Year 599 before Christ. The Taurus Mountains, somewhere in present-day Iranian Kurdistan. In a humble mud-brick hut without windows lives a couple of shepherds working for the great king Astyages of Media. He is called Mithridates, she is called Spakó.
Let me explain the key detail you need to keep in mind to understand this whole story, because without it nothing makes sense at all: the word Spakó, in the Median language of that era, meant simultaneously “bitch” or “she-wolf”. The same word for both animals. Remember this SMALL detail, because it returns at the end like a real boomerang and changes everything.
Well, this poor woman and her husband are about to get involved in the most epic and incredible story ever told, a story very similar to the legend of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Because, without knowing it, the she-wolf Spakó is about to save the life of a newborn royal child, the very one who, some years later, will become the founder of the Great Persian Empire: Cyrus II the Great. The man who will conquer Babylon and all of Mesopotamia, who in 539 BC will free the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and whose immense empire will stretch from the Mediterranean to India. An empire that will last more than two hundred years until Alexander the Great arrives from Macedonia and conquers it all…
And all of this, dear readers, thanks to the cool head of an illiterate shepherdess whose name precisely meant “She-Wolf”.
I’ll tell you the story because it’s truly “fucking awesome”…
The premonitory dream of a cruel and paranoid king
Cyrus’s grandfather, Astyages, is the king of Media and the most important man in the region. His only daughter, a beautiful princess, is called Mandane and one day — (well, more accurately, one night) — Astyages has one of those weird dreams, but I mean really fucking weird. Let me tell it just as the master Herodotus of Halicarnassus told it to us two thousand five hundred years ago in his nine books, without sweetening or censoring it: Astyages dreamed that his daughter Mandane crouched down in a very sensual way, lifted her skirt with a gaze loaded with eroticism, and started to piss with such abundance that her urine first filled the whole city of Ecbatana, then all of Media, and finally flooded all of Asia drowning his entire empire in piss. Yes, you read that right: an ocean of piss. The things those ancients had, eh?
The next morning, terrified, Astyages summoned all his powerful magi (who perhaps were the ancestors of the same guys who, a thousand years later, would go to Bethlehem with gold, frankincense and myrrh — who knows…), and asked them to interpret the dream. These sons of bitches, forgive my language, dear reader, didn’t think twice and told the king what some of you might already imagine: “My lord, your only daughter and heiress will very soon conceive a male son who will dethrone and murder Your Majesty, taking the entire empire.”
Astyages, who was an old guy already getting on in years, bipolar, cruel, superstitious and paranoid as hell — the ideal prototype of a modern psychiatry manual — decided to neutralize the ill-fated prophecy with a move as cunning as it was cowardly. Instead of marrying princess Mandane to a Median noble of her own dynastic stature (which would have meant having a dangerous son-in-law at court), he married her off to a perfect nobody: a small Persian vassal kinglet of his named Cambyses I, a man of peaceful character and moderate ambition. The idea was that the grandson, coming from a Persian father of a clearly inferior caste, would have no legitimacy whatsoever to threaten the throne of Media.
Well played, King Astyages. But the gods who dwell up there always laugh at the petty earthly plans of cruel and paranoid kings. Almost a year passed, and the beautiful Mandane finally became pregnant in Persia. And this is when things get really nasty. Because Astyages had a second dream, if possible even more perverse and Oedipal than the first: from the centre of his daughter’s naked body, right from her belly, sprouted an immense and infinite grapevine that grew and grew without stopping until with its shadow it covered all of Asia, leaving the whole Median empire in darkness. This time the so-called “magi” — (real “sons of a thousand fathers”, as Tuco would say in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) — without hesitation, and knowing that their answer would cost the life of a baby and perhaps also of his mother, told him the obvious: “Majesty, that child about to be born, your only grandson, will snatch your kingdom away.”
The next morning, Astyages didn’t pussyfoot around with tact or diplomacy. In fact, he had his daughter brought to Ecbatana in a hurry under some excuse related to her safety, and he placed armed guards over her day and night, always with the bullshit of wanting to watch over her wellbeing — although in reality it was so she wouldn’t escape back to Persia.
And when poor Mandane, completely in the dark about the grave matter concerning her little one, finally gave birth to a beautiful pink baby boy (whom, in agreement with her husband, she named Cyrus, after his paternal grandfather), the king took the newborn from her under the excuse that he had been born dead, and summoned the only person he trusted to handle that kind of “delicate matter”: the vizier Harpagus.
Harpagus, the vizier who knew how to do the math ten years ahead
This man, gifted with great strategic vision of the future and who knew how to predict what would happen ten years ahead, was the king’s Grand Vizier — that is, a kind of prime minister responsible for handling the murkiest, dirtiest and most reserved matters of the court.
