FOUR CYRUS THE GREAT IN HISTORY AND LEGEND

While there were many Great Kings during the period of the Achaemenid dynasty, Cyrus II, the founder of the empire, was the one who left the most indelible mark on the way in which the empire subsequently developed. However, while we know a great deal about its achievements, we know surprisingly little about its founder. In seeking to reach an understanding of Cyrus, history and legend come together and at times become virtually inextricable. Another complication is that much of what is known about him actually comes not from Persian sources but from others, most especially from the Greeks. Until the conquests by Alexander the Great, the Persians were the great foes of the Greeks and, largely because they were so different, the Greeks were in many ways fascinated by them and eventually found in them much that they respected and even admired.

What we know of Cyrus from Persian sources is very limited and comes almost entirely from cuneiform inscriptions on rocks and pillars. An inscription on a pillar of the palace at Pasargadae merely states cryptically, ‘I am Cyrus the King, an Achaemenian.’ Significantly, this inscription appears in Persian, Elamite and Babylonian.

The Cyrus Cylinder, which came from Babylon, contains an account of the way in which Cyrus entered the great city in triumph and allegedly was welcomed as a conqueror by its people. Most of the cuneiform inscriptions actually date from the reign of Darius and his successors.

Cuneiform inscription on the royal palace of Cyrus the Great.

The most comprehensive and significant source of information about Cyrus is the Greek historian Herodotus, considered by Cicero to have been the father of history. Herodotus (c. 484–c. 424 BC) was born about half a century after the death of Cyrus and by the time he was writing, the reign was already history, albeit fairly recent. Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus in Ionia on the eastern coast of the Aegean and in view of this it is to be expected that he had a special interest in the great eastern empire into which the Ionian Greeks had by then been incorporated. However, partly on account of his obvious exaggeration of the numbers involved in battles, and the improbable tales he often told, others have seen Herodotus less as a historian than as a spinner of yarns. Longinus thought of him as being in the tradition of Homer and used the word Homerikotatos – almost Homeric – to describe his work. It seems evident that the history written by Herodotus was inextricably bound up with tales and legends.

In his great work the Histories, Herodotus wrote widely of the history of the world as known to the Greeks. Book One is devoted almost entirely to the Persians and to the Graeco-Persian Wars. As Herodotus was a Greek writing about these conflicts, one would expect considerable bias in favour of his own people, but that is by no means the case. Book One begins as follows:

Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds – some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought with one another.1

From the outset the approach is even-handed and the deeds and achievements of the ‘barbarians’ are frequently a source of admiration to the writer. The Persian view of history, and particularly the causes of the conflict with the Greeks, is given full weight.

Book One deals most particularly with the reign of Cyrus. Cyrus was said to be half Mede, since his father was Cambyses, king of Anshan, and his mother was Mandane, the daughter of Astyages, king of the Medes. As a result of a dream foretelling the triumph of the Persians, Astyages ordered that the child be put to death, but this was not carried out and he was secretly taken to the family of a herdsman in the countryside, where he was brought up. The truth of what had taken place was later discovered and Astyages allowed the young Cyrus to return to Cambyses in Anshan. When he succeeded his father, Cyrus turned on his Mede overlords and defeated them in the great battle of Pasargadae. Cyrus followed the remains of the Mede army back to their homeland, which the Persians then occupied. Thus began the foundation of the Persian Empire, which soon extended across the Middle East. Other later writers, such as the philosopher-historian Nicolaus of Damascus, a friend of Augustus, claimed that Cyrus was actually of very humble birth and that it was through his own innate qualities that he rose to importance in the court of Astyages. However, the dream predicting the victory of the Persians was also mentioned in Nicolaus’ work. These legendary origins of the Great King are remarkably similar to those of other leaders, such as Moses.

The Cyrus Cylinder, citing a justification of the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus.

