UW Press: Ctesias’ Persica and Its Near Eastern Context

“As Matt Waters demonstrates in Ctesias’ ‘Persica’ and Its Near Eastern Context, there is a whole treasury of folk tales and legends to be found in Ctesias that resonate with stories known or partly known from earlier Near Eastern literary texts.”
—American Historical Review

The Persica is an extensive history of Assyria and Persia from around 400 BCE. It was written by the Greek historian Ctesias, who served as a doctor to the Persian king Artaxerxes II. In this volume, Matt Waters offers a fresh interdisciplinary analysis of the text. He shows in detail how Ctesias’ history, though written in a Greek literary style, was infused with two millennia of Mesopotamian and Persian motifs, legends, and traditions. Waters’ revealing study contributes significantly to knowledge of ancient historiography, Persian dynastic traditions and culture, and the influence of Near Eastern texts and oral tradition on Greek literature.

Matt Waters is a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He is the author of Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550–330 BCE.

“Brief yet illuminating account of the Persica.”
—Journal of the American Oriental Society

“The cumulative case made by Waters for the need to examine Ctesias’ work against a Near Eastern background is highly persuasive.”
—Phoenix

“A pleasure to read. Waters opens new paths in Ctesian studies, showing that the Persica is not merely the product of a Greek playing literary games, but may actually have its origins in genuine documents from the ancient Near East.”
—Jan Pieter Stronk, editor and translator of Ctesias’ Persian History, Part 1

“This welcome study examines how the Greek author Ctesias processed an ancient Near Eastern and Iranian body of thought into a Greek world of ideas.”
—Josef Wiesehöfer, Kiel University

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Also in the Series
Tragic Rites Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama Adriana E. Brook	Silenced Voices The Poetics of Speech in Ovid Bartolo A. Natoli