Tisaphernes

Family: Persia · Role: satrap · First appears: Alcibiades

Life events

Alcibiades placed himself under Tisaphernes after being driven from successive homes and military commanders.(Comparison of Alcibiades with Coriolanus)
- With: Alcibiades
- “Driven about from house to house in the city, and from general to general in the camp, the latter had no resort but to place himself in the hands of Tisaphernes;”
Tisaphernes betrayed Clearchus and the other commanders, sending them in chains to Artaxerxes.(Artaxerxes)
- With: Clearchus
- “Now after that Tisaphernes had circumvented and by a false oath had betrayed Clearchus and the other commanders, and, taking them, had sent them bound in chains to the king”

protégé: Alcibiades “At last he retired to Tisaphernes, the king of Persia's satrap, for his security, and immediately became the first and most influential person about him.”

with Alcibiades (Alcibiades placed himself in Tisaphernes's hands and courted his favor.) “There is, indeed, one distinction that may be drawn. Alcibiades, it may be said, was not safe among the Spartans, and had the inducements at once of fear and of hatred to lead him again to Athens; whereas Marcius could not honorably have left the Volscians, when they were behaving so well to him: he, in the command of their forces and the enjoyment of their entire confidence, was in a very different position from Alcibiades, whom the Lacedaemonians did not so much wish to adopt into their service, as to use, and then abandon. Driven about from house to house in the city, and from general to general in the camp, the latter had no resort but to place himself in the hands of Tisaphernes; unless, indeed, we are to suppose that his object in courting favor with him was to avert the entire destruction of his native city, whither he wished himself to return.”

enemies with Cyrus “Cyrus was willing that Tisaphernes might be found in blame, and be ill reported of, as being, indeed, a dishonest man, and privately at feud with himself.”
with Lysander (interaction) “Understanding that Cyrus, the king's son, was come to Sardis, he went up to talk with him, and to accuse Tisaphernes”

enemies with Agesilaus “And so to be even with Tisaphernes, he requites his perjury by a fair stratagem”

with Clearchus (interaction) “Tisaphernes had circumvented and by a false oath had betrayed Clearchus and the other commanders”
employer: Artaxerxes “But Artaxerxes gratified the Grecians in one thing in lieu of the many wherewith he plagued them, and that was by taking off Tisaphernes, their most hated and malicious enemy, whom he put to death”
enemies with Clearchus “Now after that Tisaphernes had circumvented and by a false oath had betrayed Clearchus and the other commanders”

Extracted from the original text of Plutarch's Lives. Made with Rho MD.