The Ancients - Cyrus the Great

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

The ancient Persian ruler who founded the Achaemenid Empire, known for his benevolent governance and conquests - Cyrus the Great was a giant of history. History remembers him as someone who conquered numerous lands, established a legendary empire, respected local customs, and allowed religious freedom for his subjects. But what does the archaeology tell us - and was he really that great?In this episode Tristan welcomes Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones back to the podcast, to delve into this ruler's life. Looking at this origins, travels, family and ultimate demise - what can we learn about Cyrus the Great, and does the archaeology back it up?Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter here.

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and the story of its founder, of of Cyrus is extraordinary, whether it's his ultimate conquest of Babylon, his unfortunate adventure into modern-day Kazakhstan, or his earlier conquests as he headed from the Persian heartlands west, ultimately marching as far as Asia Minor, as Anatolia. To talk through the story of Cyrus, well, I was delighted to interview Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from the University of Cardiff. This was the third of three episodes that Lloyd and I recorded a couple of months back. It follows hot on the heels of episodes with Lloyd about Babylon and the Bible and on Persia and the Bible. And in my opinion, this episode on Cyrus was the best of them all.

And that is saying something. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Lloyd. Lloyd, always a pleasure having you on the podcast. Always a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me. Now, Cyrus the Great. We're going to be running through his life story today. The greatest of all the Persian kings? Yes. Yes, why not? Why not? I mean, a founding father, if there ever was one. And I think of such tremendous magnitude

for the later Persians that his name echoed down the centuries in song and poetry. So yes, I mean, a man of just extraordinary vision and clear ability. And he must have been pure charisma clear ability, and he must have been pure charisma as well for what he achieved. You know, the supercret, the great, is bandied around quite a lot in ancient history. But here is a man who I do believe genuinely deserves it. Yeah, Cyrus the Great. Well, there we go. We've got 35 minutes to wrestle through his life, so let's do years. So, first of all, the sources. I mean, what types of sources do we have to learn about this figure? Okay, so we do have some indigenous Near Eastern sources, not necessarily Persian, however, okay?

So not necessarily from Iran, although some recent archaeological work in Iran is unearthing new evidence for Cyrus, but let's get on onto that later on. Majority of the sources we have are either Babylonian, very useful. We also have Hebrew, so that is in the Hebrew Bible, very useful in itself. And then, of course, we have a lot of Greek evidence, some more useful than others. None of it should be dismissed. All of it needs to be carefully sifted to look mainly at the agendas behind the texts themselves. What were the authors

trying to get at and who, of course, were they aiming these texts at as well? So audience and author become very important here. Whether we get to a genuine Cyrus remains to be seen, but I think we can get glimpses of the real man and the motivation behind him at certain moments in the narrative. Well, there we go. Well, let's keep going, therefore, into the story itself. So the early 6th century BC, before Cyrus becomes king, what is the geopolitical situation of ancient Iran, that area of the world, when he is born? Okay, so the Iranians, being this nomadic people from Eurasian steppes, had moved in to the Iranian platform around about 1200 BCE.

And there they had quite easily, it seems, amalgamated with indigenous peoples in the Zagros mountain area in the north and in the south. And these Iranian peoples, tribal peoples, separated into different linguistic groups. So in the north, around the Caspian Sea, we have the Medes. In the east, we have Parthian-speaking Iranians. And in the south, we have the Parsa, the Persians. And they inhabit this area southwestern Iran. Today, it's the modern province of Fars, which borders very closely onto what was ancient Elam, a Mesopotamian civilization.

And it's clear that the Elamites and the Persian tribes intermingled possibly intermarried and there was quite a good sort of profitable crossover between these two cultures the area of lowland Elam going into Iran was known as Anshan and this area of Persia was ruled by a family who descended from a king called Tishpish or Kishpish known to the Greeks as Taispis so for convenience sake, we call them the Taispid dynasty or the Taispid family. And really, this is a family of horsemen who are clearly interacting with Elamite elites, and they establish themselves as the leading tribal entity in the area of Anshan. And it's out of this, really, that the family of Cyrus the Great comes. So we know that this Tishpish had a son called Qurush.

