Book Review: Cyropaedia

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In 370 BC, Xenophon noticed that everyone sucked except Cyrus the Great:

The thought once occurred to us how many republics have been overthrown by people who preferred to live under any form of government other than a republican, and again, how many monarchies and how many oligarchies in times past have been abolished by the people […]

And in addition to this, we reflected that cowherds are the rulers of their cattle, that grooms are the rulers of their horses, and that all who are called herdsmen might properly be regarded as the rulers of the animals over which they are placed in charge ... we have never known of a herd conspiring against its keeper, either to refuse obedience to him or to deny him the privilege of enjoying the profits that accrue. At the same time, herds are more intractable to strangers than to their rulers and those who derive profit from them.

Men, however, conspire against none sooner than against those whom they see attempting to rule over them. Thus, as we meditated on this analogy, we were inclined to conclude that for man, as he is constituted, it is easier to rule over any and all other creatures than to rule over men.

But when we reflected that there was one Cyrus, the Persian, who reduced to obedience a vast number of men and cities and nations, we were then compelled to change our opinion and decide that to rule men might be a task neither impossible nor even difficult, if one should only go about it in an intelligent manner […]

We have therefore investigated who he was in his origin, what natural endowments he possessed, and what sort of education he had enjoyed, that he so greatly excelled in governing men.

The result was Cyropaedia, a biography of Cyrus. Modern historians debate how much of it was made up. Probably it was a lot. Better to think of it as a combination biography of Cyrus and manifesto about political philosophy.

Xenophon was a mercenary who fought beside Persians, making him potentially qualified to know things about Cyrus. He was a member of Socrates’ inner circle along with Plato, making him potentially qualified to know things about political philosophy (Plato’s Republic might be a response to Cyropaedia or vice versa; classicists aren’t sure).

Cyropaedia consists of eight books, exploring themes like:

Who Even Were The Persians?

This question has bothered me for a long time.

Lots of ancient civilizations started as city-states, and - even after reaching imperial glory - were still in some sense city-empires. Rome, Carthage, and Babylon are all obvious. But even the less obvious ones still fit the pattern. Assyria was centered around the city of Assur. Egypt shifted imperial centers over the dynasties, but it was usually either Memphis or Thebes. So what city did Persia start out as? What was the urban seed of Cyrus’ conquests?

Don’t say Persepolis - it was built after Cyrus’ conquests, and wasn’t even really a city as much as a ceremonial palace complex. And don’t say Pasagardae - it was also built by Cyrus. So where did Cyrus come from? Who were the pre-Cyrus Persians?

Cyrus started out as the king of a city called Anshan. But this wasn’t a proto-Persian homeland either - it had first been captured by Cyrus’ grandfather, who was already King of the Persians at that time. Also, nobody cares about Anshan. The Cyropaedia doesn’t even mention it. So what’s up?

I think the Persians went in three generations from a hill tribe without cities, to a hill tribe ruling over the small city of Anshan, to total mastery of the Middle East. The last part happened entirely during the lifetime of Cyrus the Great, partly due to Cyrus’ personal virtues and partly due to some poorly-understood event involving the Median Empire.

There’s a big historical dispute about exactly what happened with the Medes, of which the Cyropaedia presents one side. In 575 BC, the Median Empire was the local great power, with the Persians as one of their many vassals. By 525 BC, the Median Empire had been absorbed by Persia. Nobody knows how. Herodotus says Cyrus conquered Media. Xenophon says that Cyrus conquered his empire while still sort of a vassal of Media, and the Median king was so impressed that he gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage and made him the heir. Historians lean toward Herodotus’ story, but the details remain obscure.

(I posit that the Empire’s citizens chose to join Persia in a free and fair election; I call this the Median Voter Theorem)

Why Were The Persians So Great?

Xenophon has strong opinions on this. They were great because they raised their young men in a kind of barracks system, where everyone learned all the martial and political virtues together from wise elders. They hated luxury, ate mostly bread and water, and spent their time hunting (to practice physical virtue) and judging disputes (to practice political virtue). They would all watch each other in their barracks, those who were most virtuous would be feted by their comrades and teachers, and those who were least virtuous would be encouraged to reform. Here’s a representative passage:

Most states permit every one to train his own children just as he will, and the older people themselves to live as they please; and then they command them not to steal and not to rob, not to break into anybody's house, not to strike a person whom they have no right to strike, not to commit adultery, not to disobey an officer, and so forth; and if a man transgress anyone one of these laws, they punish him. The Persian laws, however, begin at the beginning and take care that from the first their citizens shall not be of such a character as ever to desire anything improper or immoral [...]

