Ctesias

Ctesias, a Greek historian of Persia, was private physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, and accompanied him in the expedition to crush the revolt of his brother Cyrus, 401 B.C. His Persika was a history of Persia in twenty-three books, written in the Ionic dialect, but unhappily only a meagre fragment can be recovered in an abridgment in Photius, and in some portions preserved by Diodorus and other writers. The first six books contained the history of the Assyrian monarchy down to the foundation of the kingdom of Persia; the next seven continued the history of Persia down to the end of the reign of Xerxes; the remaining ten carried it down to 398, the year in which Ctesias left Persia. Ctesias compiled his history from oriental sources, and it is not wonderful that his statements often contradict those of Herodotus. Of his Indika also only an abridgment by Photius is extant. See Gilmore's edition of The Fragments of the Persika of Ctesias (1888).