He was a relative of Astyages — apparently (it’s not certain) the two men were cousins —, and Harpagus was extraordinarily loyal to his king. He was a very intelligent man. Too intelligent, in fact. That long-range vision was going to cost him very dearly, but it was also that same capacity to foresee the future that would allow him, some time later, to take revenge in the worst way imaginable. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The king received him alone, handed him the newborn wrapped in luxurious silk garments, and gave him a clear and direct order:
“Take him home and kill him. And if you disobey me, I’ll cut off your head and your whole family’s, without thinking twice.”
Harpagus nodded. “Yes, my lord. If it is your will that this child, son of your daughter, must die, then so be it.” He took the baby and went home. But on the way, the vizier was already doing the math in his head, and the math was coming out wrong, very wrong.
We can easily imagine what he must have thought, and what he must have said to his old lady once they were alone in their kitchen:
“Fuck, my dear wife, fuck… look what a huge mess the old man has put me in. Can you believe what an immense fucking job he’s making me do to Mandane — TO MANDANE! — who is like a daughter to me. Besides, we have to think that Astyages is already very old and has no male sons, only Mandane as his offspring. And when he dies, which by the look of it I reckon won’t be long, who the hell do you think will inherit the throne? Obviously Mandane and her husband Cambyses. And if I now kill their baby for them, the day they become king and queen they’ll order us to be flayed alive and hanged — me, you and our son. No, no… I have to think of something, and quickly.”
That cynical, that calculating, and that smart, Harpagus decided that the hand that killed the baby had to be that of a nobody, someone outside his family (because it was imperative the infant should die, or within a few days all hell would break loose). He would delegate the infanticide. And if anything happened afterwards, the nobody’s problem.
Mithridates and Spakó enter the stage (the shepherdess who was called She-Wolf)
Harpagus urgently sent for one of the shepherds who tended the king’s livestock in the highest and most remote mountains, the ones whose forests were most full of bears, lynxes, eagles, vultures and wolves. The perfect place to leave a baby exposed and let nature do the dirty work for them.
The shepherd selected was a certain Mithridates, married to that woman with the strange name, Spakó or “She-Wolf”. Who, by the way, was already pregnant and just about ready to give birth.
Mithridates arrived at Ecbatana scared to death, because a shepherd urgently summoned by the king’s Grand Vizier can only mean you’re going to lose either your livestock or your head. And usually it was the head that ended up rolling in the dust.
Once he had reached the vizier’s great mansion, Mithridates was put into a closed room where he could hear how the entire family was drowning in cries of grief and lamentations of pain. And it was right there that Harpagus, with eyes wet with tears but firm, handed him the baby dressed in luxurious garments and wrapped in silk blankets, with a brutal and direct order:
“Take this child to your mountain, leave him exposed to the cold and to the wild beasts, and let him die as soon as possible. In two weeks I will personally come up there to verify the state of the corpse. If I don’t find it, or you’ve done anything different from what I’m ordering you, I’ll torture you until you beg me for death, and I’ll gouge out your wife’s eyes.”
Mithridates took the baby without protest and, scared shitless, returned to his poor cabin in the mountains. And here, dear readers, is when the real protagonist of this whole story enters the stage.
Spakó’s brilliant plan
When, four days after he had left — two days to go to the city and two to return to his mountains — Mithridates arrived back at the cabin with the royal baby hidden in a basket, he found that his wife had also given birth to a male child the previous night. And, by one of those absurd and inexplicable cruelties of fate, Spakó’s child had been born dead. She had buried him provisionally in a small wooden box behind the cabin, waiting for Mithridates to come back so they could give him a formal burial.
Spakó, in fact, was still in bed, wrecked by the labour, by having had to dig that hole all by herself, and by the immense pain of her loss, when Mithridates came into the hut with Cyrus in his arms and told her the whole story. That the baby he was bringing home was none other than prince Cyrus, son of Mandane. That the wicked king Astyages had condemned him to death. That in fifteen days Harpagus or his envoys would come to verify the corpse personally. And that if they did not find the dead baby, the next corpses to appear up there would be him and his wife.
And then a light bulb of genius went on in Spakó’s head. And she said this:
“My husband, listen to me carefully. You say Harpagus’s spies will come looking for the corpse of a baby boy, right? Well, they shall have a corpse. But it won’t be that of this innocent child. It will be the corpse of ours. Right now we’ll dig up our son from his burial, dress him in these royal silks and clothes and leave him exposed on the mountain just as Astyages and Harpagus want. In fifteen days he’ll be so deteriorated and gnawed at by the bugs that nobody will be able to tell whether it’s really him or not. And so, well, mission accomplished from the king’s point of view. And we, meanwhile, will raise this child as if he were ours. That way nobody disobeys a direct order from the king, and our son gets a burial worthy of a prince instead of rotting in that dirty hole behind the cabin.”
