The Seduction of Sudden Beginnings: Myths of Founders
Cyrus the Great and the Mythic Falsehoods of Herodotus
Why Historians Should Love the Word “causes”
The Medians and Neo-Babylon seem to emerge out of nowhere into our story because of the nature of the way that we have to tell history. Historical causation is an especially difficult thing to narrow down to a singular cause, something that I would actually argue is actually not possible. Despite efforts to identify a cause to events like the Fall of Rome, the Third Reich, or the Fall of the Soviet Union historians who are honest must make the word plural. There is not a cause of these events but causes. Events do not happen within vacuums, they need not just people to carry them out, but people to receive them, the material conditions for it to be physically possible, and the intellectual conditions for it to be conceivable, not to mention dozens of other macro and micro considerations of economic, personal, and cultural dimensions that cannot be enumerated at this time.
The Trap of Historical Determinism
I am not prescribing a pure trends and forces theory of history, that at its most blunt argues that individual actors have no real role in history, and it is large scale trends of economics, politics, climate, and intellect that really drive history. That individual man is simply subject to these forces and cannot do anything to meaningfully alter the conditions in which he lived. Now there are events that seem to support this view, and there are certain schools of history that lend themselves to this sort of history. The French Revolution, in hindsight, feels so inevitable that sometimes students and historians fall into the trap of thinking that those that resisted it were idiots.
How could they not have seen this coming?
How could the monarchy and aristocracy be so stupid?
World War I and II are often at least presented this way, especially in secondary schools.
As inevitable products of the forces produced by generations of diplomats, activists, politicians, and the economic and social forces that drove the world to two of the most destructive wars of human history. Trends and forces historians are all good Lutherans and Calvinists. Things are predestined, we can do no good, or evil on our own merit. We must simply hope that the trends and forces into which we are born will be kind.
This deterministic history is, I believe, a reductive way of looking at and investigating history. It necessitates denying the humanity and genius of individuals, both that did make a difference and that did not. That these aristocrats that were so stupid as to hold these views that were so obviously not what the trends and forces were prioritizing were not in fact stupid. They held these views genuinely, and honestly. They contained the contradictions and inanities that all systems of beliefs and prejudices hold. They were human just like the rest of us. This twenty-thousand-foot view misses the eddies and ripples within a nation or a group that cause its genuineness. Creating an archetype of a bourgeois of the 1800’s is just as artificial as creating what we believe a typical Assyrian king, or Egyptian pharaoh, or Greek citizen were. They are dolls that we built and made to move according to our whim. And to say
‘this type of human dominated this period of time because of the economic and political forces’
might be true, but it gives us no genuine insight into what that looked like and felt like to those in the group.
The insane and contradictory actions and beliefs of Southern plantation owners, who believed that their slaves would want to escape with them from the advancing Union army, are not understandable if we do not try to understand them as humans living without our historical perspective and sensibilities. We should aim to try to remind ourselves as much as possible about the human dimension of these events, even as these people seem to emerge from nowhere.
Against the Great Man (and His Magic Powers)
Now, this is not an endorsement, either, of the Great Man theory of history held by men like Carlyle. The theory that certain great men of genius, or ambition were the people who drove history, and that history is really the act of connected biography. Popular history often turns into this, and Ancient and Medieval history is especially guilty of this as the people who loom the largest and are often some of the only people we can discuss in depth are the so-called great men. These people are kings, emperors, and prophets. It was not until the 1500-1700’s that we began to see and be able to easily discuss the lives of the common people. Archaeology, and cultural and social historians are working to fill in the gaps but largely this will be an uphill battle to bring to life the lives of those who did not directly get into the historical records. And the reason that we must work against this trend of great men is because it simplifies too much in the opposite way from the trends and forces. It builds these men into something that they are not; magicians. They reshape the world with merely their voice. They move, and the world gets out of their way. They build up the belief that one man can save everything. This is the theory of history which Raskolnikov believed in at the beginning of Crime and Punishment. That great men are allowed, even called to, violate the norms of their society because they are greater than other men.
The Great Man theory completely ignores the situation in which the great man acts, it ignores all the things that the trends and forces have shown are deeply important. Napoleon does not conquer without the military innovations of cannons and muskets that preceded him, or of the political organization needed to command such massive armies as he led. If the trends and forces care too much for casual chains, the Great Man does not care enough about them.
