Is the lying madman negotiating with the Flying Dutchman?

No, I’m not asking for a friend. I’m asking for the thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of whom are children, being massacred by the indiscriminate bombing of Iran, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Middle East by Israel and America.

I’m also asking for the billions of people worldwide who are being affected economically by a war in the Middle East started by a lying madman to satisfy the murderous fetishes of a genocidal maniac trying desperately to cling to stolen land. To be honest, I’m personally more angry because the road trip I’ve been planning for months to celebrate my upcoming 60th birthday has suddenly become very, very expensive.

If you’ve been following my writing, you will, of course, know that I’m referring to the two most dangerous men in the world right now. And it’s not Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, who were probably hogging the leaderboard for that notorious distinction until Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu blossomed into full-blown insanity.

Also, for those who don’t know, The Flying Dutchman is not a person in flight, but a legendary ghost ship doomed to sail the seas forever. I’m just using poetic licence here, which I don’t actually have, but will expropriate like Trump does to reality, and Netanyahu does to Palestinian land.

Within a week of starting the war to ostensibly re-obliterate Iran’s nuclear capacity, which he claimed to have obliterated in June last year, Trump bragged, as he usually does, that he had won it decisively. Confoundingly, Iran refused to just roll over and die like a good lapdog, but rained hellfire on both Israeli and American targets around the Gulf. Then they demonstrated they have more than just missiles by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, preventing around 20% of the world’s crude oil supply from reaching the rest of the world, effectively sending fuel prices into orbit.

Nothing angers the West more than having its privileges threatened. Decades of American warmongering that resulted in tens of millions of deaths around the world, moved the beneficiaries of imperialism as much as a jump in the fuel (gas?) price did. A panicked Trump then resorted to begging his more obedient lapdog allies in the West for help.

When the usually compliant allies failed to commit, Trump resorted to more threats directed at critical Iranian infrastructure. Trump is not known for being up to date on his history (or anything else of real consequence, for that matter), and was probably ignorant of the might of the Persian Empire at one time and of the legacies of great Persians like Cyrus the Great, Darius 1, and Xerxes 1. When Iran responded with equivalent threats to target more Israeli and American infrastructure, including that of Gulf countries hosting military bases, he backed off (the phenomenon I like to call the TACO tango), postponing his threat first by five days, then ten.

All the while, Trump kept insisting that Iran was both begging to negotiate with America and that he was already negotiating with them. When pressed to reveal who he was negotiating with, Trump variously claimed that he had eliminated everyone who could negotiate, or that they were afraid to negotiate, fearing assassination, or that it was a phantom high-level diplomat, or that other countries were mediating. All of which were denied, of course, by Iran, including making a mockery of the 15-point plan by Trump, as well as rejecting it outright.

So, here we are! The question remains. Who is the lying madman negotiating with? The ghost of the assassinated Ayatollah, the ghost of Hendrick van der Decken, the captain of the Flying Dutchman, or the ghost of Cyrus the Great?

Or maybe Trump is just negotiating with himself over which fantastical new lie will best keep the credulous American public entertained, and the mainstream media pleasantly occupied.

Had Marlowe Read Ctesias?

Christopher Marlowe has not yet departed that that little, little span the dead are borne in mind. We remember that he wrote Dr. Faustus and Tamburlane the Great and died in a drunken quarrel over a bar bill (and perhaps because he was part of the long tradition of English writers working as spies to pay the bills). Unlike Shakespeare he had a good formal education, not just grammar-school Latin but a Master of Arts from Cambridge, and unlike Shakespeare he could not keep his subversion in the mouth of fools and madmen. His life of Tamurlane was what J.J. Abrams would have done at an early modern theatre, with overblown rhetoric, battles, love affairs, and special effects. There was even a disappointing sequel driven by crass commercialism. Its full of ancient Greek flavour because Marlowe knew much more about ancient Greeks than modern Persians (emissaries of the English East India Company would reach Shah Abbas by 1614 after Marlowe’s timely death, and Robert Shirley arrived in Iran in 1598 a decade after the play was written). Several times Marlowe’s characters accuse Tamburlane of being a shepherd which sounds like a way to get a tower of skulls with your name on it.

