King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the GreatPaleoJudaica posts on the book are here and here.
by Matt Waters.
Oxford, 255 pp., £21.99, September 2022, 978 0 19 092717 2... Why should we care? Cyrus has received almost universal praise since his own time, and in ancient traditions is famed as a just ruler. Plato presents him as a guardian of free speech and reasoned argument, Cicero as a model of righteous empire. According to Isaiah, he was destined to ‘make justice shine upon the nations’. In the 20th century, Iranian shahs put him at the centre of national ideology, as an emblem of the country’s pre-Islamic past. Cyrus has long held out an alluring prospect of benevolent tyranny, and of liberty through order and imperial subjection.
This is, of course, an illusion. The peaceful capture of Babylon is remembered over the brutal battle for Opis a few weeks earlier. The return of the exiled Israelites is commemorated, but not the plight of the Phokaians, who fled a Persian siege of their city. The evangelicals are closer to the mark: Cyrus didn’t do things because they were good, but because they worked. What we make of that tells us more about ourselves than it does about him.
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