Autocrat- A Roman History Podcast
Aug 26, 2026 · 42 min · 10 segments
We are joined by Sariel and Umberto from So You Think You Can Rule Persia to discuss Cyrus the Great. At about the time that Servius Tullius is ruling as the sixth (or perhaps seventh) king of Rome…
So before we get onto this miracle baby and the prophecy child-
[laughs]
... let's briefly touch on his ancestry.
And from how I understand it, that's very murky and messy, with Achaemenes being either his great-great or fourth great-grandfather, depending which source you read.
It's complicated.
Mm-hmm.
But on his mother's side, he's descended from the kings, or emperors I suppose, of Media, right?
Yeah, that's right.
So essentially what Media was at the time.
And the first two are extremely dubious, as in we may have some sort of source in Assyrian records that mentions they exist, but they may have been, like, local warlords and nothing more.
They really had limited reach.
But then eventually, when the Assyrian Empire f- begins to fall, we get Cyaxares, who is, essentially founds a proper empire, and it sort of spreads from most of Iran to northern Mesopotamia, part of the Caucasus, and a lot of, uh, Anatolia.
And the only reason we know anything about him is because of the story with Cyrus, 'cause otherwise he's just keeping the status quo and carrying on.
And the Medians are another Iranic people where they are distant cousins of the Persians, but they live in sort of in the northern bit of Iran just below the Caspian Sea.
That's where their origin is.
And also a fun thing about, uh, Achaemenes and Cyrus's paternal line is that we don't really know if Achaemenes existed in general.
So we have a vague understanding that his father, Cambyses I, and his grandfather Cyrus I vaguely existed.
Like, we have some inscriptions that say here they are.
But then when you go above that, so to Teispes and then Achaemenes, we don't really know if they're real because this is a chronology that's given much later on by Darius the Great, because Darius is either-
Right
... a very, very distant cousin of Cyrus, and so he needs to draw back this family tree so that he's an Achaemenid all along, or he is just some random noble who thought he'd claim this ancestry and would just claim Cyrus as part of his own family.
So before we get onto this miracle baby and the prophecy child-
[laughs]
... let's briefly touch on his ancestry.
And from how I understand it, that's very murky and messy, with Achaemenes being either his great-great or fourth great-grandfather, depending which source you read.
It's complicated.
Mm-hmm.
But on his mother's side, he's descended from the kings, or emperors I suppose, of Media, right?
Yeah, that's right.
So essentially what Media was at the time.
And the first two are extremely dubious, as in we may have some sort of source in Assyrian records that mentions they exist, but they may have been, like, local warlords and nothing more.
They really had limited reach.
But then eventually, when the Assyrian Empire f- begins to fall, we get Cyaxares, who is, essentially founds a proper empire, and it sort of spreads from most of Iran to northern Mesopotamia, part of the Caucasus, and a lot of, uh, Anatolia.
And the only reason we know anything about him is because of the story with Cyrus, 'cause otherwise he's just keeping the status quo and carrying on.
And the Medians are another Iranic people where they are distant cousins of the Persians, but they live in sort of in the northern bit of Iran just below the Caspian Sea.
That's where their origin is.
And also a fun thing about, uh, Achaemenes and Cyrus's paternal line is that we don't really know if Achaemenes existed in general.
So we have a vague understanding that his father, Cambyses I, and his grandfather Cyrus I vaguely existed.
Like, we have some inscriptions that say here they are.
But then when you go above that, so to Teispes and then Achaemenes, we don't really know if they're real because this is a chronology that's given much later on by Darius the Great, because Darius is either-
Right
... a very, very distant cousin of Cyrus, and so he needs to draw back this family tree so that he's an Achaemenid all along, or he is just some random noble who thought he'd claim this ancestry and would just claim Cyrus as part of his own family.
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