We call him Cyrus I, but Qurush in Old Persian. He was a military warlord. We know that he had some run-ins with people from the Zagros, but maintained his own kind of authority. After him, we have evidence of a Cambyses. The Cambyses I. So we can see some family names beginning to emerge here. And then we have the birth of our Cyrus, Qurush in Old Persian, which means slaughterer of the enemy, which is not how we think of cyrus very often but i think it is right to think of him that way and he must have been born around about 600 bce in this area of anshan which becomes very important to him because in successive years in

things like the cyrus cylinder this, this Babylonian propaganda piece, he calls himself first and foremost King of Anshan. That's his most important identity, and he lists off his Tyspid predecessors as well. So they're quite clearly a closely knit tribe. Now then, as to his kind of birth and early years, we are really reliant on our Greek sources because we have a whole wealth of birth stories about Cyrus, which are probably more legend than fact. So let's take a few. Herodotus says he knows something like four alternative stories of Cyrus's birth, and he gives us one of them. In this, the story is that the king of the Medes, a man called Astyages,

has a dream in which he sees his daughter growing vines from out of her genitals, and these vines cover the known world. And in another even worse dream, he dreams that his daughter urinates with such force that she washes out the civilizations of the world. And his dream diviners tell him that this means that any son born to his daughter will one day overtake his throne and will rule in his place. Now, this is an age-old story.

It's there in Greek mythology about Zeus, of course, isn't it? You know, it's a typical kind of folk motif, really, of the idea of father or grandfather being displaced by the younger generation. It's every man's nightmare kind of thing. If we want to give any credence to this, according to Herodotus, the daughter, a woman called Mandane does marry this Cambyses of Persia Cambyses I so the son that she's going to give birth to will be half Median and half Persian when the boy is born he commands his chief general a man called Hipparges

to take the baby away from his mother, to take it out into the mountains, and to leave it there, to expose it to the elements. And there the baby is found by a shepherd and his wife, whose recent child, a recently born child, has conveniently just died, and so she's able to suckle the baby, him up and it's only in his adolescence when they observe him playing with his friends in which he always takes the role of of kings or warriors that they realize that this boy whom they call Cyrus is in fact royal and they take him back to his grandfather's palace and he reclaims his position on the throne and does of course one day indeed overthrow Astyages and claim the throne of Media.

So that's one story. So there we have Median blood. Cyrus is an heir of Astyages, proper heir. So then we have a story, for instance, told in Ctesias. So Ctesias has probably recorded indigenous Persian stories. has probably recorded indigenous Persian stories. So this story says that Cyrus was actually the son of a very, very humble Persian man of the soil and of a woman who was a goat herder, an absolute nobody, in other words. And he rises to prominence. He goes north to find his fortune and he becomes a kind of painter and decorator at the court of the king, Astyages of Media, and from there is noted for his brilliance, his tact, his sensitivity, his courtliness,

and is promoted to the point where he becomes adopted almost by the king of Media. So two very different contrasting stories, one in which he is the son of the Persian soil, another in which he is actually the true heir of media. And I think what we've got going on both of those, of course, is propaganda. One of them written from, possibly both from a Persian point of view, one in which, of course, Cyrus is able to claim median descent, and the other in which he says, no, no, no, I am absolutely like you. I am born of this Persian soil. There are other stories that were going on around about his birth as well, all of which have considerable propagandistic purposes, that's for sure. But I think what is important is obviously not the historicity of any of these. And in a a way it doesn't matter what the reality is for me what

is fascinating is that he was so well known that he entered into numerous songs and stories and i suppose in a society like persia of course you know really where history writing in the greek sense just doesn't exist oral tradition is. And what better way of disseminating these ideas of ancestry than through song and through poetry? I mean, if you think about it, Iran has always had this very, very long poetic sing-song tradition as well. So I'm sure Cyrus's name was perpetrated around the various tribes of Iran through this popular medium. You know, every now and then in the Greek sources, we get these hints of other popular stories that were going on. So for instance, in Ctesias, at one

point, we have a story of a concubine of Astyages in Media who sings about a wild boar who thrashes through the undergrowth, causing mayhem and overturning the order of the forest and the concubine sings this story of the boar and then reveals to astyages that the boar is in fact cyrus so we have again this kind of myth making in which you know animal imagery is utilized which goes back back back into the near eastern tradition so so deep so i think all of that's going on and that's the important thing so it's not really about you know where he was really born but I think all of that's going on. And that's the important thing. So it's not really about, you know, where he was really born. But I think the fact that we can see that he has this longevity in legend is important. It works, I think, rather like stories of Arthur in Britain, Robin Hood, all of this kind of stuff. You know, we can say there's a maybe a time and a place

that is real, but the rest is make-believe but it's serving a current purpose and that's the thing okay so let's move on let's go on to his rise to the kingship then yeah so what we can say with a little bit more factual assurance is that by the time he reaches his late teens early 20s he was certainly the king of Anshan at this point, probably started to acquire wives at this period as well. We know that he has at least two daughters and two sons, so there's a dynasty set up quite early on in his reign. And what seems to be happening in this period is that we see the ascendancy of the Medes in the north, and they become quite a hostile group, really, to the Persians in the south. One of the things that the Median king, Astyages, does, the historical

