1 Ioannis M. Konstantakos Cambyses and the Sacred Bull (Herodotus 3.28-29 and 64): Oriental Fiction and Propaganda behind Historical Narrative Cambyses receives very bad press in Herodotus’ history. He is depicted as a perverse, tyrannical ruler who slides into lunacy, commits atrocious acts and meets an inglorious end. With his megalomaniac insanity, he incarnates the mad king, a figure worthy to stand next to other famous literary representatives of this type, from Shakespeare’s Richard III and Rabelais’ Picrochole to Visconti’s Ludwig and George Martin’s Aerys Targaryen. This dreary Herodotean image has long been recognized as a reflection of ancient propaganda. There were indeed specific elite groups, both in Iran and in Egypt, which had reasons to be hostile to Cambyses and wished to defame him. It was ultimately their tales that reached Herodotus’ all too receptive ears and furnished the main stuff for his account. Cambyses’ death forms the climax of this sensational pseudo-historical composition. His fatal end is foreshadowed from earlier on in the narrative, in an episode recounting the king’s greatest sacrilege, for which he was punished by the gods: the slaughter of the Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis regarded as a manifestation of Ptah, the patron god of the city. The Apis was installed in a special sanctuary and received divine veneration and honours from the Egyptian priesthood and the faithful. When it died, mourning was kept for seventy days, while its body was mummified and buried in a large granite sarcophagus at the great necropolis of the Saqqara. Afterwards, its successor was searched out from among recently born oxen, on the basis of traditionally prescribed bodily marks. Killing a holy Apis was one of the worst conceivable religious crimes for the ancient Egyptians, tantamount to deicide. This was the abomination performed by Cambyses according to Herodotus 3.27-29. The Persian king returned from his disastrous Nubian expedition in an exceedingly choleric mood, only to find the entire population of Memphis celebrating for the epiphany of a new Apis bull. Cambyses was enraged, thinking that the Egyptians were mocking his military catastrophe. He ordered the local priests to bring that strange Apis divinity before him. As soon