Read it again slowly, because it’s one of the most morally tense decisions in all of ancient history. A woman who has just lost her baby proposes to use her own son’s corpse to save the life of another woman’s child. Not for money. Not for glory. Simply because her maternal instinct and her goodness do not allow her to let a living child die when there is already a dead child to whom nothing worse can happen.
Mithridates said “all right, woman, it’s very risky but I’m with you, let’s do it!” And they did. When Harpagus’s men climbed the mountain two weeks later, they found exactly what they were looking for: a dead baby dressed in royal silk, devoured by the wild beasts. They picked him up and went back to Ecbatana to give the report: mission accomplished, my lord. Little Cyrus is dead.
And Cyrus, meanwhile, serene and unaware of any of it, was suckling at the breasts of his new mother, the she-wolf Spakó.
Ten years of shepherding
Ten long years pass like this. Ten years in which the future emperor of the known world learns to milk cows, goats and sheep, learns to make cheese, to plough the fields and sow them, as well as learning to know the smallest secrets of the wild nature surrounding him… It doesn’t matter that it’s an extremely hard life and that very often there is only stale bread to eat: for Cyrus (or rather, for Ari, as he’s known in the village), the only thing that matters is climbing up the mountain, swimming in the icy lake and playing in the mud with the other children of the village.
Ari/Cyrus grows healthy, strong and very sharp, with the typical bossy character of someone with royal blood, even though he doesn’t know it. And Spakó raises him with love, never telling him the truth.
Ten years of pastoral peace for the future conqueror of the world. But Ahura Mazda, the most important of the Persian gods, has a very peculiar sense of humour and is preparing a surprise for us.
The game that exposed a dynasty
So it turns out that one day, when Cyrus was about ten years old, what had to happen happened. Let me tell you: one summer afternoon, all the kids of the village were playing in the street, imitating the structure of the Royal Court with king, queen, princes, knights, pages, slaves and what have you, and by unanimous decision of his own companions, once again Cyrus is chosen to play the king.
And so Cyrus, after having chosen as his queen the most beautiful girl in the village, begins to hand out administrative roles with great authority: “You are my vizier, you my guard, you my royal inspector and all of you are my soldiers.” In fact, that afternoon Cyrus builds a small fictional court perfectly articulated and just like his grandfather’s court in Ecbatana.
Among the children, however, there is one who is the son of a very important nobleman who lived in the surroundings, Artembares, a personal friend of King Astyages. And this noble child, very pissed off because Cyrus has taken for himself (albeit only fictionally) the most beautiful girl, the one he too had had his eye on, repeatedly disobeys a direct order from King Cyrus — well, King Ari. And the latter, without thinking twice, has him whipped on the back for insubordination.
The little nobleman returns home humiliated, crying like a sissy, with the red marks of the lashes on his back. The father, Artembares, the moment he sees his son in such a state, flies into a fury and, strong in his authority over the people of the area, immediately goes down to Ecbatana, dragging Mithridates and Cyrus along with him. When two days later he reaches the royal palace, he plants himself with his wounded son before his friend Astyages, demanding justice.
The old king sees how that child has been flogged by an inferior subject and orders the shepherd boy and his father to be admitted into his presence immediately. And when he sees Cyrus walk in through the door, he is left totally petrified and almost has a heart attack… The resemblance to his daughter Mandane and to himself is brutal. The forehead, the eyes, the jaw, the bearing, the way of speaking and gesturing give him away… that boy is a miniature Mandane and is himself. And the age — fucking hell, the age: ten years old. Exactly the years that his grandson had supposedly been dead. Everything matches.
Astyages then dismisses Artembares and his son with some excuse, swearing on his honour that the king will deliver justice and impose on that insolent little cowherd the punishment he deserves, orders Cyrus to leave the throne room, and finally remains alone with Mithridates.
“Cowherd” — he tells him, looking at him fixedly —, “tell me right now where this child has come from, because this lad isn’t made of the same flour as your sack. And if you lie to me, I’ll have you flayed, blinded and hanged.”
And as he says this, with his gaze he orders the guards to draw closer. In less than a nanosecond, Mithridates’s stomach melts and his tunic gets stained brown, and terrified he spills the whole truth to the king. The direct order from Harpagus, the royal baby that came into his hands, his own dead son, his wife’s plan, the ten years raising him as their own. He tells everything, begging forgiveness on his knees and pleading not to be quartered.
Harpagus’s dinner
That same afternoon, Astyages — having kept his grandson Cyrus and Mithridates with him — summons Harpagus to the palace. And this is when the most appalling scene of this entire story takes place, so prepare yourselves, because you have been warned.
