26 The Story of Young Cyrus (§§107-130)

Astyage’s historical life is wholly dependent on that of his grandson Cyrus; though important, the role of Astyages is that of a supporting player. One night Astyages dreams that his daughter Mandane urinated so greatly that she flooded Ecbatana and all Asia. He explains his dream to interpreters of one of the Median tribes, the Magi, about whose report we are told only that it frightens the king. In response to the inter­pretation, when Mandane becomes of marriageable age, he marries her far beneath her rank, to a Persian (we recall that the Persians were made subjects by Phraortes) of peaceful disposition (107). Herodotus points out that Asytages considered even a noble Persian like Cambyses far inferior to a Mede of middling stature. This detail is of considerable significance, for it suggests the suffering into which the Magi’s interpretation thrust the king. Every father wishes the best for his children, and every father of a daughter, and most especially of a daughter who happens to be an only child (as is the case we learn with Mandane [109]), wants his daughter to marry well. He wants his daughter to marry a man of as noble a stature and of as splendid a character as possible. That Astyages would, no doubt out of some fear for himself, marry his daughter to one he himself considered inferior, tells us how great the terror must have been and also how anguished the decision must have been for him.

As for the dream, it is the first of several mentions of urination in the History. Later we shall learn that Persians are forbidden to urinate in rivers (1.139) and we shall see Pheros, the Egyptian king who offended the Nile, cured by washing his blind eyes with a chaste woman’s urine (2.111). How the Magi arrive at their warning is neither explained nor questioned, but it must have been very terrible to ask him to arrange an inferior marriage for his child.

The Median king has a second dream about his daughter after she was married. In the dream a vine that shaded all Asia seemed to grow from her private parts. Again terrified, he again sends for the Magi, who explain to Astyages that the dream means his daughter will bear a son who will become king instead of him. Now these dreams and their interpretations are odd. If the first dream was interpreted correctly, the king ought to have warded off any possible danger by marrying Mandane to Persian Cambyses.­ But we are not told what the interpretation was, nor if the danger had been of a contingent nature so that the actions taken should have sufficed. In other words, if the Magi had told Astyages, “If you marry your daughter Mandane off to a Persian of humble status, you will be safe,” there should have been no need for further action.

The interpretation of the second dream is clearly not of the contingent kind. It says unambiguously that the child of Mandane will become king in his place (ὄτι μέλλοι ὁ τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτοῦ γόνος βασιλεύσειν ἀντὶ ἐκείνου). The prophecy puts Astyages in the exact same position as the dream about Atys did Croesus: to be consistent he should either wholly disbelieve the prophecy and ignore it or he ought to realize that the prophecy is not contingent and therefore cannot be averted. Instead, he behaves contradictorily: he both believes the prophecy and tries to avert it. He will of course be as unsuccessful as the Lydian king. His situation is morally polar to that of Croesus, however: Croesus, like Oedipus, was trying to avert the oracle to save a life; Astyages, like Oedipus’s father Laius, was trying to avert an oracle to destroy a life.

We should contrast here, as we must throughout the History, the ­situation of the current prominent character to that of Tellus of Athens, whom Solon and Herodotus have established as the canon of human happiness. One element of Tellus’s happiness was the excellence of his sons and the fact that Tellus lived to see his grandchildren grown. Asytages, for all his wealth and power, has but an only daughter, whom he has married to an inferior man. His only grandson he orders destroyed to prolong his own rule. Who, indeed, would not prefer to be Tellus over Asytages (and we need not even consider Asytages’s end)?

Astyages sends for Harpagus, a Mede about whom we have already heard (1.80), as he was the one who suggested to Cyrus the clever stratagem of spooking Croesus’s cavalry by the use of camels. Harpagus is here described as a relative and the trustiest of all the Medes and as the overseer of all of the king’s possessions (1.108). Astyages orders him to perform the assigned task and not to fail lest he bring ruin on his own house. He is to kill Mandane’s child and to bury him as he sees fit. Harpagus answers, “O king, you have never seen anything displeasing in me, and we shall take care not to make a mistake in time hereafter. If it is dear to you that this happen, it is necessary that I carry it out obediently.”