When History Needs a Face
But to return to the problem of the Median and Neo-Babylonian Empires. Nabopolassar and Cyaxares seem to spring out of nothing, because to tell this story quickly you must tell it simply. The faster your medium the simpler your message, to paraphrase McLuhan. There is theoretically space for an exhaustive exploration of the origins of these figures, if there was no desire to tell any other story. There is also the problem of the ancient world very much circling its histories around the personages of great men. There are numerous reasons for this, one that I think is important to discuss briefly is the fact that these histories are still being written in a largely oral society.
This is a society, or series of societies, that–despite the fact that written word has been available for over a thousand years–was most familiar with the ephemera of the spoken word, not the semi-permanence of the written. The written word, up till Herodotus and Hesiod in the emerging Greek tradition had been largely the remit of two groups, nobles and officials. The written word had been developed largely to record the material and trade developments of kingdoms and cities. The first literature was a well-crafted accounting for the contents of storerooms, or what should be contained within those storerooms.
A tradition that Jane Austen keeps alive in her writing catalog at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. In her deadpan satire the contents of the wills of the various wives of gentlemen when a new eligible bachelor comes into the community are cataloged with all the seriousness of a Sotheby’s auctioneer. The newly arrived man is to be bartered and bid over and given to the highest bidder of beauty, grace, elegance, and if Jane Austen had her way, wit.
Sacrilege upon the name of Jane Austen aside. Writing, with a few notable exceptions, was the area of expertise largely for people who had physical goods to record, it was not used for the telling of stories. Those stories were the purview of images and poets. Enheduanna, the world's first author that we know the name of, was a woman who was pushing the limits of what words could do in 2300 BC with her poems and hymns. The recorders of Gilgamesh’s search for civilization and immortality kept that feeble flame burning for the next thousand years. Words had to grow into the power to communicate not just objects but entire realities as they can now. But the trouble with an oral society that is used to dealing with the immediacies of material reality is that stories function far better and more easily with characters, central protagonists.
That is not to say that these people could not understand the abstractions of things but that they are not used to extending those abstractions too far into the world. Letters themselves are abstractions, because once we reach the point of letters, or an alphabetic script, we have already extended several levels of abstraction. It is a brain twisting exercise to systematize the process by which we moved into an alphabetic understanding of the world. But alphabets needed to be invented, to be created, and had to exist outside of the purely material world to have reasonable usefulness. They had to first exist as pictorial representations of concrete objects. Then to represent the sounds associated with those concrete objects. Then to simply represent a single sound, to separate themselves completely from the original object and exist only as frozen vocalizations. These frozen vocalizations must then be understood to be arrangeable. That the letters themselves have no meaning on their own but once they are combined together they take on a meaning as words.
Despite the attempts of certain mystical traditions to ‘recover’ these hidden meanings, they no longer exist once abstraction has reached the stage of alphabetic combinations. That meaning must be injected retroactively into them, it does not exist natively.
Myth as Compression
We have to keep that in mind and be comfortable with a certain squishiness to our history. All of these levels took centuries to be created and in contemporary society we take them completely for granted. But when written words were still relatively new, and telling stories was still a largely oral exercise, the story needed a concrete focal point. Even today in our highly abstracted times we struggle to consistently wrap our minds around economic, societal, and cultural trends. So as stories were passed down, they were centered around anchor points, people, places, attitudes. And so, we must contend with that fact and understand that we are dealing with imperfect remembrances; myth mixed with truth with custom and with distance.
All that is to say the story that is upcoming can only be understood as a fragment of what really happened, and despite assurances to the contrary we will never know what really happened. We have to be okay with that. Otherwise, we will have to abandon the very project of ancient history. Uncertainty is part of the nature of the practice, lessening that uncertainty is our ultimate goal. We will never be able to completely remove it, but history is a human undertaking, and all human undertakings are filled with uncertainty.
Cyrus and the Destined Archetype
The problem of causation is especially acute when myth and history have elided. A clear example of this is in the figure of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Cyrus the Great was like many great leaders in the ancient concept of leadership announced before his birth by miraculous signs and prophecies. Paris, with his mother’s dream of giving birth to a torch that burned Troy to the ground, Buddha with prophecies of him become a great monarch or reaching enlightenment, and the Book of Daniel’s statue foretelling the fall of the Neo-Babylonian and Median Empires and the coming of the Persians. These stories follow a familiar pattern, which often collides with its discrepancies with other contemporary records. Cyrus is not immune from this.