Astyages does, is to start imposing road taxes on the Persians, which means that Persians really can't move their herds to places where they need to go, traditionally have gone. And this becomes kind of intolerable for the Persians. And Cyrus's genius, I suppose, first emerges when he manages to bring together a whole consortium of different Persian tribes from across the whole of southern Iran under his banner. And he seems to bring them together at a particularly important place for him, a place called Pasagada, which is about an hour's drive north of current-day Shiraz. Seems to be his ancestral homelands there. There he raises

his banner and he goes to war against the Medes, essentially. He leads an army to the north, retreats because of weather conditions, and then he sees the Medes coming down into Persia. And it's actually at the Battle of Pasargadae that he has a definitive victory over the Medes. So the Persians now are liberated of their Median oppression, and it seems highly likely at this point that Cyrus then marches north, occupies the Median capital camp we could say which is Ekbatana, modern-day Hamadan, probably executes the king of the Medes at that point as well and most importantly therefore inherits all of the Median territories which by this point

around about 564 something like that we have considerable territories stretching from the mountains around the north of the Caspian Sea right the way across into eastern Turkey so a huge swathe of land was being occupied by the Medes at this point. So suddenly this all falls into the hands of this young Persian man. And this is, I suppose, what makes him remarkable is that he looks at this and seizes the opportunity. What does this mean for him? Well, he no longer is just a tribal leader. he's now conquered a major military influence in the north and he rides to the far borders of what is considered to be median territory in eastern turkey and then in something quite unprecedented he leads his persian followers and no doubt there are some

medes in his army by this time too across across the whole of Anatolia, rough, tough riding, but these are horse masters, I mean they're brilliant, brilliant horse riders, and crosses the Hylas River into Lydia and his focus settles on the city of Sardis. Sardis was, without doubt, the most wealthy and culturally important Greek-speaking city of Asia Minor at that period. It was ruled by a king called Croesus, who, of course, in mythology becomes this, you know, well, I mean, as rich as Croesus. It's no coincidence that he's given this kind of attribute because Sardis was so

wealthy. It was one of the first kind of areas where coins were being minted, for instance. So very, very wealthy indeed. And after a long siege, the city of Sardis falls to Cyrus and his men, and with that, tumble down all the other Greek-speaking city-states of the coast of Asia Minor. So we're going, you know, knocking them down like Nine Pins, Miletus, Halicarnassus, all of these places as well. So they all become suddenly part of an empire, which I don't think Cyrus ever saw coming, to tell you the truth. But there it is, and he owns it. And he immediately goes into action about, okay, how do I control this place now then? So he sets up governors.

Later they become known as satraps, but at this period I don't think we really hear this term, but governors certainly to stay behind and keep these places in order. And I presume, although it's not said anywhere specifically, to start demanding tribute, taxation from these conquered areas as well. Now, I suppose we might consider then Cyrus to want to go home, back to Persia to consolidate whatever's going on there. But as he's trundling back through Anatolia, of course, he comes to the edge of the Euphrates River and he thinks, hmm, down south from here, there lies even greater treasure. The jewel in the crown.

The jewel in the crown, Babylon itself, okay? And Babylon has been the superpower for the last 70 years under the Neo-Babylonian kings, Nebuchadnezzar II. It had taken a bit of a dive under Narbonidus, the last indigenous king there. And so I think Cyrus just seems to anticipate that this will be rich pickings and quite an easy target as well. And so he marches his troops down the Euphrates. And in fact, we have a lot of Babylonians from the military and from the elites who actually side with Cyrus. I think they see that a good future lies with this ruler. To make sure that the Babylonians know that he means business, he takes out a few towns on his journey down, most conspicuously the city of Opis, which is only about 50 or 60 miles north of Babylon.

So a very important city. He completely destroys it, massacres all the men, sells off all the women and children, and even kills the Babylonian prince Belshazzar, which means that when his army approaches Babylon itself, the Babylonians simply open their gates of the city to him. So Babylon is taken without any fuss whatsoever, which is quite an achievement, because I suppose the last thing he wanted to do anyway was to destroy any of the wealth of Babylon. But I mean, if you think about what Cyrus saw there, I mean, it's completely a different world from what he was brought up in.