Harpagus, who for ten years now had been thinking that his delegation of the crime had worked out perfectly, arrives at the palace happy and without suspecting anything at all, so when the king receives him smiling, with the shepherd Mithridates and Cyrus by his side, his world collapses. However, Astyages kindly invites him to enter the hall without fear. He explains who the boy is and that he knows everything (well, and Harpagus also knew it just by seeing Mithridates with that lad), and adds that he holds no grudge against him for his betrayal — quite the contrary, he has spent years gnawed by remorse and regretting the huge dirty trick done to his daughter, and is now most grateful that his grandson is alive.
“It is a miracle and we are going to celebrate it all together, Harpagus. We’ll do this: you go home now to tell your wife the good news, and on the way send your son to the palace so he can keep my grandson company, and tonight come yourself with your wife to dine with me. I haven’t seen your lady in many months either, and I’d love to greet her.”
Harpagus, relieved, returns home, talks to his wife and immediately sends to the palace his only son, a thirteen-year-old adolescent. When the boy arrives, Astyages coldly orders his executioner to behead the child and the cooks to prepare part of the flesh grilled, the other part boiled, and that everything be well seasoned like a delicacy. And that is exactly what they serve on the vizier’s plate during the banquet.
When Harpagus finishes dining, Astyages asks him whether “he has eaten well” and the vizier replies that the food was delicious. The old demon then orders a wicker basket placed beside him to be uncovered, and shows its contents to Harpagus: inside are the identifiable remains of his son — the head, an arm, the feet… “Do you recognize the animal you have just eaten?” he asks, smiling.
Harpagus, containing the horror with superhuman cold blood, answers him firmly: “Yes, my lord, not only do I recognize it, I will also add that everything my king decides or does is well done.” At that moment he stands up and asks permission to take home the remains in the basket so he can bury them with the proper ritual and honours due. Astyages, smiling, grants him this.
From now on, the vizier Harpagus, like a spider in its web, is going to wait patiently for the right moment to take his revenge on that old monster.
And here is when the legend of the she-wolf is born
The next morning, Astyages, in a really foul mood and wanting someone (his soothsayer priests) to pay the price for such an erroneous prophecy, goes back to consult the same magi from the first time about what to do with Cyrus. And these, whether out of pure incompetence or out of fear of ending up hanged for the mess their previous false prophecy had caused, tell him this: “My lord, it is absolutely clear to us that if the child in question has already ‘reigned’, even if only symbolically in his games, this means that the prophecy has already been fulfilled. You have nothing to fear from him; let him live…”
Astyages this time doesn’t believe a single word of those lying priests and sends them all to the gallows. As for Cyrus, on the other hand, he sends him back to Persia with his parents, Mandane and Cambyses.
And here comes the key moment. The one that justifies the title of this article.
When Cyrus arrives in Persia and is reunited for the first time with his biological parents, during the following months he won’t stop talking to them about his adoptive parents, and very especially he talks to them about his mother the She-Wolf: “Spakó this, Spakó that, Spakó gave me milk, Spakó sang to me, Spakó protected me.” And it’s logical: for that ten-year-old boy catapulted into a royal palace with new parents he doesn’t yet know, the She-Wolf is his mother, she’s the one who suckled him and saved his life.
Mandane and Cambyses listen to the boy talking all day about “Spakó”, and the light bulb of royal marketing goes off in their heads. Because, as I already explained at the beginning of the article, Spakó in Median language meant bitch or she-wolf. It is the same word. And a prince of royal blood calling “mum” a She-Wolf gives you the perfect tale to legitimize a future king and create a legend.
Mandane and Cambyses then launch the most efficient propaganda operation in the ancient world. They spread the word through every Persian village: “Our son Cyrus was suckled by a sacred she-wolf in the heart of the forest. A divine she-wolf. That is why he survived his grandfather’s death sentence. That is why he is invincible. That is why Cyrus the Great has been chosen by the gods…”
The Matrecano moral
Great civilizations always need a founding myth. Rome needed Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf on the banks of the river Tiber. Persia needed its greatest king, Cyrus II, to be suckled by a she-wolf in the Taurus. And the two myths, in reality, are the same myth repeated less than two centuries apart from one another. For the legend of Romulus and Remus is set in 753 BC, and the events of baby Cyrus took place around 599 BC — barely 150 years later. Who copied whom? I leave the final verdict to my readers.
I drink to your health, dear she-wolf Spakó, wherever you may be. And thank you for saving Cyrus for us…
This story is told in detail in the first book of Herodotus, “Histories”, also known as “The Book of the Muse Clio”. I have rewritten and commented on it in my own version of the Histories Reloaded 2.0, where Herodotus sits down at a table with a 21st-century Italian writer named David, and together they go through, chapter by chapter, what really happened and what has come down to us distorted.
✠ David S. Matrecano