What if the Persians under the emperor Xerxes had conquered mainland Greece in 480–79 B.C. and added a new satrapy to the already hypertrophied Achaemenid Persian Empire, the biggest thing yet in the storied Near East? It would have been largely due, ultimately, to the “Great King,” the “King of Kings,” Emperor Cyrus II the Great. Many such counterfactuals come to mind as we contemplate the extraordinary career and afterlife reception of Cyrus, the founder in about 550 B.C. of an empire destined to continue (minus mainland Greece) for over two centuries before it fell victim at last to the ambitions of another “Great,” Alexander III of Macedon, in 330 B.C.
How many others before or indeed after Cyrus might properly qualify for the title bestowed upon him by the biblical Deutero-Isaiah, messiah, the Lord’s anointed? Who else has a document named for him, the so-called Cyrus Cylinder, the text of which may be read in English (and French) translation under a replica within the U.N. building in New York? (The original is in the British Museum.) How many other figures in ancient history merited a (rather horrific, admittedly) death-scene painting by Rubens, based on a narrative by Herodotus? And so the superlatives go, on and on and on.
As do the variety of contemporary receptions, both Eastern and Western: a few movies, a novel, not to mention those among us—a Cyrus Vance, a Cy Twombly—who are endowed with his name in a latinized
