Esther and Herodotus part four

I know this particular study has been slow going, but I do intend to finish it.

We are at Esther chapter one, verse 13. Vashti/Amestris has refused to appear before the drunken king and his drunken entourage.  The king is angry. He decides to speak to his advisers, the seven (there is that number again) highest nobles and wise men in the kingdom. The king asks them to tell him what must be done to the Queen for not obeying his command, according to the law.

Notably, the wise men do not directly answer the king's actual question. Instead, pandering to the king,  one of them says, "Queen Vashti has done wrong not only against the King but also all the nobles and the people of all the provinces."  In other words, for refusing to show up and be shown off in front of a bunch of drunken men, the queen has sinned against the entire Persian empire. However, the noble does not state an actual law to that effect, probably because there isn't one. Yet.

The noble goes on to explain why Vashti has wronged the empire. It is because all the other women will hear about Vashti's conduct, follow her example, and begin to despise their husbands. The wives of the nobles (remember the ladies' banquet?) would hear about this outrageousness that very day and would also emulate the queen's conduct. "There would be no end of the disrespect and discord." Ye olde slippery slope fallacy. The authoritarian men were quaking in their boots. If the queen could defy the king, they were doomed.

If there was a law against the queen's behavior, the king's advisers would have found it. We know there wasn't, because they suggested that the king immediately draft such a law. He was to "issue a royal decree....which cannot be repealed."  Vashti was never again to enter the king's presence. Her royal position was to be given to someone else better than she. That would show all the women in the land that they had better respect their husbands. Right.

The good ol' boys present at the banquet thought the advice the king had been given was terrific. So, the king made a royal proclamation and had it sent to every province in the empire, in the appropriate language. It stated that every man should be ruler over his own household. All the men of the empire became petty kings of their own domestic castles.

Notes:

There is no reason to believe any of this ever happened, especially if this story is referring to Amestris, Xerxes' one and only official queen. There is no record of another. Even if Amestris fell out of royal favor, she was still the queen and of noble ancestry. She may have been in disfavor, but, she definitely was not killed. She was also still the mother of the royal heirs, hence a person of import. Also, according  to secular history, Amestris had at least six children. She can't have been that despised by the king. Maybe  the worst that would have happened was that she no longer got invited to the king's bed. Too bad.

Now comes an interesting piece of speculation. Amestris was the daughter of one Otanes, a commander in Xerxes army, according to Herodotus  Histories VII:61. There is also an Otanes mentioned in Histories III: 83   who does not contend for the throne on condition neither he nor his descendants was under any obligation to obey the Persian monarch. Since this was possibly the same Otanes who was the father of Amestris, it could be a reason for Vashti/ Amestris to not fear refusing to obey the king's order to appear before the nobles.