A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology. By various writers. Ed. by William Smith. Illustrated by numerous engravings on wood.

898 CTESIAS.
Homeric poems in a philosophical manner. This
is all we know about Cronius, although he appears
to have been very distinguished among the later
Pythagoreans. [L. S.]
CRO'NIUS, an engraver of gems, who lived
between the times of Alexander and Augustus.
(Plin. H. N. xxxvii. 4; Visconti, Oeuv. div. ii.
p. 123.) [L. U.]
CRONUS (Kpovos), a son of Uranus and Ge,
and the youngest among the Titans. He was
married to Rhea, by whom he became the father of
Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and
Zeus. Cheiron is also called a son of Cronus.
(Hesiod. Theog. 137, 452, &c.; Apollod. i. 1. ~ 3,
&c.) At the instigation of his mother, Cronus unmanned his father for having thrown the Cyclopes,
who were likewise his children by Ge, into Tartarus. Out of the blood thus shed sprang up the
Erinnyes. When the Cyclopes were delivered
from Tartarus, the government of the world was
taken from Uranus and given to Cronus, who in
his turn lost it through Zeus, as was predicted to
him by Ge and Uranus. [ZEUS.] The Romans
identified their Saturnus with the Cronus of the
Greeks. [SATURNUS.] [L. S.]
CROTUS (Kpdovs), a son of Pan by Eupheme,
the nurse of the Muses, with whom he was brought
up, and at whose request he was placed among the
stars as Sagittarius, as he had been a skilful shooter.
(Hygin. Fab. 224; PoEit. Astr. ii. 77.) [L. S.]
CRUS, an agnomen of L. Cornelius Lentulus,
consul, B. c. 49. [LENTULus.]
CTEATUS. [MOLIONES.]
CTE'SIAS (KTrioeuas). 1. Of Cnidus in Caria,
and a son of Ctesiochus or Ctesiarchus. (Suid.
s. v. KTnrjoas; Eudocia, p. 268; Tzetz. Cil. i. 82.)
Cnidus was celebrated from early times as a seat
of medical knowledge, and Ctesias, who himself
belonged to the family of the Asclepiadae, was a
physician by profession. He was a contemporary
of Xenophon; and if Herodotus lived till B.c. 425,
or, according to some, even till B. c. 408, Ctesias
may be called a contemporary of Herodotus.
He lived for a number of years in Persia at the
court of king Artaxerxes Mnemon, as private physician to the king. (Strab. xiv. p. 656.) Diodorus
(ii. 32) states, that Ctesias was made prisoner by
the king, and that owing to his great skill in medicine, he was afterwards drawn to the court, and
was highly honoured there. This statement,
which contains nothing to suggest the time when
Ctesias was made prisoner, has been referred by
some critics to the war between Artaxerxes
and his brother, Cyrus the Younger, B. c. 401.
But, in the first place, Ctesias is already mentioned, during that war, as accompanying the king.
(Xen. Anab. i. 8. ~ 27.) Moreover, if as Diodorus,
and Tzetzes state, Ctesias remained seventeen
years at the court of Persia, and returned to his
native country in B. c. 398 (Diod. xiv. 46; comp.
Plut. Artaoc. 21), it follows, that he must have
gone to Persia long before the battle of Cunaxa,
that is, about B. c. 415. The statement, that
Ctesias entered Persia as a prisoner of war, has'
been doubted; and if we consider the favour with
which other Greek physicians, such as Democedes
and Hippocrates were treated and how they were
sought for at the court of Persia, it is not-improbable that Ctesias may have been invited to the
court; but the express statement of Diodorus, that
he was made a prisoner cannot be upset by such a

CTESIAS.
mere probability. There are two accounts respecting his return to Cnidus. It took place at the
time when Conon was in Cyprus. Ctesias himself
had simply stated, that he asked Artaxerxes and
obtained from him the permission to return. According to the other account, Conon sent a letter
to the king, in which he gave him advice as to the
means of humbling the Lacedaemonians. Conon
requested the bearer to get the letter delivered to
the king by some of the Greeks who were staying
at his court. When the letter was given for this
purpose to Ctesias, the latter inserted a passage in
which he made Conon desire the king to send
Ctesias to the west, as he would be a very useful
person there. (Plut. Artax. 21.) The latter account is not recommended by any strong internal
probability, and the simple statement of Ctesias
himself seems to be more entitled to credit. 'How
long Ctesias survived his return to Cnidus is unknown.
During his stay in Persia, Ctesias gathered all
the information that was attainable in that country, and wrote - 1. A great work on the history
of Persia (ITEpouca') with the view of giving his
countrymen a more accurate knowledge of that
empire than they possessed, and to refute the
errors current in Greece, which had arisen partly
from ignorance and partly from the national vanity
of the Greeks. The materials for his history, so
far as he did not describe events of which he had
been an eye-witness, he derived, according to the
testimony of Diodorus, from the Persian archives
(r8ip4e BpanSIAtLKat), or the official history of the
Persian empire, which was written in accordance
with a law of the country. This important work
of Ctesias, which, like that of Herodotus, was
written in the Ionic dialect, consisted of twentythree books. The first six contained the history
of the great Assyrian monarchy down to the foundation of the kingdom of Persia. It is for this
reason that Strabo (xiv. p. 656) speaks of Ctesias as
ovyypcpa'as T 'AoruvpiaicKd caI 7a HSleplKd. The
next seven books contained the history of Persia
down to the end of the reign of Xerxes, and the
remaining ten carried the history down to the time
when Ctesias left Persia, i. e. to the year B. c. 398.
(Diod. xiv. 46.) The form and style of this work
were of considerable merit, and its loss may be
regarded as one of the most serious for the history
of the East. (Dionys. Hal. De Conmp. Verb. 10;
Demetr. Phal. De Elocut. ~~ 212, 215.) All that
is now extant of it is a meagre abridgment in
Photius (Cod. 72), and a number of fragments
which are preserved in Diodorus, Athenaeus, Plutarch, and others. Of the first portion, which
contained the history of Assyria, there is no
abridgment in Photius, and all we possess of that
part is contained in the second book of Diodorus,
which seems to be taken almost entirely from Ctesias. There we find that the accounts of Ctesias,
especially in their chronology, differ considerably
from those of Berosus, who likewise derived his
information from eastern sources. These discrepancies can only be explained by the fact, that the
annals used by the two historians were written in
- different places and under different circumstances.
The chronicles used by Ctesias were written by
official persons, and those used by Berosus were
the work of priests; both therefore were written
from a different point of view, and neither was perhaps strictly true in all its details. The part of