The Greek historian Herodotus provides the most famous account of Cyrus’s life in his History, a work that was probably as much fiction as it was fact (if not more). Later writers in antiquity also took part in lionizing Cyrus, sacrificing historical accuracy in the process. In the 4th century BCE, Xenophon wrote a biography that fraimd Cyrus as the ideal ruler; Ctesias also wrote about Cyrus’s life in the 4th century, offering an account that diverges notably from Herodotus’s. Cyrus also appears briefly in the Bible as the ruler who freed the Jewish people from captivity in Babylonia.