It is from Herodotus that we get the picture of Cyrus being different from so many other great conquerors. There are many stories of his benevolence and of his kindness to the conquered peoples. Following the defeat of the Medes he spared Astyages and allowed him to live out his old age in peace. Following the defeat of the Lydians, their king, Croesus, was captured and sentenced to be burned to death on a funeral pyre. A last-minute change of heart by Cyrus is said to have saved the Lydian monarch from the flames.2 Croesus subsequently became a member of the court of Cyrus and was present in the last battle fought by the great emperor. This was in Central Asia, east of the Caspian and near to what Herodotus called the Araxes river, where Cyrus was fighting against the Massagetae and their fierce warrior queen, Tomyris.³ Tomyris advised Cyrus to return to his own lands, but Cyrus ignored her advice as he was still bent on expanding his empire northwards and deeper into the old Aryan lands. In a fierce battle near the Oxus river, Cyrus was killed. One has to conclude from Herodotus that a dominant characteristic of Cyrus was ambition, and it was this that eventually brought about his downfall. This was a version of the Greek hybris (arrogance), which for the Greeks was considered an inevitable path to catastrophe. This was all seen as being part of a divine plan to teach man humility. A later Latin verse talks of fata (fate), in finally ending the life of the conqueror of both the Medes and ‘proud Babylon’.⁴

Despite the incorporation of stories and legends, the principal aim of Herodotus was to write history. Aeschylus (525–456 BC), on the other hand, was an Athenian playwright whose aim was to dramatize historical subjects.⁵ As with Herodotus, his empathy with the Persians is very evident. His play The Persians centres on the great Persian defeat in the sea battle of Salamis that was crucial to the survival of the Greeks as a free and independent people. The Greek conflict with Persia was presented as being one of liberty versus despotism, yet the merits of the foe were always fully recognized. The Persians were seen in so many ways as being a noble people who behaved in a loyal and disciplined way, even in defeat. Of course, this battle took place half a century after the death of Cyrus, but the role of the Great King is recognized in a speech by Darius lamenting the Persian defeat at Salamis. In his lament for what had happened, Darius recounts the way in which the Persian Empire had arisen with the approbation of Zeus. Interestingly, the Greek god was used in this play, as the Zoroastrian god Ahuramazda, even if known to Aeschylus, would have meant little to a Greek audience. Zeus had given his authority for the establishment of a great empire, ‘One man to wield his rod’s authority over all Asia’, beginning with Medus. In the succession of rulers:

Third was Cyrus, fortunate, whose rule

Brought peace to all: the Lydian people

And the Phrygian he acquired,

And marched his might against Ionia:

No god resented him, for he was wise.6

Throughout history, it has been very unusual for an enemy to be presented in drama in so favourable a light, and it clearly demonstrates the respect the Greeks had for the Persians and especially for Cyrus himself.

The body of Cyrus was brought back to Parsa and buried at Pasargadae, the site of the great battle in which the Medes had been defeated. Later visitors to the site were moved by the lonely tomb of the great conqueror. Plutarch, in his biography of Alexander the Great, said how two centuries after the death of Cyrus, Alexander was moved (empathe) by the epitaph, which read: ‘O man, whoever you are and from wherever you come . . . I am Cyrus founder of the Persian Empire. Begrudge me not, therefore, this little earth which covers my body.’ Later visitors were equally impressed. ‘The very venerable appearance of this ruin instantly awed me’, wrote the Orientalist Claudius James Rich, who visited the tomb in the early nineteenth century, ‘and I began to think that this in reality must be the tomb of the best, the most illustrious, and the most interesting of Oriental Sovereigns.’7

The Greek physician Ctesias spent some time at the royal court of Persia and became fluent in Persian. His story of Cyrus differs in many ways from that of Herodotus, including the assertion that there was no blood relationship between Cyrus and the royal house of the Medes, although after their defeat he had married the daughter of Astyages. Others have seen this as being an important contributing factor in the close relationship between the Persians and the Medes, which was one of the justifications for the Persian acquisition of empire. Ctesias also presents Cyrus as being less benign to his foes and asserts that he had actually connived in the death of Astyages.

