Interview with Cyrus the Great
Recently our www.opednews.com correspondent tracked down the ancient Persian conqueror and empire-builder, Cyrus the Great, who lives a quiet afterlife in the Hanging Gardens Retirement Home.
OEN: Just for the record, can you state your name please?
Cyrus: Cyrus the Great, aka Kurosh-e Kabeer, Founder of the Persian Empire, Conqueror of Medea, Babylon, Phoenecia, Egypt, Anatolia, the Greek Isles, and a bunch of other places that frankly, I forget. The memory tends to go after a couple of millennia.
OEN: Didn’t you also conquer Lydia?
Cyrus: She might have been in my harem, I just can’t remember.
OEN: Hmm, maybe we should go on. No relation to Miley Cyrus, I presume, ha ha.
Cyrus: You don’t want to go there, young man, trust me.
OEN: Oh, sorry. So you lived from about 590-530 B.C. when you lost your head to the Scythian Queen Tomyris.
Cyrus: What of it? I’m not the first guy to lose his head over a woman. I kind of like the Rubens painting where they’re presenting Tomyris with my head. Did justice to my good looks.
OEN: You seem to have come to terms with it.
Cyrus: Well, the feminist movement really changed my perspective.
OEN: Oh, you mean in the 1970s?
Cyrus: No you idiot. The one from the late Roman Empire. And then there was 12th century Aquitane and Seneca Falls in 1848, of course
OEN: Of course. Can we get to the issue at hand? Iran, which is what we call Persia…
Cyrus: It’s what we called Persia till the Greeks renamed us.
