In 401 B.C., the Battle of Cunaxa resolved a civil war in the Achaemenid Persian Empire. While the battle had all the things military history buffs enjoy—formations, miscommunications, different events in different wings, all that jazz—the singular event that resolved it was like something out of a fairy tale. In the midst of a battle involving potentially hundreds of thousands, the reigning King of Persia and the usurper who sought his throne came to personal blows. The event is well-attested enough for it to be reasonable to believe that, at a minimum, the two kings’ personal guards collided, fought it out, and one of the kings was killed, thereby losing his side the entire battle.
Let’s see how you can use this high drama in your RPG campaign, turning a giant battle into an opportunity to become king-killers! This is part of a long-running series on PCs on the Battlefield, showing battlefield moments you can fictionalize for your campaign, where a few PCs can make all the difference.
This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Arthur Brown. Thanks, Arthur—you rock!
We have multiple ancient sources for how the Battle of Cunaxa went down, and some of these sources were themselves pulling from sources now lost to us. One, the Persica of Ctesias of Cnidus, was written by the winning king’s doctor, who claimed to have been an eyewitness to this fight. The Persica is now lost, but multiple summaries and glosses have survived.
The two kings were King Artaxerxes II and his younger brother, the usurper Cyrus the Younger. Artaxerxes II had the longest reign of any ruler of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. We don’t necessarily get much of a characterization of his personality. Of his younger brother Cyrus (called Cyrus the Younger to distinguish him from Cyrus the Great, who ruled 150 years earlier), we know that he was brave, generous, reckless, and power-hungry. Of the two of them, their mother preferred Cyrus.
The armies of Artaxerxes and Cyrus met in what is today Iraq, just east of the Euphrates River. Cyrus was marching on the empire’s most important city, Babylon, from his holdings in Anatolia (modern Turkey). He hoped to move fast enough that Artaxerxes wouldn’t have time to summon the full might of the empire. The ploy worked in that Artaxerxes probably didn’t have the entire imperial army with him at Cunaxa, but what he had was more than enough.
Both armies lined up anchoring one flank to the Euphrates River, but Artaxerxes had so many more troops that his line extended something like twice as far from the river. Both commanders placed themselves (surrounded by generals and bodyguards) at the center of their formation. Cyrus’s best troops, thirteen thousand Greek heavy infantry mercenaries, were supposed to make for Artaxerxes himself, an attack that required them to advance at an angle. But through some misunderstanding or miscommunication, the Greeks attacked directly forward. They drove the part of the royal army they targeted from the field and pursued to inflict further casualties—but in so doing left the battlefield behind, leaving Cyrus without his best troops. As the two lines moved to engage one another, it seems no one attacked the royal forces directly in front of Artaxerxes. It’s possible Cyrus’s general over there, Ariaios, didn’t want to shed royal blood.
So, amid the chaos of battle as men in their thousands screamed and died, Cyrus personally charged Artaxerxes, dragging his 600 personal cavalry, his bodyguards, and his highest nobles along with him. They cut their way through Artaxerxes’s rank-and-file troops—or maybe those troops simply made room, equally unwilling to risk shedding the blood of nobles and royals. Thus did Cyrus and his entourage close with Artaxerxes and his.
What happened next is a bit muddy. The sources don’t align on the details. Nor should we expect them to, human memory being fairly garbage, even without introducing a game of telephone between eyewitnesses and chroniclers. One possible reconstruction has Cyrus’s 600 personal cavalry chase after the troops they routed, leaving Cyrus alone with his so-called Table Companions to face Artaxerxes’s’ same. Cyrus struck Artaxerxes and pierced his breastplate. The wound was grievous but not fatal. Someone—perhaps Artaxerxes, perhaps not—then struck Cyrus in the head, and the usurper fell from his horse, dead. When Cyrus’s closest friend, Artapas, saw the usurper’s corpse, he leapt from his saddle and threw himself over him. Then the wounded Artaxerxes ordered one of his victorious Table Companions to slay Artapas right atop Cyrus’s corpse, using a ceremonial dagger in the method practiced in an animal sacrifice. Then Artaxerxes had Cyrus’s head and hands removed as a trophy.
But there’s another version of the story worth mentioning. Remember the lost Persica of Ctesias of Cnidus, Artaxerxes’s doctor? We have several glosses and references to it in other sources, and the one in Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes is totally different from the others. This version of Ctesias claims Cyrus wounded Artaxerxes, then wheeled his horse about to flee through the thick of battle, perhaps believing he’d slain his brother and won the day. Cyrus’s crown fell from his brow and someone, ignorant of his royal status, hit him in the head. Cyrus fell from his horse, then wandered dazed and uncomprehending through the battlefield. Eventually, some of Artaxerxes’s troops identified from Cyrus’s clothes that he was their enemy (though not who he was) and killed him. More time passed until an official who knew Cyrus’s face finally spotted the body. He ran to tell Artaxerxes, who was too badly wounded to go see for himself, but sent a detachment to verify the report.
Artaxerxes would go on to reign for 43 more years, many of them tumultuous. Hesitant General Ariaios, who declined to send his troops to attack Artaxerxes’s force directly, was rewarded for his caution, as Artaxerxes pardoned him for backing the usurper. And remember the 13,000 Greek mercenaries who didn’t get the message they were supposed to attack Artaxerxes, but chased their opponents clear off the battlefield? They suddenly found themselves deep in the empire of a man they’d sought to overthrow. Their long and desperate march back to the sea will be, I suspect, the subject of another post.
At your table, a fictional battle based on the Battle of Cunaxa puts your party in the heart of the action! Place them among the bodyguards of the leader of one side. Then have their leader spot the enemy leader and order her entire command apparatus to charge the enemy leader alongside her!
In the combat encounter, handwave most of the people involved in this fight. The rest of the bodyguards and generals on the party’s side and most of the bodyguards and generals on the enemy side are fighting each other, keeping one another occupied so they don’t need stats. Instead, they almost become terrain, hemming in the party and tightly constraining the space they’ll fight in.
The NPCs who will participate in the combat encounter are the enemy commander, enough of his generals and bodyguards to make the fight fun, and the party’s commander. In most RPGs, having several NPCs fight alongside the party can be a slog, but one NPC usually doesn’t slow things down too much. If it’s a big-deal NPC like a queen or a commander, it’s worth the trouble. Have the two commanders shout really personal and nasty trash talk at one another throughout the combat.
When the party slays the enemy commander, word of this calamity ripples outwards through the enemy army. Unwilling to die for a dead liege, soldiers throw down their shields and flee. The PCs have carried the day!
Released under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. Credit: Bruce Allardice.
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Sing and fight magical folk ballads in 1813 England and Scotland! This free early-access edition has everything you need to play a Ballad Hunters one-shot about the traditional song Barbara Allen.
The game has:
– Investigative adventures centered around the lyrics of traditional British ballads
– Simple, story-driven rules inspired by the GUMSHOE engine
– A historical setting that is grim but hopeful
– Magic where characters make ballad verses come to life
Ballad Hunters is the sequel to Shanty Hunters, winner of a 2022 Ennie Award (Judge’s Choice) and nominee at the Indie Groundbreaker Awards for Most Innovative and Game of the Year.
You can download the free early-access version of the game from DriveThruRPG or Google Drive.
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Source: All the different sources in this post are helpfully assembled in The Landmark Xenophon’s Anabasis, edited by Shane Brennan and David Thomas. I unreservedly recommend the entire Landmark series—it’s outstanding.