In the middle of the fourth century BC, Xenophon wrote Cyropaedia, or The Education of Cyrus, a work that was later much commended by Cicero. Xenophon appears to have paid little attention to the historical record and to have concentrated on the positive aspects of Cyrus as a ruler. He saw Cyrus as being an example of the ideal prince and emphasized the qualities that were necessary to have made him so. Fundamentally, Cyrus was presented as having been a wise and humane ruler. He had a nobility and possessed a profound political philosophy. Xenophon’s final verdict was that Cyrus had ‘eclipsed all other monarchs, either before him or since’. In addition to this, Xenophon believed that Cyrus did not die violently but died as serenely as he had lived, ‘with noble words of counsel on his lips’. Arthur Young considered this work to have been not so much history as ‘a romance woven around an historical figure’. The Education of Cyrus, according to Young, ‘is an extravagant tribute to a life the nobility of which has left many echoes in both Xenophon’s time and subsequent eras’.⁸ In many ways, Cyrus can be seen as having been the first example of the ideal ruler, an idea which later political thinkers were to develop, such as Machiavelli in The Prince.

As has been observed, another important example of the benevolence of Cyrus was in his treatment of the Jews following his conquest of Babylon. The Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar had conquered Palestine and taken the captive Jews back to Babylon as slaves. This Babylonian Captivity was subsequently considered to have been one of the darkest periods in the whole of Jewish history. However, following the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, the Jews were set free and allowed to return to their homeland. In the Book of Isaiah, the credit for this is given to Cyrus, who appears as a wise and benevolent ruler. Most significantly, in Isaiah, the Lord in His assertion on His supreme power gives Cyrus a place of honour among those who work for Him.

He [Cyrus] is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure; even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the Temple, Thy foundations shall be laid.

Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden. (Isaiah 44:28–45:1)

Furthermore, and even more astonishing, according to Isaiah the Lord not only endorses the benevolence of Cyrus, but appears to express approval and support for his conquests. The Lord is holding Cyrus’s right hand in order that he may ‘subdue nations before him’. In the next verses of Isaiah, the support of the Lord for the Persian king appears to be absolute. The Lord says that in subduing the nations:

I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut;

I will go before thee and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. (Isaiah 45:1–3)

In the Book of Ezra, there is more on the accomplishments of Cyrus and his close relationship to the Lord of Israel. Cyrus himself acknowledges that his great conquests are the work of the Lord:

Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. (Ezra 1:2)

Ezra goes on to describe how Cyrus had given back the valuable ornaments that Nebuchadnezzar had stolen from the Temple. When the Temple was being rebuilt, the ‘adversaries’ of Judah attempted to frustrate the rebuilding and, although the rebuilding was slowed down, it went on ‘for the Lord God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us’. According to Ezra 6, Cyrus took a special interest in the building of the temple, ensuring that it was built on solid foundations and its walls were high, and that the gold and silver vessels that had been stolen by Nebuchadnezzar be returned to their proper place.

Everything that is said about Cyrus in both Isaiah and Ezra is favourable. Besides his release of the captives and the rebuilding of the temple, the fact of his great conquests and his position as the king of ‘all the kingdoms of the earth’ is fully endorsed. It was an endorsement from the Lord God of Israel, who had been supporting him in all these things.

In Roman and post-Roman times, the adulation of Cyrus continued. Flavius Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities written in the first century AD asserted that Cyrus considered it his heaven-sent destiny to return the Jews to their homeland and to rebuild the Temple. To this end the necessary funds were provided. St Jerome in his commentary on Isaiah notes the reverence felt by the Jews for Cyrus. He was considered to be the one chosen by God to do His will. The rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem was begun during the reign of Cyrus but not finished until the reign of his successor, Darius. In the eleventh century, the monk Herva de Bourg-Dieu called Cyrus a ‘pastor Dei’ (shepherd of God) for all the good he had done to the Jewish people. A sixteenth-century edition of the Jewish Antiquities includes a magnificent miniature by the painter Jehan Foucquet entitled The Clemency of Cyrus. The Persian king is seated on his throne in some magnificence, receiving the petitions of the leaders of the Jewish people.