COSROE. What means this devilish shepherd, to aspire
With such a giantly presumption,
To cast up hills against the face of heaven,
And dare the force of angry Jupiter?

… and later …

THERIDAMAS. Tamburlaine!
A Scythian shepherd so embellished
With nature’s pride and richest furniture!
His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods;
His fiery eyes are fix’d upon the earth,
As if he now devis’d some stratagem,
Or meant to pierce Avernus’ darksome vaults
To pull the triple-headed dog from hell.

Both quotes are from the Project Gutenberg edition of Tamburlane the Great, Part 1 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1094/1094-h/1094-h.htm

I don’t know if any Latin Christian writers emphasized that Tamurlane was a shepherd (he was actually born to a wealthy and influential father, and the only sheep he herded were the ones he was stealing, but nobody in England knew Farsi or Turkish). But one ancient text, as summarized in the tenth century, does accuse a famous conqueror of being a common herder: Cyrus the Great. This is Nicholaus of Damascus’s history of the world, which probably reworked Ctesias’ history of Persia for its ancient Persian history. We enter the story when Astyages the king of the Medes has learned that a young man named Cyrus has defeated one of his armies in Persia.

“And the king (Astyages) struck his thigh and said ‘Alas! I resolved often enough not to treat bad men well, but I have been ensnared by fine words all the same: I took on Cyrus, a wicked goatherd, a Mard by birth, and produced such utter destruction for myself. But now he shall not enjoy the pleasures he desires.””

Nicholaus of Damascus, Excerpta de Insidiis (= Ctesias Fragment F8d.30 Lenfant, translated by llewellyn-Jones and Robson p. 166)

I don’t think this detail appears in the better-known stories about Cyrus in Herodotus and Xenophon, or in collections of anecdotes and details like the Suda. Its not a very common slur in the ancient world, although Greek aristocrats accused each other of having been in business. I wonder if Marlowe (or his sources) might have gotten the idea of calling Tamburlane a Scythian shepherd from Astages calling Cyrus a Mardian goatherd.

Do any of my gentle readers know research on Marlowe’s classical sources? Were there Latin versions of Nicholaus of Damascus in Elizabethan England? Did Marlowe use any sources on Tamurlane derived from East Roman writers who were familiar with Ctesias? I am a versatile and productive scholar but Elizabethan drama is not one of the areas of my expertise!

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(drafted 1 May 2025)

Edit 2025-05-03: mentioned Robert Shirley

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Our AI hosts are "cracking open" the Cyrus Cylinder! 🏺 This ancient Babylonian artifact isn't just a dusty relic – it's Cyrus the Great's personal PR campaign! 👑 Hear how he spun his conquest as divine will (thanks, Marduk! 😉) and positioned himself as a liberator. 🏛️ We'll unpack the propaganda, the religious tolerance (a bit ahead of its time!), and why it's a symbol of human rights today... even if that wasn't the plan. 🤔 There's even a copy at the UN! 🇺🇳 Tune in for a trip back to the Achaemenid Empire! #CyrusTheGreat #CyrusCylinder #AncientHistory #PersianEmpire #Archaeology #BritishMuseum #Podcast #HistoryPodcast #Mesopotamia #Babylon #HumanRights #Propaganda #AncientText #AI #DigitalHumanities

Archaeologists unearth royal wall in Persepolis, Iran

A significant archaeological discovery at the ancient city of Persepolis in southwestern Iran has unveiled the eastern wall of a grand historical gateway, believed to have been constructed at the order of Cyrus the Great...

More information: https://archaeologymag.com/2023/10/royal-wall-unearthed-in-persepolis/

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