So he's brought up in tents, in yurts, amongst horse riders. He's gone to Sardis, which has seen Greek architecture and remarkable civic layouts. But now he's in the center of the world in a city which at its time was unparalleled in the whole globe. I mean, there was nothing like Babylon on Earth. It was a metropolis, a true metropolis, with the finest buildings, the greatest temples, a huge ancient urban center. This was not the language that Cyrus spoke. He didn't know about these things. So, I mean, he must have been overawed by it. And yet, at the same time, he claims it. He claims it for himself. He doesn't show any weakness. He doesn't think, you

know, I'm an outsider here or I'm not good enough. He simply claims it. And we know about this because we have one of the most important documents from ancient history, and that's the so-called Cyrus Cylinder. Hey, I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I journey across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made the United States. From first flight to first ladies, from stitching the Star Spangled Banner to striking gold in California, to shooting for the moon with Apollo,

we've got you covered. Catch new episodes of American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit, every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. The Cyrus Cylinder is this really unprepossessing lump of clay, dried clay. It doesn't look much to look at, but what it says is remarkable. Part of it is written in Cyrus's own words, so he's speaking his own history, and in which, of course, he says that

the god Marduk, the supreme god of the Babylonian pantheon, called him by name, held him by the hand, and welcomed him into Babylon. So clearly Cyrus has got the Babylonian priesthood working for him at this point in which his propaganda is stressing that he is the heir to the throne of Babylon and that of course he is a champion of the god Marduk as well so it's a very pragmatic way in which he does this very interesting to see the titles and names that he gives for himself in the Cyrus Cylinder. So while he says he calls himself King of Anshan, so we're harking back to that ancestry of his in Iran, he is also very keen on the title King of the Four Quarters of the World, which is the traditional way in which the Babylonian and Assyrian kings had called themselves too. And also straight away, it's really interesting to see how Cyrus suddenly becomes aware of his place in history as well. He talks about repairing the walls of Babylon,

which had been broken down. And he says that when he was doing this, he came across an inscription, another cylinder, which had belonged to a king who came before me, and his name was Ashurbanipal. So he must have been, you know, obviously this is a man who was probably illiterate. And so the scribes must have read this out to him. And suddenly Cyrus gets this idea of where he sits in his own history, which I think is really, really quite fabulous. Now then, there's another detail in the Cyrus Cylinder, which is often overlooked. It says that Cyrus restores the walls of Babylon, restores the great festivals of the city as well, which is important. And then right at the end, where the text begins to be eroded and finally wears off, a very fragmentary section talks about

how about a year after the liberation of the city, as he would put it, the conquest, he and his son Cambyses appear in the temple of Marduk, right in the city center. And he says very specifically that they were wearing Elamite dress. So the Elamites, of course, were part of this world of the ancient Iranians, and the Elamites had long been the absolute enemies of the Babylonians. So there is Cambyses, the prince, and Cyrus, the king, wearing this very conspicuous foreign costume while propitiating the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon in his cult center in the heart of Babylon. I think it must have been like, I don't know, something like, you know, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, wearing his full, you know, military kit, full on 1880s military kit and going to a Hindu temple or something. 1880s military kit and going to a Hindu temple or something. I mean, you could not but read this as something which was colonial. I mean, that's what's going on. I think this is what Cyrus does.

So, you know, it's not all sugar at all. I mean, there's a kind of quite tricky element to some of this. What we do know is that Cyrus returns to Iran after this quite a long sojourn in Babylon, and he leaves his son Cambyses behind as the kind of viceroy of Babylon, so that the Persian presence is absolutely fixed at that period. Of equal interest, I think, is the idea that when we look at the vast amount of documentation that exists from the late Neo-Babylonian into the early Persian period in Babylon, we have tax returns, receipts, accounts from different firms, we don't get any sense of disturbance or upset, which suggests to me that the Persians didn't come in and change the system. They simply worked within the system

that was already existing. And that tends to be, by and large, the way in which the Persians didn't come in and change the system. They simply worked within the system that was already existing. And that tends to be, by and large, the way in which the Persians operated for the whole of their imperial history. And I should say as well that with, of course, the fall of Babylon, also came to Cyrus all of Babylon's former empire, which included Syria and modern-day Lebanon, Israel, Palestine. That whole swathe of land becomes part of his as well. What we see when Cyrus returns to Iran after all this time, where he must have been hailed as, I mean, the greatest hero ever. I mean, how could they possibly conceive of what had gone on here?

