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.

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