However, Josephus accepted that Cyrus died in the war with the Massagetae and was beheaded in front of their fierce queen Tomyris. Later writers emphasized the fate of Cyrus as being a lesson in the folly of ambition. Cyrus was attempting to extend his kingdom too far into areas inhabited by people whom he found it difficult or impossible to defeat. The historian Marcellinus writing in the fourth century AD also stresses this. Marcellinus was mainly interested in writing a history of the Roman Empire, but he looked back to the Persian Empire as being the forerunner of Rome. He expressed the opinion that what had brought down Cyrus was similar to what centuries later brought down Rome. Both St Augustine and St Ambrose were also deeply troubled by the fall of Rome and the implications of this for the destruction of the Christian world. To them, the fall of Rome was the fall of civilization and the coming of a time of chaos and destruction. In their attempts to understand history, both looked back to Cyrus, less as a model than as an example of that overweening ambition which they considered to be at the root of the fall of empires. Many of the subsequent Christian and pagan writers were most concerned with the tragedy of the fall of Cyrus and with the reasons for this. Boethius, in the early sixth century, wrote of the goddess of Fortune and the wheel on which human affairs turned. Dante puts Cyrus in Purgatory – mainly, it seems, because of the overweening ambition that had led him to disaster against Tomyris and the Massagetae.

It can be seen from all this that the medieval Christian writers were most inclined to use the story of the death of Cyrus to illustrate the premise that pride goes before a fall. The fate of Cyrus was nothing but the judgement of God on him for his ambition. There is very little in these writers about the virtues of the Persian king who had been extolled to such an extent by the ancient writers, notably Herodotus and Aeschylus.

A great deal of what was written by the medieval writers on the subject was also intended to help explain the fall of Rome, which was widely seen to have been a major catastrophe that left the world in chaos. They sought to generalize from this by attempting to understand the reasons for the fall of empires and in doing so they took a particular interest in Rome’s great predecessor.

With the coming of the European Renaissance – the New Learning – the work of the ancient writers became once more available and this produced a further re-evaluation of Cyrus and the Persian Empire. The new editions of Herodotus and of Xenophon published in 1516 introduced Renaissance scholars to the more enlightened aspects of Cyrus’s reign rather than his doom, which had been emphasized in the Middle Ages. Matteo Bandello (1480– 1562), for example, relates a version of one of Xenophon’s stories. The beautiful Babylonian Panthea was captured at the time of Cyrus’s conquest of the city. As she was a prize of war, Cyrus sought to marry her, but out of respect for her unflinching devotion to her husband, Abradatas, Cyrus freed her and put her under his protection. The positive aspects of the story of Cyrus now became part of the knowledge that the Renaissance was revealing, and these revelations contributed to the better understanding of the pre-Christian world. Most importantly, Renaissance scholars wished to make a clean break with the theology of the Middle Ages, and going back to the pre-Christian world was for them the ideal way of accomplishing this.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), who was deeply involved with the difficult relations of the city-states of the Italian peninsula, found Cyrus of considerable interest. In his most famous work, Il Principe (The Prince), he attempted to outline the qualities he considered necessary for the ideal ruler. The understanding of Herodotus and other ancient writers led him to examine Cyrus and his imperial ambitions. In his Arte della guerra (Art of War), Machiavelli examined the conflict between Cyrus and the Massagetae and the way in which the advice of Croesus, to advance into the territory of the Massagetae and to do battle with them there, was the main cause of the disaster that ensued. Machiavelli also attributes to Tomyris the stratagem of feigning retreat and leaving behind large quantities of food and drink, which is the opposite of the Herodotus story and suggests that Machiavelli may also have been using other sources.

In the 1430s the Englishman John Lydgate, a contemporary of Chaucer, wrote a treatise, the Fall of Princes, which includes Cyrus and discusses the ambition that caused his fall. Thus by no means were all the Renaissance writers emphasizing Cyrus’s virtues. His fall was put down to reasons of strategy and bad advice rather than the wrath of god as in medieval times. Paintings and tapestries of the life of Cyrus during this period also added to the vividness of the portrayal of the Persian king.