The boys go to school and spend their time in learning justice; and they say that they go there for this purpose, just as in our country they say that they go to learn to read and write. And their officers spend the greater part of the day in deciding cases for them. For, as a matter of course, boys also prefer charges against one another, just as men do, of theft, robbery, assault, cheating, slander, and other things that naturally come up; and when they discover any one committing any of these crimes, they punish him, and they punish also any one whom they find accusing another falsely. And they bring one another to trial also charged with an offence for which people hate one another most but go to law least, namely, that of ingratitude; and if they know that any one is able to return a favour and fails to do so, they punish him also severely. For they think that the ungrateful are likely to be most neglectful of their duty toward their gods, their parents, their country, and their friends; for it seems that shamelessness goes hand in hand with ingratitude; and it is that, we know, which leads the way to every moral wrong.

They teach the boys self-control also; and it greatly conduces to their learning self-control that they see their elders also living temperately day by day. And they teach them likewise to obey the officers; and it greatly conduces to this also that they see their elders implicitly obeying their officers. And besides, they teach them self-restraint in eating and drinking; and it greatly conduces to this also that they see that their elders do not leave their post to satisfy their hunger until the officers dismiss them; and the same end is promoted by the fact that the boys do not eat with their mothers but with their teachers, from the time the officers so direct. Furthermore, they bring from home bread for their food, cress for a relish, and for drinking, if any one is thirsty, a cup to draw water from the river. Besides this, they learn to shoot and to throw the spear.

There’s a bunch more stuff like this, including rules about how many divisions and legions the boys are organized in, how they graduate from one form of virtuous military living to another at certain ages, etc. You get the idea.

This reminded me of Sparta, which might not be a coincidence. Most of what we know of Spartan society, we know from . . . Xenophon, who in addition to spending time in Persia spent time in Sparta and wrote about them too. Maybe Persian society and Spartan society were similar in ways. Or maybe Xenophon just had a virtuous-military-education fetish that he applied to whatever society he was writing about, sort of like what his colleague Plato did in The Republic.

Xenophon’s Cyrus is constantly giving speeches on the virtues of simple living. He is half-Mede, half-Persian, and alternates between the almost-literally-spartan Persian court and the luxurious Median court; in the latter, he monologues about how all of the Medes’ fancy foods and wines are less satisfying than simple bread well-earned after a day of hard labor. “Hunger is the best relish” is practically his catchphrase.

When on military expeditions, Cyrus and his Persians always leave the best treasure for their allies; when their allies seem incredulous, the Persians explain that it would make them soft. Or that they learned proper self-control as children so they don’t need it. Or that the praise of future generations is better than riches. Or something to that effect. It’s a testament to Cyrus’ greatness that his allies didn’t turn around and murder him in the middle of the night after listening to the fiftieth speech about how fine silks are less comfortable than a soldier’s simple tunic, or gold jewels shine less brightly than a reputation for honor, or whatever.

Along with teaching self-control, the Persian education system turned Cyrus and his fellows into a band of close friends who trusted each other with their lives. This was a big advantage in a world where everyone else was betraying each other. Cyrus made his school friends into officers and satraps, and was always confident in their competence and loyalty. This sounds similar to the story of Alexander the Great and his generals, making me think this really was a big advantage in those days. It is cliques of schoolboys who conquer the world (for a more modern version of this trope, see Viktor Orban).

Interlude: Is This The Fremen Mirage?

Xenophon’s view of Persia - they were great because they were hard men who resisted decadence - is what historian-blogger Bret Devereaux calls “The Fremen Mirage”. Devereaux is against this. He has a long, very interesting series on how this trope gets called up to serve various unsavory agendas, but in real life settled “decadent” states usually beat hard “manly” barbarians. Sure, some barbarians eventually conquered the Western Roman Empire. But before that happened, the Romans conquered hundreds of barbarian tribes in the process of taking the entire Mediterranean region and holding it for hundreds of years. The score is still settled states 100, barbarians 1. And this is a typical record - look at China, the Middle East, etc, and you will find a similar pattern.

Grant that settled states beat barbarians most of the time (for example, by Devereaux’s numbers, China was only ruled by barbarians for 13 - 24% of its history). Is this more or less than we would expect?