It is perhaps instructive to observe the difference between the current situation and that which occurred when Candaules asked his most intimate associate, the one who was “most pleasing” to him, to perform an ­unsuitable act. Then Gyges, though a man of far humbler rank than Harpagus and no relation to the king, presented a strong argument against doing what he was told. It is true of course that the argument fell on deaf ears, but Gyges had felt free enough to present it. Here Harpagus, a kinsman of the king, is asked to kill a child and a relation, an action more awful than seeing a naked queen, and there is no discussion with the monarch. There is no questioning this type of ruler. We see here the operation of Deioces’s ceremonial of forcing those who would deal with the king to go through intermediaries like Harpagus, and also the consequences of such ceremonial: there is a total absence of debate but all the opportunity for cruel and arbitrary orders. Thucydides has Pericles describe the full and free consideration of an action as one of the glories of Athenian democracy (2.40); the situation in Ecbatana is the antithesis of such democracy.

Still, complete obedience to the king is not what it appears. Harpagus carries the child dressed for death to his house and weepingly tells his wife what he has been ordered to do. He then explains why he will not follow the orders: first, the child is a relation; second, Astyages has no male heir; third, if Mandane should come to the throne, he would be in the greatest danger for having killed her son. All these sound to us like splendid reasons to save the child; the steward of the house of Astyages reaches a different conclusion: the child must be murdered, but someone else must do it. Harpagus thus emerges as just another self-interested individual, certainly no fighter for virtue and freedom.

Harpagus sends for Astyages’s herdsman Mitradates (110), who grazes the flocks in a mountainous area full of wild beasts. He lives with his wife Bitch (Cyno) north of Ecbatana.^[1] Harpagus instructs the slave to expose the child on a desolate hill, warning that if he does not, he will perish most miserably. As each who has been ordered by his superior to kill the child received also a dire warning not to fail, and as none did as he was told, we can see that efficient execution of orders is not a virtue of this Oriental despotism.

Mitradates’s wife, who was due to give birth, “as God would have it,” delivered while the herdsman was with Harpagus. Each, the historian tells us, was afraid for the other: the one for his pregnant wife, the other for her husband, who has so unusually been called to his master’s presence. Upon returning home, Mitradates explains his instructions to Bitch, telling also details about the child’s parentage that he had learned from servants as he was leaving the city. He shows the baby to Bitch, who explodes into tears and begs him not to expose it. She cannot convince him, for he is very fearful of Harpagus’s threats. Finally she reveals that their own child was still­ born. She then begs Mitradates to take their dead baby, expose it, and keep the royal child as their own. In this way their child will have a royal funeral, and the other will not lose his life (112).^[2]

The resourcefulness of this poor woman is remarkable, as is her boldness. She conceals her own suffering from the death of a child in her eagerness to have another. That she was hopeful and anxious the historian has pointed out in the statement about the couple’s mutual concern. The conversation of these lower class individuals is most revealing: for one of the few times in the History, we see a discourse between a man and a woman. It is a great contrast to the scene of Harpagus and his unnamed wife; she, for all her status, was limited to asking her husband what he would do.

The closest antiquity ever seems to get to equal opportunity is these stories of the lowly origins of its most glorious leaders. Thus, Moses was born a slave; Romulus, the offspring of a rape, was nourished by a wolf;^[3] and now Cyrus the Great is rescued by humble herdsmen. One can only guess the effect of this kind of story upon the popular psyche. Perhaps it connects the rulers with the people: they seem so remote, so much to inhabit a distant and altogether different world as to be almost another species of animal. These stories draw them into an understandable and familiar world.

The herdsman follows his wife’s suggestion in all its particulars. He leaves one of his subordinates (there are many layers of hierarchy here) to guard the exposed child while he goes to tell Harpagus that the baby is ready for burial. In this way the royal baby is given a new name and is brought up by the herdsman’s wife (113).

