Darius III: Reassessing the Last Achaemenid King Beyond Alexander's Shadow

Crowned around 336 BC after the sudden death of Artaxerxes III and a palace purge orchestrated by the courtier Bagoas, Darius III inherited an Achaemenid Empire stretching from Egypt to India. His rise was unexpected: a distant relative of the ruling family, he had won army admiration by defeating a Cadusian champion in single combat during Artaxerxes III's campaign. When Bagoas apparently expected a puppet, Darius forced the courtier to drink his own poison. Alexander the Great invaded in 334 BC, when Darius was likely in his forties and the Macedonian was 22. The Persians lost at the Granicus, then at Issus in 333 BC after Darius advanced from his chosen flat ground in Syria into narrow Cilician terrain that favored Alexander. At Gaugamela in 331 BC, on an open plain near Arbela in modern Iraq, the king's flight dissolved his numerically superior army; Arrian claims cowardice, while Justin and Diodorus describe a forced retreat. After Alexander burned Persepolis and pursued him through northern Iran, the usurper Bessus and other nobles stabbed Darius and left him dying by the road. Greco-Roman sources, written centuries later, cast Darius as a stereotypical oriental tyrant; scholar Pierre Briant concludes an accurate biography is impossible, since even Darius' death accounts serve as what Briant calls a long panegyric of his adversary. The article argues his conduct was largely conventional, relying on strategies that had worked before but failed against a changed world.