You know, I mean, he begins building, and there are two sites on which he builds. The first is very well known. And it goes back to this place, Pasagadai, which I mentioned earlier on. So his tribal homeland. He now begins to make it into a kind of royal center. I suppose we could say an imperial center. He builds several stone pavilions there. And this is the first ever stone structures that we see in central Iran. Everything before, of course, had been tents. But now there's a kind of square or oblong palaces, kind of garden pavilions, really. Not huge, but impressive in their own way, with columned porticos that run around them. So very Greek in some respects. And in fact, we can tell that Greeks were present at Pasagadae building these things.

We can see we know the Greek styles too well. These are definitely built by Greeks. Whether these are war captives or people who came willingly, we simply don't know. And around these small pavilions, he also builds an entranceway. So there's a monumental gateway. The only thing that remains of it now is one standing wall, which depicts this really quite remarkable sort of genie image or a kind of, the Assyrians or Babylonians would have called it an apkalu, so a kind of talisman, a good figure, a guardian figure with these kind of four wings that come out of him.

Clearly Babylonian in inspiration, but wearing on his head an Egyptian-style crown. So it's really amazing to see that kind of art being employed very early on. But the glory of Pasagadae is actually its gardens. So Cyrus created at Pasagadae the first paradisos, as the Greeks would call it, the first paradise garden. And it was what has become known as the classic Chahabag, so the four-quarter garden. To echo, I think, the idea of the four quarters of the universe.

And you can still see it today when you go to the site. It has incredible, elegant water channels, beautifully lined with brick, stone, and fountains as well all the way around it so it must have just been gorgeous and we know that it was planted with cypress trees and with actually flora from all over his empire so it became a kind of empire in miniature if you like and you know because the persians were these kind of nomadic peoples, it's really, I think, appropriate to imagine Cyrus sitting there, passing his laws and giving judgment, sitting under an awning at the portico of one of these stone buildings, and yet still being in the open air of the garden as well. It really beautifully sort of straddles these

buildings, the outdoor and the indoor space. The other thing he builds at this location is his tomb, which I presume he must have started quite early on in his reign. And that's really fascinating too, because it's on a kind of brick stone pediment with about four steps, four or five steps to it, which is very much like a ziggurat. with about four steps, four or five steps to it, which is very much like a ziggurat.

But then the tomb chamber itself is a kind of vaulted barrel roof, which is typical of the kind of tombs that one would find in 6th century Asia Minor. So it seems that he is commissioning his architects to create things which are a mashup, I suppose we would say, of different international styles and bringing them back to Persia. For the first time, they would have seen anything like this. So quite remarkable. But the most fascinating thing, I think, which has come to light in the last 10 years of archaeology in Iran is happening at the city of Persepolis. Now, we used to think that Persepolis

was the brainchild of Darius the Great, started around about 518, but now we can push it back to Cyrus's time, because Italian and Iranian archaeological teams have discovered at a place called Tol el-Arjuri, which means the mound of bricks, masses and masses of evidence for a construction of Cyrus the Great. And what's coming out of the ground is a huge gateway, a massive monumental gateway, covered in blue glazed brick with dragons and bulls exactly like the gate of Ishtar that we found at Babylon and there's one brick which even has the title Shahru in Babylonian on it which means king

so it looks as though the ambition of Cyrus was actually to create a new Babylon in Iran. And maybe, you know, his untimely death ended that dream, we don't know. But certainly the archaeology reveals that the gateway was systematically demolished, probably by Darius, who then quite ostentatiously built a 30-meter platform above the area of the gateway which would have meant he literally looked down on his predecessors ambitions for building which says quite a lot doesn't it about the nature of the relationship between Darius and Cyrus perhaps so that is one of the most remarkable things that's come out of the archaeology. I mean, you know, and we don't have that kind of evidence anywhere else. You know, it's only what is coming out of the ground.

So I think that's really remarkable. Beyond that, our attention then really only turns to the last years of Cyrus's life, which is a great shame because we don't know really anything about his policies or what his aims were. You know, how did he rule Persia and his empire? We get nothing, really. Well, I was just going to ask about his wife or anything. Do people know about her at all? Well, we know that his wife died

in the time that he was in Babylon, actually. And we know that because a year's mourning was decreed. Yes, but we know of nothing else at all. So two of his daughters, certainly we know their names. One is Atossa, known to the Greeks as Atossa, and his other daughter Ataistone. They are known in Old Persian by their proper names, Udusha and Ishtatuna, and they figure prominently in the reigns of Darius the Great, not in Cyrus's reign, but in Darius the Great's name, because he married both of them as the heirs, as the daughters of Cyrus, they became very important to him. But we also know that Cyrus has two sons. So we have Cambyses, who of course is the eldest, and he's in Babylon as the regent.