The story shifts to Cyrus’s tenth year, when through a series of events his identity becomes known. In play Cyrus (though he is not yet addressed by this name) is chosen king by his playmates (114). As “king” he gives orders to the children, assigning them various positions. But one of the children, the son of the high-ranking Artembares, refuses to follow the puerile king’s orders, and Cyrus has his child-attendants whip him. The lad complains to his father Artembares, who in turn angrily complains to Astyages that the son of a lowly herdsman has abused a noble child. Astyages, amazingly, not only listens to Artembares but is eager to avenge the boy and orders the cowherd’s son brought into his presence. The still unidentified Cyrus admits that he had ordered the lad whipped and proudly asserts that he had it coming, for he was unwilling to obey the orders of a properly chosen king.

When it comes to humor, there are some jokes that achieve their effect entirely at the end, when after a long build-up the punchline is delivered; there are other jokes in which there are funny lines all the way through. In the current tale of the recognition of Cyrus, the outcome is most startling, but, like the second kind of joke, there are startling points throughout. We are asked to believe that when a nobleman’s son is abused by a mere peasant’s child, the nobleman would go to the king of an empire for satisfaction, taking along the abused son whose bruised shoulders he can show as evidence. Is a noble too intimidated to take the matter into his own hands? This part of the story perhaps shows how fearsome Astyages really is: even his herdsmen are protected from danger by their relationship with their owner, to such an extent that when the herdsman’s son is rude to another child even a nobleman is reluctant to take independent action. Then we are asked to believe that the king actually would intervene personally in a dispute arising out of children’s play. If the whole incident was not to be ignored, at least the king would send some intermediary to deal with the issue, as he had in the attempt to destroy his grandson. What does this kind of micro-management mean for the empire?^[4]

The king becomes more and more suspicious as the boy explains himself (116). He has a certain look that reminds Astyages of himself; he is the age his grandson would be if he had lived, and the boy’s manner is too free for his station in life. The story clearly shows, I think, where Herodotus comes down on the debate between nomos and physis, between nurture and nature. There really is a kingly bloodline that will emerge even when suppressed by a lower-class environment. There is the clear implication that something royal about Cyrus made him stand out among his playmates (even when there were aristocrats among them) as suited for kingship. This demeanor was conspicuous in the child’s comportment before the king and, combined with what should normally be taken as coincidental circumstances of dubious evidential value, was enough to provoke Astyages’s suspicions. We have seen this predilection to rule in Deioces, the first of the line, and we have seen its evolution through the family members. We observe the strength of this tendency as it is inherited by Cyrus, whose connection to Deioces is through his mother: it was strong enough to survive contamination from the seed of the mild-mannered and sweet-­tempered Cambyses. We who are parents can only wonder what it must have been like for the humble Mitradates and Bitch to bring up so imperious a child (though perhaps it is the universal experience of parents that all children by nature tend to behave like little Napoleons, a tendency that good rearing chastens over time).^[5]

The views of Herodotus often emerge, I think, in the motives that he attributes to his historical figures; this is of course perfectly logical. Since he could not read their minds he introduces into their heads the kinds of motives that he feels are appropriate to them. Let me emphasize the words “that he feels.” Thus the attributed motives are an amalgam of Herodotus’s views and those of the character. Now the historian had described as Deioces’s motive for establishing the elaborate ceremonial the avoidance of envy on the part of Deioces’s peers. Their natural feeling would be that since Deioces was not superior to them he was no more worthy to be king than they. Deioces’s motive in creating the distance between himself and the others was the idea that his peers would not recognize any natural or divine right to kingship on his part. In other words, neither Deioces nor his peers believed in a natural aristocracy, a natural right to rule. When now Astyages sees certain kingly qualities in Cyrus and assumes that there­ fore he must be related to himself, he is embracing the idea of an innate aristocracy. The views that Pericles expresses in his funeral oration (Thucydides, 2.37) surely had currency while Herodotus was being read in Athens, and probably no reader would fail to see the marked difference between Pericles’s praise of Athens—that the laws afforded equal justice to all in private and equal opportunity to advancement in public life, advancement depending only on merit. There is no idea in Pericles of a closed aristocracy maintained by blood.

