This privileged religious situation is justified by the myth of the founding of the Achaemenid dynasty. According to Herodotus 1. 107–17, after two dreams, which the Magi interpreted as bad omens for his throne, Astyages, king of the Medes, married his daughter to a Persian (hence a man of inferior race) named Cambyses, and when she bore a son, Cyrus, Astyages ordered that he be killed. But the child was saved and brought up by the wife of a herdsman, Mithradates.31 Cyrus grew up to adolescence among the young herdsmen, but his princely bearing betrayed him and his identity was discovered.
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