tiribazus and then destroyed himself. The Armenian satrapy he lost in the affair's aftermath became the wound around which everything else circled: his Mysian exile, his leadership and betrayal of the western satrapal revolt, his defiance of Artaxerxes III from the citadel at Pergamon, and his final accommodation with a system that rewarded his service without satisfying his ambitions.Drawing on Greek literary sources, Athenian inscriptions, and the numismatic record, this book reconstructs one of antiquity's most revealing careers, the story of a man who built a dynasty that outlasted an empire, and never recovered the province that was its foundation. Read more