Between 0 and 1500 AD, China’s population varied between 50 and 100 million people. The population of Genghis Khan’s Mongolia (before its conquests) was between 500,000 and 1 million (so 1% of the Chinese total). I can’t find population figures for the Jurchens, Manchus, and all the other “barbarian” groups who invaded China, but I think they were probably closer to the Mongol level than the Chinese.

Not only did China have a hundred times more people than the steppe groups they fought, but they must have had higher per capita GDP. They had proto-industries producing high-quality armor, swords, and (eventually) gunpowder weapon. They had libraries full of books on generalship dating back to Sun Tzu and beyond. They had meticulous records that could be used for taxation and drafting. So when the steppe people “only” beat them about 20% of the time, I maintain this should still seem pretty impressive.

Devereaux admits that the Mongols were an exception to his theory. But the more you look, the more exceptions you find. Devereaux has a convenient explanation for each:

• Barbarians taking over Rome: Rome took over a lot of barbarians first, plus the barbarians had to adopt Roman military practices, so it doesn’t count.

• Mongols taking over everywhere: Okay, fine, Mongols were the exception.

• Jurchen, Manchu, etc, conquest of China: Some of these people were steppe warriors, so they also get the Mongol exception. The others lost more often than they won.

• Pattern of repeated barbarian overrun in North Africa noted by Ibn Khaldun: Okay, but Ibn Khaldun didn’t describe this in exactly the same words as Westerners, so it doesn’t count. Western decadence theorists have just stolen Ibn Khaldun’s cool theory for their own evil ends, which are probably racist or something, so they should be ashamed of themselves. And having successfully proven our political opponents racist, which is the only goal of scholarship, there’s no need for us to consider Ibn Khaldun’s observations on their own terms.

• Early Islamic Arabs taking over the Middle East: Devereaux doesn’t mention this, except for a half-sentence with no content in the Ibn Khaldun section. How do you forget this one in a piece about the Fremen? Charitably, perhaps we should ignore this since the Byzantines and Persians were both exhausted from fighting each other.

• Seljuks, Ottomans, other Turks, Turkmen, etc taking over Middle East, Byzantium: Devereaux doesn’t mention this either.

• Amorites taking over Babylon: Okay, but the Babylonians could hardly go into the hills to wipe them out, so they got basically unlimited chances.

The way I would frame this is that settled decadent people do win more often than they lose, but unsettled barbarians still seem to punch above their weight given the material disadvantages they face.

In one of his few concessions to the Fremen, Devereaux has a soft spot for Ibn Khaldun’s theory of asabiyyah - that small tribes can maintain camaraderie and a “family” type atmosphere as their larger neighbors spread themselves too wide and get involved in satrapial backstabbing. The tightly-knit small tribe can then conquer the large but fragmented empire, benefit from its camaraderie for a generation or two until it fades away, and then become the next fragmented decadent empire in turn.

Xenophon hints at this in Cyropaedia. Cyrus and his childhood friends form a tightly-knit cadre for the Persian army; their bonds of trust are unbreakable. Meanwhile, Assyria and all the Persians’ other enemies are collections of backstabbing vassals held together with gum and duct tape, who fragment at a mere poke from the crystalline perfection of the Persian machinery.

In one of his few other concessions, Devereaux agrees that the Mongols were very impressive, but says this was because of very specific aspects of their society rather than general Fremenness. For example:

Steppe warriors battled with tactics learned from the hunt and engaged in operations with logistics they used for every day survival. But it isn’t the ‘hardness’ of this way of life that provided the military advantage (if it was, one might expect non-horse cultures on similarly marginal lands to be equally militarily effective and – as we’ve shown – they were not), it was the overlap of very specific skills (namely riding, horse archery and the logistics of steppe pastoralism) that led to the military advantage.

Okay, but one of Xenophon’s points is that Cyrus was a great warrior because he and his friends learned tactics from hunting constantly, and their foil the Medes didn’t do this because they were too civilized and decadent.

So my model of Xenophon’s response to Devereaux would be that Devereaux is accurately recognizing various features of non-decadent societies, and judging each of them a contingent exception, rather than Directly The True Effect Of Non-Decadence. But non-decadence, if it’s valuable as a concept at all, will be made of things like “camaraderie among tribe members” and “a tradition of learning tactics from hunting”.

