Ancient Historians · Part 11 · Wonders · A2–B1
Ctesias: Wonders of India and Persia
Part 11 of Ancient Historians: Ctesias was a Greek doctor who lived at the court of the Persian king for seventeen years, and wrote books about Persia and India full of amazing creatures: a wild ass with one horn, the man-eating manticore, people with the heads of dogs, and people with one enormous foot. Other ancient writers said he was a liar. But where did his stories come from? Describing creatures (it has got, it can, it is covered in, it is said to), and the language of wonders and doubt, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we meet a historian whom almost everyone in the ancient world loved to read and loved to call a liar. Ctesias was a Greek doctor at the Persian court, the king’s own physician. He wrote a long history of Persia and a short book about India, which he never visited.
Unicorns, Marcos. And a monster with a man’s face, a lion’s body and a tail that shoots stings. And people with dogs’ heads who bark. Tonight we describe amazing creatures, and then we ask, like detectives, what real animals might be hiding inside the stories.
The Persian court at Susa and Babylon, about 405–398 BCE
Ctesias came from Cnidus, a Greek city famous for its doctors. Around 405 BCE he became physician to the Persian king Artaxerxes II, and he says he treated the king’s wound at the battle of Cunaxa, the same battle in which Xenophon fought on the other side. He lived at the Persian court for about seventeen years, and claimed to have read the king’s royal records.
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