I would define "Great" in the
context of a conqueror as someone whose rule managed to improve the lives of the
people whose territories he had annexed. In the case of Cyrus though we have
very few contemporary sources that enable us to make any proper judgment as to
whether his rule was in fact as benevolent as many have made out. The Chronicle
of Nabonidus only details significant events for Babylon and just mentions the
successive victories of Cyrus without offering any kind of value judgment -
hardly surprising given Nabonidus himself was next in line on the chopping
block. The famous Cyrus cylinder containing his speech to the Babylonians is
supposed to be the world's first human rights document, yet according to many
historians of the period, the guarantees to allow the individual cults to thrive
was pretty typical of the period.
This would be just sensible statesmanship if you had an eye on conquering further afield and didn't wish to be distracted by petty revolts led by agitators wishing to reinstall the worship of Marduk or some other local deity. It is often said that this seal makes reference to the liberation of the Jews from captivity in Babylon, but it doesn't - though this "liberation" is attested in Isaiah as well as other books of the Old Testament. Maybe he wanted the Jews released so he could set up a buffer state between the Near East and the as yet unconquered Egypt, who knows.
There's no doubt that invaluable primary sources were lost when Alexander (the not so great) sacked and burnt to the ground the city of Persepolis - apparently on a drunken whim. Even though these accounts would have been from the Persian side they could have at least been held up as some type of yardstick from which to judge the non-Persian Western commentaries. So we are left with Herodotus and the later Greek and Roman historians such as Xenephon and Strabo. Some of Herodotus' stories you simply couldn't make up but they cannot be adjudged 'trustworthy' in the rigorous modern sense, more likely the faithful distillations of tales that were doing the rounds a hundred years after the event. His account of Cyrus' upbringing for instance is almost certainly based on an original fabrication - but nevertheless there was a Harapas who defected from the Median side and became a prominent General within Cyrus' army. As with much else in the tales of Herodotus it is the charm of exposition no less than the admixture of demonstrable fact which keeps us, his modern readers, compelled.
It is entirely plausible that as Cyrus reached maturity he instilled such confidence in those around him that they plotted along with other Indo-Iranian royal houses of the region to have an increasingly ineffectual Aygestes toppled. The alliance between the Babylonians and Medes, which brought down the Assyrian empire after the sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE, and which was further secured through strategic marriage alliances with Lydia, was evidently beginning to lose the mandate of many in the region. But why would the throne have passed (albeit by force) to an Achaemenid who spoke a different language and had separate customs to the reigning Medes? It is known that he took the throne by force, but he was aided at the end of the day by mass defections among the Median army. Perhaps he had personal qualities that had become well known and it was this that provided the coup it's critical momentum?
In fact, his reputation only appears to make sense if there is a certain germ of truth in the legends which have since sprung up. By the time Xenophon set down to write the Cyropaedia over 150 years after his death the name of Cyrus appeared to many to have been synonymous with all that was wise and noble in a ruler - even the Ionian Greeks of conquered Lydia appeared to think so! If there was maltreatment of Greeks in Anatolia under Cyrus' rule, this would surely have been reflected in the writings of Herodotus and Xenephon who were writing only a few generations after his death in 530 BCE. The latter in particular chooses him as the paragon of judicious kingship and the leader of an exemplary life fit enough to be the model on which his masterpiece in political praxis was based - a work read over and over for the next two thousand years by all aspiring to govern. Thomas Jefferson for instance, the principal author of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, had in his proud possession two well thumbed copies of Xenephon's Cyropaedia.
The Cyrus seal, like much else of the world's antiquity, is now held in the British museum and a replica was presented to the UN by the Shah of Iran in 1971 marking the "2,500th" anniversary of the Persian monarchy - an exercise intended to bolster legitimacy for his faltering regime. The replica can be found on the second floor of the UN headquarters fittingly displayed outside the Security Council. Cyrus chose a humble nondescript tomb which is well preserved to this day in Pasergadae, the city he made capital to the largest empire the world had yet seen.
According to Plutarch his epitaph read;
"O man, whoever you are and wherever you come from, for I know you will come, I am Cyrus who won the Persians their empire. Do not therefore grudge me this little earth that covers my body."
This would be just sensible statesmanship if you had an eye on conquering further afield and didn't wish to be distracted by petty revolts led by agitators wishing to reinstall the worship of Marduk or some other local deity. It is often said that this seal makes reference to the liberation of the Jews from captivity in Babylon, but it doesn't - though this "liberation" is attested in Isaiah as well as other books of the Old Testament. Maybe he wanted the Jews released so he could set up a buffer state between the Near East and the as yet unconquered Egypt, who knows.
There's no doubt that invaluable primary sources were lost when Alexander (the not so great) sacked and burnt to the ground the city of Persepolis - apparently on a drunken whim. Even though these accounts would have been from the Persian side they could have at least been held up as some type of yardstick from which to judge the non-Persian Western commentaries. So we are left with Herodotus and the later Greek and Roman historians such as Xenephon and Strabo. Some of Herodotus' stories you simply couldn't make up but they cannot be adjudged 'trustworthy' in the rigorous modern sense, more likely the faithful distillations of tales that were doing the rounds a hundred years after the event. His account of Cyrus' upbringing for instance is almost certainly based on an original fabrication - but nevertheless there was a Harapas who defected from the Median side and became a prominent General within Cyrus' army. As with much else in the tales of Herodotus it is the charm of exposition no less than the admixture of demonstrable fact which keeps us, his modern readers, compelled.
It is entirely plausible that as Cyrus reached maturity he instilled such confidence in those around him that they plotted along with other Indo-Iranian royal houses of the region to have an increasingly ineffectual Aygestes toppled. The alliance between the Babylonians and Medes, which brought down the Assyrian empire after the sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE, and which was further secured through strategic marriage alliances with Lydia, was evidently beginning to lose the mandate of many in the region. But why would the throne have passed (albeit by force) to an Achaemenid who spoke a different language and had separate customs to the reigning Medes? It is known that he took the throne by force, but he was aided at the end of the day by mass defections among the Median army. Perhaps he had personal qualities that had become well known and it was this that provided the coup it's critical momentum?
In fact, his reputation only appears to make sense if there is a certain germ of truth in the legends which have since sprung up. By the time Xenophon set down to write the Cyropaedia over 150 years after his death the name of Cyrus appeared to many to have been synonymous with all that was wise and noble in a ruler - even the Ionian Greeks of conquered Lydia appeared to think so! If there was maltreatment of Greeks in Anatolia under Cyrus' rule, this would surely have been reflected in the writings of Herodotus and Xenephon who were writing only a few generations after his death in 530 BCE. The latter in particular chooses him as the paragon of judicious kingship and the leader of an exemplary life fit enough to be the model on which his masterpiece in political praxis was based - a work read over and over for the next two thousand years by all aspiring to govern. Thomas Jefferson for instance, the principal author of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, had in his proud possession two well thumbed copies of Xenephon's Cyropaedia.
The Cyrus seal, like much else of the world's antiquity, is now held in the British museum and a replica was presented to the UN by the Shah of Iran in 1971 marking the "2,500th" anniversary of the Persian monarchy - an exercise intended to bolster legitimacy for his faltering regime. The replica can be found on the second floor of the UN headquarters fittingly displayed outside the Security Council. Cyrus chose a humble nondescript tomb which is well preserved to this day in Pasergadae, the city he made capital to the largest empire the world had yet seen.
According to Plutarch his epitaph read;
"O man, whoever you are and wherever you come from, for I know you will come, I am Cyrus who won the Persians their empire. Do not therefore grudge me this little earth that covers my body."
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