Is it useful to think of all of these things as coming from a central concept of “non-decadence” rather than as a bunch of separate things? Here I think about Zvi’s review of Moral Mazes, a book about (essentially) corporate decadence, the difference between a bloated megacorporation and a nimble startup. On average, a bloated megacorporation beats a startup - the next-generation smartphone is more likely to be developed by Apple than by three people in a garage. But everyone agrees startups have advantages of their own, and are sometimes able to beat the megacorporation despite how unlikely this seems.

Moral Mazes posits that the bloated megacorporation has so many layers of middle management that the average leader is dealing entirely with social reality - trying to manipulate the beliefs of other middle managers, who are themselves concerned mostly with the beliefs of other middle managers, and so on. Meanwhile, the startup is concerned mostly with physical reality. Either you’re working on real business things (like engineering the product, or looking for customers, or even managing the budget) or you’re at least managing someone who’s doing those things rather than living entirely in some giant house of mirrors. Megacorporations have high volume and low surface area - most points are far away from any boundary with the outside. Startups have low volume and high surface area - most parts of them are being constantly tested against reality and honed into some useful form.

One reading of Cyropaedia portrays Cyrus the Great as a guy in touch with physical reality. Part of that is that he goes hunting (and later, goes into battle). But part of that is that his friends are real people, who are his friends for specific reasons, and not ten layers of courtiers and flatterers and vassals. Cultures whose leaders spend time in physical reality tend to get different norms from cultures whose leaders spend time in social reality (read Zvi if you don’t believe me). I think this is enough to link Ibn Khaldun, Xenophon, and the Western tradition of decadence (this is just a possibility proof, not an “I’m definitely right” argument). Then you could use that to explain why barbarians seem to punch above their weight (eg rule China 20% of the time even with 1% of the population).

Did Cyrus The Great Invent Niceness?

This is a claim I’ve sometimes heard.

Machiavelli said that it is better to be both loved and feared, but if you can only have one, be feared. The history of the late Bronze and early Iron Ages is a history of fearmaxxing. Kings would torture their rivals and slaughter their enemies, then erect steles saying “I massacred the Vorgundians, laid waste the land of the Hapidians, enslaved the Gargulians . . . “ etc etc etc.

The story goes that Cyrus was the first to get Machiavelli’s perfect balance of fear and love. I don’t know how true it is - some of this comes from the Cyrus Cylinder, Cyrus’ own propaganda about himself. Still, it has to mean something that when every other king erected steles about how many people he massacred or enslaved, Cyrus chose to write about how many people he had liberated, helped, or given rights back to.

Wikipedia says:

A comparison of the Cyrus Cylinder with the inscriptions of previous conquerors of Babylon highlights this sharply. For instance, when Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705-681 BC) captured the city in 690 BC after a 15-month siege, Babylon endured a dreadful destruction and massacre. Sennacharib describes how, having captured the King of Babylon, he had him tied up in the middle of the city like a pig. Then he describes how he destroyed Babylon, and filled the city with corpses, looted its wealth, broke its gods, burned and destroyed its houses down to foundations, demolished its walls and temples and dumped them in the canals. This is in stark contrast to Cyrus the Great and the Cyrus Cylinder.

Sounds pretty easy to get a reputation as “the nice tolerant guy” when this is your competition!

Xenophon follows the Cylinder and the invented-niceness side of the story. In fact, he hits you over the head with stories of how Cyrus was nice to people and it ended out helping him. For example:

• When the Armenians rebel against their master the Medes, the Medes send Cyrus to pacify them. Cyrus wins, but the Prince of Armenia argues that Cyrus should spare the life of his father the king, because this will be so over-the-top unexpectedly nice that his father will be a more grateful and helpful vassal than anyone else Cyrus could put in his place. Cyrus agrees and the Armenians are loyal to him forever.

• In a couple of cases, Cyrus gets both Group A and Group B to swear allegiance to him if he will protect them from the other. Then he staffs all the forts along their mutual border with Persians, and establishes peace in the land.

• Cyrus captures a very beautiful woman who his soldiers want to rape. He protects her, and she is so grateful that she sends a letter to her husband, who joins Cyrus’ cause with his vast armies of chariots.

• The Assyrian king is a jerk who is constantly killing and castrating people. All those people hear about Cyrus and agree to join him if he will help them get their revenge. Cyrus treats them well and agrees to avenge all of the wrongs done to them, and they too join his armies.

