Achaemenids: How Much Longer Could the Dynasty Last

Assuming that the Macedonian threat is quashed either by Alexander's death at Granicus or earlier by dynastic intrigues, how much longer could the Achaemenid dynasty last? Are we talking only a few more decades at best? Or was it stable enough to last for a couple hundred more years? Butterflies are big, of course, but does anyone have a good guess-timate?
 
Assuming that the Macedonian threat is quashed either by Alexander's death at Granicus or earlier by dynastic intrigues, how much longer could the Achaemenid dynasty last? Are we talking only a few more decades at best? Or was it stable enough to last for a couple hundred more years? Butterflies are big, of course, but does anyone have a good guess-timate?
The problem is that especially the later rulers had to essentially reconquer the out-territories every time they came to power.

Darius II had to put down revolts in Lydia, Egypt as soon as he took power and he spent most of his reign doing the same everywhere else. He died on the way to put down another.

Artaxerxes II had to put down a revolt by his little brother (the Anabasis) and while he was recapturing the Greek cities in Asia Minor, Egypt broke away.

Artaxerxes III came to power after massacring his entire family and had to recapture Egypt and pacify Phoenicia and Cyprus.

Darius III himself was putting down another Egyptian revolt when Alexander invaded.

So from about 424-336 BC you had a pattern of revolts. I don't see how you can survive much longer after that even without Alexander. Even if it remains territorially integrated it's still a shaky construction.
 
The problem is that especially the later rulers had to essentially reconquer the out-territories every time they came to power.

Darius II had to put down revolts in Lydia, Egypt as soon as he took power and he spent most of his reign doing the same everywhere else. He died on the way to put down another.

Artaxerxes II had to put down a revolt by his little brother (the Anabasis) and while he was recapturing the Greek cities in Asia Minor, Egypt broke away.

Artaxerxes III came to power after massacring his entire family and had to recapture Egypt and pacify Phoenicia and Cyprus.

Darius III himself was putting down another Egyptian revolt when Alexander invaded.

So from about 424-336 BC you had a pattern of revolts. I don't see how you can survive much longer after that even without Alexander. Even if it remains territorially integrated it's still a shaky construction.

True, but AFAIK no particularly large provinces had been able to break away prior to Alexander, though there were some pretty serious revolts.

Would you care to offer an estimate of how long the Empire realistically had left? Would you see it as a spectacular implosion a la Babylon or Assyria due to some external threat, or a slow whittling-way at the edges? How many more years could something recognizable as the Persian Empire have lasted?
 
The problem is that especially the later rulers had to essentially reconquer the out-territories every time they came to power.

Darius II had to put down revolts in Lydia, Egypt as soon as he took power and he spent most of his reign doing the same everywhere else. He died on the way to put down another.

Artaxerxes II had to put down a revolt by his little brother (the Anabasis) and while he was recapturing the Greek cities in Asia Minor, Egypt broke away.

Artaxerxes III came to power after massacring his entire family and had to recapture Egypt and pacify Phoenicia and Cyprus.

Darius III himself was putting down another Egyptian revolt when Alexander invaded.

So from about 424-336 BC you had a pattern of revolts. I don't see how you can survive much longer after that even without Alexander. Even if it remains territorially integrated it's still a shaky construction.

I disagree. The fact that the rulers had to leave the comfort of their palaces to put down revolts from time to time is not an indicator of weakness...that was part of the cost of doing business if you were a Middle Eastern despot of the period. Indeed, I would argue that the record of revolts in the same period you cite indicates the relative strength of the Persian Empire. Of all the revolts, only one was even partially successful...Egypt, which was independent from 404 BC to 343 BC. And even it had been reconquered by the time Alexander came.

The vast majority of the peoples within the empire remained loyal at all times throughout the entire span of Persian rule. There were no significant enemies pressing on the borders, other than the Greeks, and the Persians had, with the exceptions of their botched invasions of Greece itself, handled the Greeks quite well in the almost 2 centuries since the Persian Wars, setting themselves up as a powerbroker between the squabbling Greek polei. The empire was economically prosperous. And the dynastic struggles which occurred between members of the Achaemenid house whenever the throne fell vacant had been pretty much a fixture in Persian society since the inception of the Empire. They certainly didn't mark the empire as some sort of crumbling institution, the way such struggles did mark Rome as such in it's final years. Indeed, for the most part, the best man usually seemed to win in the internal struggles of the Achaemenid House, where that was not usually the case with Rome, for example.

No, if Greece had remained disunited and the Macedonians had not arisen to marshal the forces of Greece against them, the Achaemenids would probably have gone on for quite some time. I can see them lasting at least until the arrival of the Parthians in Iran, and quite probably even longer than that, maybe even into the early centuries of the Christian era (assuming that such a thing occurs in a world where the Achaemenids weren't conquered by Alexander in the 4th century BC.
 
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