© 1998 Bernard SUZANNE   Last updated December 5, 1998 
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Cyrus the Great

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Cyrus, a Persian king of the Achemenides family, is considered the founder of the Persian Empire, that he ruled from 559 to 530. Starting as the sovereign of a relatively small country vassal of the Medes, he rebelled against them and managed to subject them, then to conquer Lydia and the cities along the coast of Asia Minor, and Babylon and Babylonia (539). It is the Empire he built, enlarged by his son Cambyses and structured and organized by Darius, which would eventually try unsuccessfully to conquer Greece during the so-called Medean Wars under the leadership first of Darius the Great, defeate at Marathon in 490 (1st Medean War), then of his successors Xerxes and Artaxerxes (2nd Medean War).
Cyrus had the reputation of a good leader (he is the one praised in the Bible from having freed the Jews lead captives to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar), even among the Greeks. In his Histories, when comparing Darius to his predecessors, Herodotus says : "it is because of this fixing of tribute [by Darius] and other similar ordinances that the Persians called Darius the merchant, Cambyses the master and Cyrus the father ; for Darius made petty profit out of everything, Cambyses was harsh and arrogant, Cyrus was merciful and always worked for their well-being" (Histories, III, 89).
The story of Cyrus is told by Herodotus in the second part of book I of his Histories (I, 95-216).
In the Alcibiades, Plato has Socrates, reading young Alcibiades' mind, suggests that Cyrus is probably the only leader he would accept to take as a model (Alcibiades, 105d), while in the Laws, taking a more measured approach when analysing past history, he has the Athenian stranger try to explain the ups and downs of Persia from Cyrus to Cambyses to Darius to Xerxes (Laws, III, 694a-696b), looking into education as the root of the problem (in the Alcibiades, at 121d-122a Socrates draws an idealized picture of the education of a Persian king to try and motivate Alcibiades into accepting his tutoring).

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Plato and his dialogues : Home - Biography - Works - History of interpretation - New hypotheses - Map of dialogues : table version or non tabular version. Tools : Index of persons and locations - Detailed and synoptic chronologies - Maps of Ancient Greek World. Site information : About the author.

First published January 4, 1998 - Last updated December 5, 1998
© 1998 Bernard SUZANNE (click on name to send your comments via e-mail)
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