Or so the legends had it. It is the nature of great men to attract tall stories, and it may be that the early proofs of Cyrus’ destiny were not quite so manifest as the Persians would later claim.14 Even so—and irrespective of whether there had truly been prophecies—his potential was evidently sufficient to alarm Astyages: for the Median king, overlord of the Zagros, and wary of high-flying vassals, decided, after six years of watching his grandson on the Persian throne, that Cyrus was altogether too able and dangerous to be left in place for long. Accordingly, in 553 BC, he mustered his fearsome horsemen and struck south. Heavily outnumbered, the Persians resisted ferociously. When it appeared that surrender was imminent, even their women took to the battlefield, to encourage Cyrus and his warriors to fight on. For three years, the conflict convulsed the Zagros—and then, suddenly, in 550 BC, it was over. Even the gods, it appeared, were taken by surprise. They began appearing in the dreams of neighboring kings to broadcast the startling news. “Cyrus scattered the large armies of the Medes with his small army. And he captured Astyages, King of the Medes. And he took him to his country as captive.”15 Not since the downfall of Assyria had there been an upset on such a scale.
How had it come about? Yes, Cyrus had proved himself a steely and indomitable opponent. As had his Persian subjects, a people so toughened by poverty that they had uncomplainingly endured the sternest hardships—even, notoriously, to the extent of wearing leather trousers. Yet Astyages, with all the resources of a mighty empire behind him, would surely still have triumphed—had he not been grievously stabbed in the back. The story of his betrayal was a strange one—and, as the years passed, the retellings of it grew ever more fantastical and grotesque. The bare essentials were not in doubt. Harpagus, commander of the Median army, and most prominent of the clan chiefs, had deserted to Cyrus, leading a rebellion in mid-battle, and taking Astyages captive. But why such treachery? Because—so the story went—Harpagus, a close kinsman of Astyages, had simultaneously been bound by the most terrible ties of obligation to the King of Persia. It was Harpagus, according to the Medes, who had been charged with the murder of the infant Cyrus, a task which—dissembling—he had claimed to have carried out. Years later, when the truth had at last emerged, Astyages was rumored to have wreaked a bloody revenge, butchering Harpagus’ son, jointing the corpse, and then serving it dressed as mutton to the unsuspecting father. Harpagus himself, having consumed his own child, had swallowed the insult too, and remained a loyal, if chastened, servant of his king. Or so he had pretended. His act had certainly been convincing, for when the war against the Persians broke out, Astyages had appointed Harpagus to the supreme command. Not the cleverest piece of man-management, perhaps—and, in reality, so foolish as to be palpably absurd.
So how had this tall story ever come to be believed? Maybe—somewhere within the shadow play of implausibility and rumor—a faint hint of the truth could still be glimpsed? The family relationship between Astyages and Cyrus had mirrored the close ties, of culture as well as blood, which had always bound the Persians to the Medes. Both peoples, after all, were Aryan; and, to an Aryan, it was only the “anairya”—the non-Aryan—who was foreign. Indeed, any of Astyages’ courtiers who were suffering from nostalgia had only to look south for a glimpse of the good old days. Like their Median cousins, the Persians were at heart a nomadic people, and their country, “rich with good horses, rich with good men,”16 had remained as much a confederation of different clans as a state. “King of Anshan” though he was, Cyrus had also claimed his throne by virtue of his status as his people’s greatest chieftain—for he was head of the Achaemenids, the leading family of the Pasargadae, the leading Persian tribe. Master both of the stiff rituals of a Near Eastern court and of assemblies of wild horsemen wheeling beneath the open sky, of ancient cities and of the hills and plains, of the Persians’ future and of the memories and customs of their past, Cyrus was adept at playing all these roles, and more. As a result, Persia had largely avoided the tensions that afflicted Media: between a king impatient with the traditional tribal structures of his people and a nobility still defined by them. The Median clan chiefs, suffering from the authoritarian ambitions of Astyages, had taken note. Over time, the contrast between their own king and Cyrus must have struck them as ever more pronounced. It was almost certainly this which had persuaded Harpagus to take his fateful step. “So it was that the Persians, who had once been the slaves of the Medes, became their masters,”17 and Cyrus, marching into Ecbatana, reaped the due rewards of his forbearance, acuity and charm.
Nor, even after this first great victory, did the subtlety of his balancing act fail. The kings of Assyria, honing the traditional rights of conquest to a peak of savagery, had prescribed unspeakable cruelties for defeated enemies, but Cyrus, prompted by calculation and—no doubt—by temperament as well, preferred the course of mercy. Having lured important swaths of the Median aristocracy into his camp, he resisted the temptation to treat their countrymen as slaves. Even Astyages, rather than being flayed, fed to animals or impaled, was pensioned off into princely retirement. True, the treasury was emptied and its contents carted away to Anshan, but Ecbatana was otherwise spared the fate of Nineveh. Cyrus had no intention of destroying the most strategically sited city in the Zagros. The most pleasant, too—for if, in winter, the cold was savage, with blizzards blocking off the passes, in summer, while the lowlands of Persia burned, Ecbatana was a paradise of greenness, the mountain peaks behind it still capped with cooling snow, the slopes below the walls terraced with orchards and gardens, the air bright and crystal clear. Not only did the city remain the capital of Media, but it became, during the broiling summer months, the effective capital of Cyrus’ whole empire. No wonder that the Medes were able to feel, if not exactly the equals of their conquerors, then at least associates in the great adventure of their new king’s reign.
And that adventure, as events were soon exhilaratingly to prove, had only just begun. The downfall of a king as great as Astyages had sent shock waves throughout the whole Near East. Not only the Median Empire but the decades-old international status quo had been left in rubble. Suddenly, it seemed, there was everything to play for, and neighboring great powers, still barely able to take the Persians seriously, began to wonder what pickings might be on offer for themselves. In 547 BC, Croesus, the King of Lydia, led a huge army over the River Halys to find out. Cyrus, having descended from the Zagros, advanced hurriedly to meet him, the ruined cities of Assyria standing sentinel as he passed by, nothing now but dust-blown and jumbled heaps of mud, mute witnesses to the precariousness of power. Yet such a lesson might serve an ambitious man as inspiration as well as warning, and Cyrus, even though it was by now late in the campaigning season, pressed on urgently, eager to engage Croesus. As before, when the Lydians had met with the Medes, an indecisive battle was fought; but this time there was no eclipse, and no end to the war. Instead, with winter drawing on, Croesus withdrew to his capital, Sardis, never imagining that Cyrus would dare to follow him, for the city was so far to the west that the Aegean lay only three days’ journey beyond it—a tremendous distance from the Median frontier. But the Persians did not retreat. Instead, braving the bitter cold, they shadowed Croesus, never alerting him to their presence, allowing him time to dismiss his allies, lurking and waiting for his conscripts to melt away. Then, with Sardis denuded, Cyrus struck. Frantically, Croesus cobbled together what few troops remained. A desperate battle, with the Lydians staking everything on a final cavalry charge—and then the storming of Sardis, and the capture of Croesus himself. Far off in the Fertile Crescent, the details were recorded with a terseness that hardly hinted at their seismic effect: “[Cyrus] defeated the King [of Lydia], seized his possessions, and stationed his own garrison there.”18 Over the Lydian Empire itself, the news of Croesus’ downfall burst with such a thunderclap that the priestess of one temple was said to have sprouted a beard from the shock. As well she might have done, for in the space of just six years, the Persians, so small in numbers, once so backward and obscure, had made their kingdom the greatest power in the world.