Bagistanes (Ancient Greek: Βαγιστάνης) was a distinguished man of ancient Babylon, who lived in the 4th century BCE.[1][2]
He was a part of the group of Achaemenid Bessus that conspired to depose the Persian king Darius III. When Alexander the Great was in pursuit of them, in 330 BCE, Bagistanes, with Antibelus, abandoned his fellow conspirators, and informed Alexander of the danger of Darius, who was shortly thereafter murdered by the conspirators.[3][4][5][6]
Some scholars posit that he may not actually have been Babylonian, and that his Babylonian ethnicity was merely inferred by later writers from his titles and social context. Some speculation comes from the fact that "Bagistanes" is not a typically Babylonian name.[4] It has been suggested he was instead a man from Bagistan (modern Bogʻiston) who was merely employed by the Babylonian empire.[7]
References
edit- ↑ Arrian, 3.21
- ↑ Curt. 5.13
- ↑ Fling, Fred Morrow (1899). Studies in European History: Greek and Roman Civilization. Ainsworth & Company. p. 55. Retrieved 2025-09-07.
- 1 2 Kuhrt, Amélie (2013). The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781136017025. Retrieved 2025-09-07.
- ↑ Rogers, Guy Maclean (2005). Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness. Random House. p. 134. ISBN 9780812972719. Retrieved 2025-09-07.
- ↑ Cheshire, Keyne (2009). Alexander the Great. Cambridge University Press. p. 94. ISBN 9780521707091. Retrieved 2025-09-07.
- ↑ Bellew, Henry Walter (1891). An Inquiry Into the Ethnography of Afghanistan: Prepared for and Presented to the 9th International Congress of Orientalists. p. 42. Retrieved 2025-09-07.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William (1870). "Bagistanes". In Smith, William (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. p. 453.