Atossa

Atossa (Old Persian: Utauθa, or Old Iranian: Hutauθa; 550–475 BC) was an Achaemenid empress. She was the daughter of Cyrus the Great, and the wife of Darius the Great.

Name
The name "Atossa" (or "Atusa") means "bestowing very richly" or "well trickling" or "well granting". Atossa is the Greek (Ἄτοσσα) transliteration of the Old Persian name Utauθa. Her name in Avestan is Hutaosā.

Life
Atossa was born in c. 550 BC. She was eldest daughter of Cyrus the Great; her mother may have been Cassandane. According to Greek sources she married her brother Cambyses II after her father's death, yet it remains problematic to determine the reliability of these accounts. According to Herodotus, Cambyses supposedly married two of his sisters, Atossa and Roxane. This would have been regarded as illegal. However, Herodotus also states that Cambyses married Otanes' daughter Phaidyme, whilst his contemporary Ctesias names Roxane as Cambyses' wife, but she is not referred to as his sister.

Accusations against Cambyses for committing incest are used as a way to vilify him: painting him as mad and vain. This is a common historiographical issue faced in many older historical texts on Persia. For example, one of the primary records of his incestuous acts is from an Egyptian text which antagonizes many of his actions, far beyond incest. However, many of the allegations within the text, such as the killing of the Apis bull, have been confirmed as false, which means that the report of Cambyses' supposed incestuous acts are also contestable.

When Darius I defeated the followers of a man claiming to be Bardiya (Smerdis), the younger brother of Cambyses II in 522 BC, he married Atossa. Atossa played an important role in the Achaemenid royal family, as she bore Darius the Great the next Achaemenid king, Xerxes I.

Atossa had great authority in the Achaemenid royal house and her marriage with Darius I is likely due to her power, influence and the fact that she was a direct descendant of Cyrus.

Herodotus records in The Histories that Atossa was troubled by a bleeding lump in her breast. A Greek slave, Democedes, excised the tumor. This is the first recorded case of mastitis, sometimes interpreted as a sign of an inflammatory breast cancer.

Xerxes I was the eldest son of Atossa and Darius. Atossa lived to see Xerxes invade Greece. Atossa's special position enabled Xerxes, who was not the eldest son of Darius, to succeed his father.

Literary references


Aeschylus included her as a central character in his tragedy The Persians. Atossa is also one of the major characters in the Gore Vidal novel Creation.

Atossa is included by Herodotus in his The Histories as a strong woman with considerable influence. Herodotus even goes so far as to suggest that her wanting Hellene servant-girls was a reason for her husband Darius the Great deciding to begin a campaign against Greece in 492 BC.

In his non-fictional history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee imagines Atossa traveling through time, encountering different diagnoses and treatments for her breast cancer. Atossa becomes emblematic of cancer sufferers through history.

Dr. Jason Fung, in his book The Cancer Code, references Atossa's inflammatory breast cancer as written about by the contemporary Greek historian Herodotus.

Legacy
Minor planet 810 Atossa discovered by Max Wolf, is named in her honor.

She is celebrated in Matthew Arnold's 1882 poem ‘Poor Matthias’, which was about the death of a pet canary.