Cyrus was supposedly born into the Median royal family, but there was a prophecy about him before his birth that he would overshadow and overthrow his grandfather, the king of the Medians. His grandfather, afraid of this outcome, decided to have the boy killed. Now it was taboo to directly kill a child in the ancient world but the cultures had developed a workaround in some instances called exposure. This was taking the child and placing him in a basket with food and drink and leaving them out in the wild surrounding the city. The justification being that they had given the child everything that was needed to survive and had not directly killed the child. This of course was a weak justification, and everyone knew this. So, the king gave the responsibility to one of his generals of actually exposing the child. The general gave the child to a shepherd who was beholden to the general. The shepherd switched the child with a child that his wife had just delivered as a stilborn. The shepherd then kept the living Cyrus and exposed the dead body of his dead infant. Reporting to the general that the deed was done, the shepherd then raised Cyrus as his own son.
The king of the Medians now felt sure that he was safe, and he was safe to continue to sink into the corruption that supposedly had begun to envelop his kingdom. Herodotus charges the Medians with becoming opulent and weak after a successful series of campaigns. He says that the Medians deserted the virtues that had given rise to their kingdom; toughness, honesty, and simplicity, in favor of the vices of the conquered Assyrians; weakness, lying, and opulence. They degraded themselves and cared too much for the softer pleasures of life and so were left open for conquest from a new power who understood the value of those old virtues.
Herodotus and the Problem of Power
This all sounds hauntingly familiar to rhetoric that has echoed continuously through history. There seems endlessly to be some component of the culture of every society that claims that the current generation is weaker than those that came before, that there is something missing from the present. This nostalgia for a tough past is also often accompanied by the suggestion that the way to cure society of its ills is a war. That war, the suffering and hardship injects some needed vigor into such a weak and soft generation. Teddy Roosevelt, Bismarck, and Joffre all saw such necessity and goodness in war. And society has been fed so often on stories of virtuous heroes striding confidently through a battlefield or into a boardroom that we forget how stale the image is, and how often the author reveals the ironic twist, the undercut of the conquering hero. We forget that just because the story is following a character, which does not mean the author wishes us to be like them. And we need to sometimes remind ourselves that this disappointment in a generation can be genuine or it can be the bitterness of those who have not gained wisdom in their old age; they have only successfully aged.
And just because Herodotus wrote his history over two thousand yeast that does not mean we have to take his leaning on this old trope at face value. We have before us a story that legitimizes what is going to come after it, the rise of the Persians and the conquest of the Medians and their allies. But does that mean that the Medians fell into complete corruption and useless luxury?
No. Of course it doesn’t.
Now is it likely that the Medians had a far more luxurious lifestyle that they had under the Assyrian and Scythian dominance? It is a near certainty. But that cannot account for the only reason that the Median kingdom fell. And neither does the story of Cyrus’ escape from death by exposure explain that it was their fate to fall to the father of the Persian empires. It presents a very compelling story, which is why this story keeps being used. A single boy, raised by the people to have all of the virtues of hardworking shepherds but cannot escape the fact that he was destined for more than just herding sheep. There is something deeply compelling and exciting about such a figure. We want to root for him. But archaeology throws some cold water on Herodotus’s story. As does Cyrus.
The Cold Water of Archaeology
Our records show that Cyrus did not begin his life by being exposed but as the son of Cambyses I King of Anshan and the daughter of Astyages who was the King of Media, Mandane. His mother then was directly connected to the Median royal family and his father was the independent ruler of an area that was later known as the Persian heartland. Cyrus, contrary to Herodotus, was never exposed and grew up in the royal residence of Anshan. He was the grandson of the Median king, but beyond that the Herodotus story rests more on the perception that great leaders need to prove that they were chosen by Fate than reality.
To return to the narrative though, with the Medians clearly growing incapable of managing their new kingdom Cyrus began to plot his rebellion. He succeeded to the throne of Anshan in 559 BC, but still had to recognize his grandfather’s authority over him. It would seem from both Herodotus and the Nabonidus Chronicle that the relationship soon soured, and a Median general named Harpagus was sent to put down what must have seemed to Astyages, the Median king, a very petulant and ambitious grandson.
