Were Cyrus and Hadrian Liberal Democrats?

One of the highlights of the live broadcast review of the papers I was on tonight on PressTV, with host Amina Taylor and the Independent’s Amol Rajan, was a story actually from yesterday’s ‘Daily Telegraph’ about the rumpus that has blown up over the founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great (d. 529BC). A magnificent cylinder inscribed in cuneiform script, held by that amazing treasure-house, the British Museum, has been championed by the United Nations as the ‘first bill of human rights’ — over 2,000 years before Europeans got round to such things. Bunkum (or words to that effect), a learned German professor, Josef Wiesehoefer, has declared: it is nothing more than propaganda. Spin. Any illusions that Cyrus was some sort of premature Liberal Democrat should be abandoned forthwith, we are told. But as I pointed out on the programme tonight, Cyrus got quite a good write-up in the the Bible, as the liberator of Jews from Babylon and a man who believed in multiculturalism. On the other hand, to have built up one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen, he must have been a bit of a thug as well.

Curiously, this debate has coincided with the imminent opening of a remarkable exhibition at the British Museum (where else), about the (Spanish-born) Roman Emperor Hadrian. Known by schoolkids as the builder of that rather sad looking wall in the north country, Hadrian was, like Cyrus, an extraordinary empire-builder, a tactician of brilliance but also a skilled politician who knew how to put out his messages, Focus-style, in inscriptions and on coins (one delightfully trumpets his success in clearing off a large slice of public debt). Moreover, he was a lover who championed gay rights (even if he wouldn’t quite have termed things in that way), turning his deceased young male lover Antinous into a cult. The British Museum’s exhibition (which will open to the public on 24 July) is a revelation, both about the man and his legacy. So was he a first century Liberal Democrat? Let the scholars’ arguments rage.

Link: www.britishmuseum,org