of the major characters in the Gore Vidal novel Creation. Atossa is included by Herodotus in his The Histories as a strong woman with considerable influence. Herodotus even goes so far as to suggest that her wanting Hellene servant-girls was a reason for her husband Darius the Great deciding to begin a campaign against Greece in 492 BC. In his non-fictional history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee imagines Atossa traveling through time, encountering different diagnoses and treatments for her breast cancer. Atossa becomes emblematic of cancer sufferers through history. Dr. Jason Fung, in his book The Cancer Code, references Atossa's inflammatory breast cancer as written about by the contemporary Greek historian Herodotus. Legacy Minor planet 810 Atossa discovered by Max Wolf, is named in her honor. The poet Matthew Arnold named his Persian cat ‘Atossa’. She is celebrated in his poem of 1882 called ‘Poor Matthias’, about the death of a pet canary. References Sources 6th-century BC women 5th-century BC women Queens of the Achaemenid Empire 6th-century BC Iranian people 5th-century BC Iranian people Remarried royal consorts Family of Darius the Great Cambyses II Teispids