Blood and Thunder

The King of Kings - The Life and Legacy of Cyrus The Great

In this episode of Blood and Thunder, host William traces the extraordinary life of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The story opens on the steppes east of the Caspian Sea, where the nomad queen Tomyris lowers the severed head of the most powerful man on earth into a wineskin full of blood, then circles back to ask how a boy born in the backwater kingdom of Anshan around 600 BC ever came to such an end. We follow Cyrus through the dreams of his grandfather Astyages, the king of the Medes who tried to have him exposed as an infant; through the horrifying revenge plot of Harpagus, the nobleman fed his own son in a stew; through the overthrow of the Medes in 550 BC, the war with Croesus of Lydia and the famous moment on the burning pyre when the doomed king cried out the name of Solon; and through the bloodless fall of Babylon in 539 BC, where the priests of Marduk opened the gates and a clay cylinder, still in the British Museum today, proclaimed Cyrus the chosen one of their god. The narration roots itself in the major ancient sources, principally Herodotus, Xenophon's Cyropaedia, the fragments of Ctesias, the Nabonidus Chronicle, the Cyrus Cylinder, and the books of Ezra and Isaiah, as well as modern works by Pierre Briant, Tom Holland, Amélie Kuhrt, Matt Waters, and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. It examines Cyrus's startling innovation of letting conquered peoples keep their gods, their customs, and their homelands, including his decision to send the exiled Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple, which earned him the only use of the word messiah given to a foreign king anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. The episode ends on the eastern frontier, where an aging Cyrus, unable to stop conquering, marches against the Massagetae and falls in a brutal battle on the grass, his body eventually carried home to the simple stone tomb at Pasargadae that still stands today, bearing the inscription Alexander the Great would one day read: do not begrudge me this little earth that covers my body.