Georg Pencz, Tomyris with the head of Cyrus, c. 1550–50, engraving.

A seventeenth-century historical novel by Madeleine de Scudéry entitled Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (Artamene, or Cyrus the Great) drew a picture of an ideal romantic hero who would have fit well in the French court of Louis XIV. Contemporary tapestries of Cyrus dressed in the aristocratic costume of the period depicted the king as envisaged in Scudéry’s novel. Spanish eighteenth-century tapestries continued this romantic tradition, but also stressed the political importance of Cyrus as a model ruler, with one such tapestry carrying the inscription, ‘Sovereign Power under Justice and Freedom’.9

Arthur Young maintains that ‘Cyrus the Great was a history-maker born into a myth-making age.’¹⁰ The Cyrus of history has been largely hidden by the figure who represents a variety of imperial characteristics, from the honourable and noble to the overly ambitious. The fact is that throughout the ages Cyrus became whatever that age wanted him to be.

One can see how different ages drew their own picture of Cyrus that accorded with the ideas they wished him to represent. To the Greeks, Cyrus appeared as a largely benign figure of considerable historical importance. He emerges as a supreme ruler who acted in a benevolent fashion and whose rule was often compared favourably with the imperfections of the Athenian democracy. However, while the Greek writers were prepared to acknowledge the negative as well as the positive qualities of the Persian king, an entirely admirable picture is presented in the biblical texts. Cyrus, who in the Bible is said to have released the Jews from their captivity and even contributed to the rebuilding of the Temple, appears as an unblemished figure of good. The Lord announced that he has held the right hand of Cyrus and endorsed the way in which Cyrus had subdued the nations. In fact Cyrus is depicted as an agent of the biblical Lord, and Cyrus himself acknowledges the way in which he has been supported by the Lord throughout his work. This is very much similar to the way Cyrus’s successor Darius stressed the role of the god Ahuramazda at every stage in the process of empire building.

The Roman writers were most interested in comparing this earlier empire with Rome, and later in using it to help explain the fall of the Roman Empire. While Cyrus was often seen in a positive light, his actions, like those of later rulers, inevitably led to catastrophe. The Christian writers of medieval times were most inclined to condemn Cyrus and they saw his fall as the consequence of pride and ambition. The fate of Cyrus was presented as a lesson to all who sought to follow a similar course. These theological writers were most concerned with the workings of the divine in human affairs, the road to success being to follow the course prescribed by the deity. Influenced no doubt by the fall of Rome, they ignored the biblical texts that had presented a very different picture of the Persian ruler. With the Renaissance, all this again changed and Cyrus once more became the example of the good and benign ruler, exercising ‘sovereign power under justice and freedom’. The paintings and tapestries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasized this, with the image of a magnificent and powerful ruler, in the best romantic tradition of the time.

Throughout the 2,500 years since the death of Cyrus, the ancient ruler has enjoyed the sobriquet ‘the Great’ and has been regarded as being a ruler of considerable historical significance. However, this significance has regularly oscillated between Cyrus as ideal and Cyrus as warning. As with the fusion of history and legend, the two have most often come together to present the ideal of the benevolent prince at the same time the pitfalls into which power can become ensnared. Yet it is the image of Cyrus as the great and benevolent ruler that eventually came to the fore. This was perhaps most simply stated by Aeschylus, who summed up Cyrus’s reign in The Persians with the words, ‘No god resented him, for he was wise.’

The question of the value of empire and imperialism, which began with the Greek views of Cyrus, was to continue into modern times. The Great King, in both history and legend, has remained throughout a figure of considerable interest and relevance. Despite the lack of real historical evidence on the subject, it is above all through the work of Cyrus that the legacy of the Achaemenid dynasty has been perpetuated. Throughout the ages the dynasty and its first ruler have continued to fascinate all who have attempted to examine the realities of this long-gone civilization and to understand what the lessons of its rise and fall can teach subsequent ages.