Herodotus’ account of Cyrus the Great’s death at the hands of Tomyris is awe-inspiring, funny, and, I’m lead to believe, almost certainly fake. Other histories paint him as a pretty chill guy who tolerated other religions in his kingdom and expanded through peaceful means. Yet Herotodus paints him as demanding Tomyris’ hand in marriage and invading when she said no.
Why did Herodotus do Cyrus dirty like that? Is there any chance he was telling the truth?
The issue is that there are a number of accounts of Cyrus’s death, all of them mutually exclusive. Herodotus may have relayed the version about losing against the Massagetae because it suited Greek notions of hubris - that even divinely ordained and immensely skilled men would be brought low by their own confidence, when victory is granted by fate, not human hands. If memory serves, Cyrus, in Herodotus’s account, ignores several warning signs and omens, and presses on with the campaign regardless of these ‘obvious’ signs from the gods.
On the other hand, considering that Herodotus, Father of History and Father of Lies, was basically trying to piece together the world’s first truly coherent narrative of world events across a vast gap of geography, languages, and time, in a period when travel was slow and dangerous, he may have just thought that that particular story was the most plausible rather than having any particular prejudice. Other than the general one against Persians as a Greek, considering the two ethnicities’ then-recent history of warring.
One thing I will note, though - while in general a chill guy, Cyrus the Great definitely expanded his empire through numerous wars. The thing is, many of his wars also included skillful appeals to the people he was conquering, which both created an advantage during wartime (as the hostility of the locals was often greatly decreased by an argument of “We are here to liberate you, and my NOBLE SOLDIERS are going to act like it”) and in the ensuing peace, by minimizing bad blood, so to speak, and limiting the antagonism of the war to that of one ruling class against another, rather than a foreign peoples against a native one.
Considering that Cyrus was praised as ‘father’ by many peoples whom he conquered even hundreds of years after his death and when the Persian Empire no longer controlled those areas, usually not how the conquered remember their conquerors, clearly the novel technique had some success!
Okay, so if Herodotus didn’t invent the story, who did? Was it the Scythians? One would think, given your account, that they wouldn’t have much of a grudge against him. But who else is gonna go to such lengths to badassify Tomyris and make her army look awesome?
Communication is hard - even the Persian Empire itself didn’t have a single unifying language, and standards for translation were… ad hoc.
If the story is untrue, it may have been storytellers confusing Cyrus with later Persian monarchs or military leaders - Herodotus was writing nearly 200 years after the fact, and the nomadic tribes to the north often did clash with the Persian Empire - sometimes with considerable success. Or it may have been intentional - a boring story about a no-one general or forgettable monarch getting his ass kicked by the Scythians doesn’t get attention - but make that general CYRUS THE GREAT HIMSELF, and suddenly the story becomes much more interesting when you tell it 'round the campfire.
And who amongst the great mass of people was studying or verifying history in a time before… uh… well, history? If they didn’t have access to the chronicles of the elite - who, themselves, were not always great about keeping accurate records - how would anyone verify what story was true and which was false about an event that happened generations ago?
Prominent figures often have tall tales told about them. Plenty of the exact same trope-filled stories - with serial numbers filed off and names replaced - have been reused and retold as supposed truth from antiquity to the modern day. And we in the modern day don’t even have the excuse of limited information at our fingertips!
People love stories. Truth… is often secondary. That’s why history as a discipline - sorting out truth from stories - was so novel - and so difficult!
Novel in Europe, I’ll grant. Thanks for the answers!