However, this is the moment that history and myth begin to elide. Myths are always important to rebellions, it helps give purpose and justification for the overturning of society. Both Herodotus and the Chronicle confirm this rebellion and the Chronicle gives the tentative length for the war of three years, ending of course with Cyrus tearing the Median Kingdom apart and taking his grandfather’s position of supreme ruler. But there is a detail that might also explain part of Herodotus’ story. The general that Astyages supposedly gave the duty of exposing the infant Cyrus, according to Herodotus, was Harpagus. Harpagus had been to that point the single most loyal general in all of Media, but with the king giving the responsibility for the death of an infant to him cracks seems to have formed. Then later in the story when Cyrus was discovered alive and was confirmed to be Astyages’ grandson Harpagus was called to have dinner with Astyages to celebrate the discovery that the child had not been killed. Harpagus was just asked to send his own son ahead to help prepare the dinner. Of course, the son actually became the dinner. He was murdered, cut up and cooked into the dishes that were served to Harpagus. After the dinner had concluded Astyages asked if he had enjoyed the meal and if he would like to see what sort of animal he had been served. Being polite and understanding that you cannot say no to a king, Harpagus said that he had enjoyed the meal and would like to know what sort of animal it was. His son’s head was then presented to Harpagus and the general took the head home and buried it. After this show of gratuitous violence and malevolence Harpagus appeared to be cowed. He now knew the price of disloyalty and that his indiscretions would be met with vindictive violence.
Harpagus appeared so cowed and loyal that when that child he had inadvertently saved from death rebelled he was sent to complete the mission that he had failed. There seems to be an implicit threat that if he failed again, because of disloyalty, or mercy, that other members of his family would be the next on the literal chopping block. So, when he faced the rebellious Cyrus, everything was stacked against him. But that dinner with the king would not have faded, and instead of fighting Cyrus to the death Harpagus defected, along with a large contingent army over to Cyrus’ cause. This is elaborated by the Chronicle which claims that Harpagus encouraged Cyrus’ revolt.
A Coup Disguised as Conquest
The loyalty of Harpagus, one of Media’s great generals, had been lost. This had to be accounted for by later chroniclers and storytellers. But they did not have access to Harpagus and so they had to fill in the blanks with rumor and theory. It also speaks to an understandable and still very present need in our understanding of history. Political betrayal or betrayal in general needs to have a personal cause, a wounding, a villain and hero. Cruelty and the breaking of trust needs to be justified. The dinner almost certainly did not happen, but the reason for its creation seems to have been to explain Harpagus’ betrayal of the Median king. It seems to have been a very colorful rationalization for what was almost certainly a far more political event.
Harpagus defected along with a number of nobles which seems to point to the fact that there was a contingent of Medians that saw the current ruler was not meeting the problems of the Median kingdom. These men seemed to think that there needed to be a change of leadership. It should be noted that they did not support a completely alien conqueror, but one that was still within the royal family. This was almost more of a coup than an invasion. Cyrus’ conquest can almost be viewed similarly to the English War of the Roses, or the struggle between the Dauphin Louis and the French king Charles VII. Now, the nature of the empire after Cyrus’ ascension and later conquests was completely different. Though it is interesting to note that the collapse of the Median kingdom could have begun as an internal dynastic struggle. This struggle replaced the ruling faction more than creating something from whole cloth.
A Fragmented Myth
Cyrus after his successful rebellion also made sure to tie himself even more closely to the existing dynasty by marrying Astyages’ daughter Amytis and even spared Astyages’ life. You would imagine that if Astyages had been the sort of tyrant to serve children at dinner he would not have survived the transition in power, though there might be reasons to keep him alive.
We are left with at the end of this dissection is not a clear cut origin story for Cyrus. It is instead a composite made up of narrative threads which have been tied together to simulate a complete tapestry. It was likely a founding myth shaped by the necessity of his rebellion against his grandfather, to legitimize his coup, and the natural distortion of events across time, distance, and language before it reached the Greek Herodotus. The tale, as told by Herodotus, of noble birth, miraculous survival, and rebellion is not completely false, but condenses facts into an easily digestible framework. In its various forms it likely served partly as a simplification to carry in oral memory and played on these tropes to help it stick. So like other myths it explains enough not to be believed to be completely false, while not claiming absolute truth. Herodotus likely did not invent the story. But he understood it, and other stories about Cyrus, and its usefulness. It made Cyrus legible to a world which thought it already knew him and his story and was ready to place him among other mythic founders. So, he had to be made to look like the others.
If you enjoyed this discussion of the myth and history of Cyrus please let me know, and if you are not already subscribed please do so. I have two more posts about Cyrus and his history upcoming as well as many other essays and discussions about topics I think you will really enjoy!