• When an enemy unit fights him especially well, Cyrus sends a messenger praising them for their bravery, and offering to pay them much more if they switch sides and fight for him. He listens to their concerns, like how they don’t want to fight against their homeland, then respects them and works out a mutually agreeable solution.

• If anyone subjects themselves to him voluntarily, Cyrus gives them lavish gifts, lets them keep their freedom, and demands only a light tribute.

Some of these “innovations” seem obvious. At times, the Cyropaedia reminds me of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, in a bad way - it’s about an especially smart guy coming up with clever tricks to get outsized success in some sphere where it’s unclear why thousands of equally smart and motivated people didn’t think of all these things centuries before. But Xenophon is an experienced general, and presumably knows what is and isn’t normal in the domain of ancient Near Eastern warfare, so maybe he’s right that all of this was unusual.

The Game Theory Of The Ancient Near East

Cyrus built an empire bigger than anyone had before. Also more cohesive than anyone had before, and more stable, and so on.

Cyropaedia presents the pre-Cyrus world as operating on a particularly crappy form of proto-feudalism. The Near East was divided among hundreds of small tribes and city-states. Nobody expected to be able to keep meaningful control of anyone else. The best they could do was invade and vassalize weaker kingdoms, meaning they had to pay a yearly tribute and join in any future wars. The vassals mostly hated their masters and would take any opportunity to revolt. The masters couldn’t respond to every revolt, but when they could, they would try to devastate the rebels so horrifically that it would discourage future unrest.

In order to devastate rebelling vassals, the masters needed big armies. In order to get big armies, they needed to call up troops from their remaining vassals. This tended to create cascades of collapse. If only one vassal revolted, the master might still seem pretty powerful, and it would be in the other vassals’ best interest to send their troops to the punitive expedition lest they become the next victim. But if enough vassals revolted, then the remainder might think it was more advantageous to revolt themselves than to send troops, and this would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think this was how Cyrus managed to conquer so much so quickly. All he had to do was gesture at being a great conquerer, and then everyone who hated their previous feudal masters revolted and joined him instead. Because so many peoples and nations did this at the same time, the self-fulfilling prophecy came true, and Cyrus succeeded in conquering all the previous feudal masters.

This is also where Cyrus’ legendary honesty and benevolence came in. Wherever he went, the rumor spread before him that everyone who surrendered to Cyrus got great terms, and everyone who defected to Cyrus was treated fairly, and so on. Aside from all of this, Cyrus was genuinely a great conqueror, so the prospect of being on the winning side and getting treated well seemed much better than fighting on the losing side for a king who would oppress you anyway. Cyrus was legendarily generous and gave everything he had to his friends and allies (usually with some annoying speech about how he was sacrificing nothing, because the true good in life was to eat bread and dress in a simple tunic), which made being his friend or ally an even better deal. And he was a meritocrat, which encouraged everyone under him to fight hard to get a better position or a bigger share of the spoil.

So one possible answer to the question “Why could one guy just invent being nice?” was that first you had to be a winner. Once you looked like a winner, niceness could accelerate the speed at which you won: people are always happy to join the winning side, but they’re even happier to join the winning side if they expect to be treated well. There hadn’t been too many people who won as much as Cyrus before, being a winner in the ancient Near East tended to select for psychopaths, and so he was the first of this very small group to try the niceness strategy. And so instead of just winning a local empire, he won the whole Near East.

This also let him build a more cohesive empire. His subjects (at least according to Xenophon) really liked him, so he could try to actually govern instead of just extract as much as possible from them before their inevitable defection.

Stories I Liked In The Cyropaedia

1.6.27: When Cyrus was about to go to war for the first time, he went to his father for advice. His father told him that he should trick the enemy with things like ambushes. “Wait,” asked Cyrus. “Wouldn’t that be dishonest?”

“Oh, right,” said his father. “I forgot to tell you. We teach children that dishonesty is always wrong. But actually dishonesty towards your friends is wrong, but dishonesty to your enemy is an important part of war.”

“Shouldn’t you have told me this before?” asked Cyrus. “I’ve never practiced being dishonest and I’m not sure I’m any good at it.”

“It’s fine,” said his father. “We taught you to hunt, and hunting implicitly involves stealth and dishonesty, like setting snares for animals. We tried to prevent you from noticing this was dishonest so you wouldn’t be dishonest to other people, but it was, and you implicitly understand dishonest strategies pretty well already.”

“I don’t know,” said Cyrus. “I wish you had just taught me dishonesty directly. I’d probably be better at it.”