The king is so persuaded by his suspicions that he responds with thun­derstruck silence. He dismisses Artembares abruptly, then interviews the cowherd by himself. In response to Astyages’s question of where he found the child, he first answers that the lad is his own, but after threats he tells the truth and ceases to be a concern to the king. The king summons Harpagus (117), who sees the cowherd in the king’ presence and tells the whole story, including the threats he had made to the cowherd if he did not watch the baby die. Though Astyages is furious with Harpagus, he shows no anger. Once again we see how these barbarians can hide the intensity of their feelings.^[6] He claims that the matter has turned out well and asks Harpagus and his son to join the newly discovered Cyrus as his guests for dinner that they might make thanksgiving to the gods for saving his grandson. When Harpagus’s son arrives, Astyages has him chopped up and cooked, some roasted and some stewed; when Harpagus arrives for dinner, he is served his son and eats. When he has finished dining, Astyages asks him how he liked the food and has a basket brought in with the dismembered head and feet of his guest’s son. Astyages shows the remains to his kinsman and asks him whether he knows what he is eating, to which Harpagus, showing no signs of distress, answers, ‘‘Yes, and whatever the king does is pleasing.” He gathers what remains of his son’s flesh and goes home, Herodotus supposes, to bury it.

The story is a horrific tale of callous murder and cruelty. Harpagus had planned to escape culpability for the death of the grandson by not perform­ing the deed himself; as we have seen, his motive in asking the herdsman to kill the boy was not actuated by charity but by self-interest. There is poetic justice in that he and not the herdsman is punished. The slaugh­tered child is considered merely Harpagus’s possession; his suffering has no bearing on the story: Herodotus has told us nothing about him except for the fact of his existence. Harpagus’s crime had been a failure to carry out the tyrant’s cruel orders. The story will surely give a shudder to Herodo­tus’s audience. It is one thing to hear this kind of tale in the long-ago myth of Atreus and Thyestes, and quite another to think of such things happen­ ing in the recent history of one’s rival nations. Surely the Herodotean prop­aganda value of the story would be to remind the Greeks of how lucky they are to be free Greeks and not subject to barbarians. Since the danger of Persia still looms great, perhaps they ought to work together for peace. To be sure, one can never know whether Herodotus intends this message or is simply telling an exciting, blood-curdling tale. Yet there is, I think, always present in the text a vital joy in having escaped Persian conquest.

The story of Harpagus’s punishment becomes even more awful in light of Astyages’s continued reckoning. He calls the same Magi as ten years earlier, the ones who had interpreted for him the dreams about Mandane and asks them what they make of the way the events have unfolded (120). They reply that since Cyrus has been named by his playmates as king, the prophecy in the dream has been fulfilled and Astyages has nothing more to fear. Astoundingly, he says that this has been his own view, and he asks again for the safest path. They reiterate that the prophecy has been fulfil­ led, explaining that dreams often turn out in ways that are less momentous than what at first appeared. And they affirm that their own safety depends upon him, for should Cyrus, a Persian, become king they would lose the honor of the rule (since nationality is determined by paternity-though Cyrus’s mother was a Mede, his father was a Persian).

Now if Astyages had come to the conclusion that the dream was fulfilled by the playful, puerile kingship, then the punishment of Harpagus was a response not to any real and present danger but to the failure personally to kill the infant Cyrus. As the king’s promise of a thanksgiving to celebrate Cyrus’s deliverance had the ring of truth to Harpagus, the brutality that came about must have been not only unexpected but, under the circumstances, unjustified. An event that justifies thanksgiving does not warrant so cruel a punishment. The effect of the whole is to characterize Astyages as a savage monster, like Cambyses later, who, though grateful that some servants did not carry out his orders to kill Croesus, still punishes them with death for not carrying out the orders (3.36).^[7]

Astyages, pleased with the reports of the Magi, joyously sends Cyrus to his birth parents. He tells them the story he had learnt from the servants on the road (for his grandfather did not fill him in on the details), praising the cowherd’s wife Bitch, who had reared him. Herodotus reports that the birth parents exploited the name to make the rescue of Cyrus seem the result of divine intervention. Thus, Herodotus has managed to preserve one of the miraculous events of the story while at the same time placing the miracle into clearly human terms. Yet one still wonders why the parents would have wanted a divine element to their son’s story unless they had great plans for him.