But we also have another one called Bardia. In some of the Greek texts, he's, is the eldest, and he's in Babylon as the regent. But we also have another one called Bardia. In some of the Greek texts, he's known by the title Tanoxeres, which actually is probably his nickname, and it means strong-armed. And there are stories which say that he was an exemplary bowman. So that's there. Now, we need to jump then. We don't have any evidence of what he's doing as a ruler of these lands. And the next stories that we have, again, we're going back to the realm of legend,

really, are stories about his death. Because you did mention earlier his untimely end, Lloyd. So let's focus in on the stories around his death. So there's one story, Herodotus, in which he goes over to the east to fight these kind of barbaric nomadic peoples there. And he meets his end at the hands of a formidable queen called Pterimus, who manages to take his head, dips it in a pail of blood, all of this. We have another story from Xenophon, in which he dies comfortably at home in bed with his two sons at his side. Now clearly Cyrus couldn't have died on the battlefield and at home in bed so I suggest that what we got going on with Cyrus's death stories is another series of propaganda myths which were doing the rounds as well.

Interestingly in the great Persian epic Shah Namae, the Book of Kings, which dates to the early medieval period, there are reminiscences of Cyrus the Great. He was such a major figure. He is known in Shah Namae by the name Kaykurush or Kaykorosh. And there, when he dies, this character based on Cyrus doesn't have a normal ending at all instead he ascends into heaven godlike he just ascends into heaven instead so I think all of these were part of a rich culture of death around this great figure as well summing him up I think he must have been a brilliant tactician, a brilliant leader of an army, an incredibly charismatic individual. He must have been, to take troops

with him to the ends of the earth where they didn't really know where they were going or what they were doing in the first place. He was also really astute, it seems. He was a very good self-promoter. He understood the power of propaganda, the power of working with different types of peoples as well. It's quite clear that he could be generous. He releases the Jews and others from captivity in Babylon, for instance. But of course, he could be absolutely bloodthirsty and cruel as well. I don't want us to whitewash him in that way. What he did at Opus and other city sites was horrific. And let's not forget, empires are not made through negotiation and hand-holding and goodwill. They

come about through square George soldiers doing really horrific things to local populations. And Cyrus was responsible for that and upheld, maintained, and in fact, kick-started the whole system for the Persians. And yet there is something about him which is still quite enlightened. In my opinion as well, we have these stories in the Alexander historians of Alexander the Great going around with copies of the Iliad and sleeping with them under his pillow and thinking that Achilles was the greatest thing. That's part of the myth-making of the Alexander historians. I think that if anybody Alexander admired, it was actually Cyrus,

because I really think he models himself on Cyrus. The entry into Babylon, for instance, is Cyrus's entry into Babylon. He really seems to mould himself in the guise of this man that he clearly knew a lot about. The Greeks were fixated on Cyrus. Xenophon's Chiropodea, while it's purporting to be about Cyrus II, is of course, it's a pian, really, to what a balanced, good king can be. So even the Greeks were willing to overlook the darker side of him, to portray him in a really remarkably generous light. Whereas in the Hebrew Bible, he gets the greatest accolade of all, because God,

the Hebrew God, calls him my anointed, Miseach, Messiah. I mean, that is the loftiest of lofty titles you can get. And the ultimate, I suppose, was homage to this man who was simply out of his league, ahead of his time. Out of his league, ahead of his time. And of course, Alexander supposedly visited his tomb as well. Yes, precisely.

Precisely. There's a bit of a cry there as well, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Lloyd, it's always so fascinating listening to you talk all things ancient Persia. You've come back on the podcast to explain Cyrus in 35, 40 minutes.

You've done a great job of it. It's not bad, is it? Not bad at all. So it just goes for me to say thank you so much back on the podcast to explain Cyrus in 35-40 minutes you've done a great job not bad at all so it just goes me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast you're very welcome anytime well there you go there was Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones talking you through the story of King Cyrus the Great founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you want to help us out as we continue our infinite mission to share these incredible stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible, well if you

want to help us out you can just leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue to grow the ancients. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode. We'll see you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power.

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