“We tried this a few generations ago,” said his father. “In fact . . .

In the time of our forefathers there was once a teacher of the boys who, it seems, used to teach them justice in the very way that you propose; to lie and not to lie, to cheat and not to cheat, to slander and not to slander, to take and not to take unfair advantage. And he drew the line between what one should do to one's friends and what to one's enemies. And what is more, he used to teach this: that it was right to deceive friends even, provided it were for a good end, and to steal the possessions of a friend for a good purpose. And in teaching these lessons he had also to train the boys to practise them upon one another, just as also in wrestling, the Greeks, they say, teach deception and train the boys to be able to practise it upon one another. When, therefore, some had in this way become expert both in deceiving successfully and in taking unfair advantage and perhaps also not inexpert in avarice, they did not refrain from trying to take an unfair advantage even of their friends.

In consequence of that, therefore, an ordinance was passed which obtains even unto this day, simply to teach our boys, just as we teach our servants in their relations toward us, to tell the truth and not to deceive and not to take unfair advantage; and if they should act contrary to this law, the law requires their punishment, in order that, inured to such habits, they may become more refined members of society.

But when they came to be as old as you are now, then it seemed to be safe to teach them that also which is lawful toward enemies; for it does not seem likely that you would break away and degenerate into savages after you had been brought up together in mutual respect. In the same way we do not discuss sexual matters in the presence of very young boys, lest in case lax discipline should give a free rein to their passions the young might indulge them to excess.”

8.2.15: Cyrus defeated Croesus (of “as rich as Croesus” fame), and, in keeping with his usual benevolence, offered to keep him on as an advisor. Given his talents (no pun intended), Croesus decided to offer financial advice. He looked over Cyrus’ budget.

“On this line,” said Croesus, “where it says GAVE EVERYTHING AWAY TO MY FRIENDS, that’s your problem. If you want to run an empire, you need to save money against some disaster.”

“How much money do you think I’d have if I didn’t give so much away?” asked Cyrus.

Croesus calculated it out, named some vast sum, and said that was a good start in case the empire ran into an emergency.

Cyrus called for a messenger. “Go to all my friends,” he said, “say that Cyrus is having an emergency, and ask how much they can pitch in.”

So the messenger rode to all of Cyrus’ friends, came back, and listed some numbers - so-and-so would give X, such-and-such would give Y. When they added all of them up, they had a number many times greater than Croesus’ original estimate for what Cyrus would have if he was less generous.

And so even Croesus learned that friends are more important than money, and that it is better to give than to receive. Merry Christmas!

8.3.27: Cyrus sponsored a horse race among his troops. Although everyone expected a famous noble to win, the winner was a common Sacian soldier nobody had heard of. Cyrus asked him if he would accept “a kingdom for his horse”, and the Sacian said that he would accept “the gratitude of a brave man” (I can’t tell if he’s trying to flatter Cyrus).

Cyrus said that would be easy, because he was surrounded by his army, and you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a brave man. The Sacian asked him if he was being literal. Cyrus said sure, he should throw a stone, and Cyrus bet that the man that it hit would be brave. So the Sacian picked up a stone and threw it, and it hit Pheraulus, one of Cyrus’ messengers. Even though he started bleeding, Pheraulus didn’t cry out, but continued bravely carrying his message.

The Sacian found Pheraulus later, apologized for hitting him, explained it was a weird metaphor gone too far, and offered him his horse. Pheraulus accepted and invited the Sacian to dinner at his palace (all of Cyrus’ original band of Persians had palaces by this point). The Sacian expressed awe at all of his beautiful belongings, and Pheraulus said that actually wealth was just a burden, and he was only keeping it because it would be insulting to turn down good things that Cyrus had offered him. The Sacian joked that if it was such a burden, why not give it to him. “Great idea!” said Pheraulus, and offered him all of his wealth.

And so Pheraulas was greatly delighted to think that he could be rid of the care of all his worldly goods and devote himself to his friends; and the Sacian, on his part, was delighted to think that he was to have much and enjoy much. And the Sacian loved Pheraulas because he was always bringing him something more; and Pheraulas loved the Sacian because he was willing to take charge of everything; and though the Sacian had continually more in his charge, none the more did he trouble Pheraulas about it.

Thus these two continued to live.

I am a decadent modern and not one of the simple virtuous Persians - but to me this sounds like a kink thing.