Reproductive Retribution:
Cyrus’ Death and a Mother’s Revenge in the Histories

Yurie Hong (Arizona State University)

Book 1 of the Histories concludes with the vivid image of Cyrus’ head thrust into a wineskin filled with human blood (1.214.4)—his post-mortem punishment dispensed by Tomyris, the queen of the Massagetae, for the death of her son, who was captured while intoxicated by Persian wine.  In this paper I argue that the manner of Cyrus’ death represents an inverted birth by recalling the reproductive images that presage his birth: two dreams in which a flood of urine and a sprouting vine issue forth from his mother’s body.

The bloodying of Cyrus’ head is framed within the narrative as compensation for his “bloodying” of the prince by means of the “fruit of the vine”.  Cyrus’ crime against Tomyris is framed as a crime against her as a mother, and within this maternal context the submersion of Cyrus’ head in a wineskin full of blood evokes the image of a bloody fetus enclosed in the womb, a perversion of the gestational process whereby Cyrus, a fully grown king and the ruler of all Asia, is reduced to a bloody fetus and retrojected into the womb at the hands of a mother.

In the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus the womb is twice compared to a wineskin (Mul. 1.61, 2.170/viii. 124.15-21).  The wineskin was one of the dominant analogies for comprehending the physiological features and functions of the womb (Dean-Jones, 1994). In Herodotus’ Histories, the overwhelming majority of references to birth occur in narratives of kings and tyrants and act as a point of entry into a broader discourse on the transient nature of power and stability.  By exploiting the connotations of growth, change, and death inherent in reproductive imagery, Herodotus expresses in bodily terms the vicissitudes of human fortune of which power is so prominent an indicator.