This account was originally written by Plutarch, who was more interested in telling a good moralistic story than sticking to the facts (of ~150 years before).
Plutarch selected the stories he told and modified them into moralistic narratives, but he didn't completely make them up. He is not reliable historian in modern sense, of course.
UFO sightings were a real common thing in Minnesota, so in the show a real UFO comes, because it’s people telling the story as they saw it. The true part is that people truly tell the stories, and in that sense, since they told this story it truly is a true story.
Did you somehow watch season 2 without watching season 1?
I’m also not sure if none of the characters being aliens really makes the show stupid. That analysis would apply to quite a few shows.
Based on a true story just means someone somewhere said something like this happened. Bloodsport is a great example of a movie that is based on a true story but that true story turned out to be entirely false.
Some of what he said might have been and some parts probably weren't.
> Cyrus it's pretty obvious he's outright lying
He was telling a story from the perspective of the (or some of them) the Greeks might have seen. It's just as likely to have been hearsay as outright intentional lies.
> And incidentally, Herodotus is the ONLY ancient source that so much as mentions Tomyris, full stop
How many other ancient sources do we actually have on some of the periods (especially related to Persia) described by Herodotus? Also as far as we can tell the narrative history or even Mesopotamian/Asyrian/Babylonian style chronicles weren't really a thing in ancient Persia so it's not inconceivable that he just wrote down one of the oral stories coming from there (it probably wasn't that clear to the Persians themselves what might have happened to one of their previous rulers after a generation or two).
Overall by the standards of ancient historians Herodotus was probably above average.
Let's see:
Persians of a generation or two after Cyrus are Dariush and Xerxes. These guys were running a multi-national empire, had invented the satrap system to administer foreign conquests, were in the process of taking over Egypt, digging canals, had a relay system mail network with a catchy motto (per Mr. H himself!) of "neither rain nor snow blah blah blah" (likely in Aramaic), taking the time to carve in a pretty tough to reach spot in a mountain face in western Iran the specifics of which uppity rebel was put down, and how. Did they really lose track of what happened to their grandparents' (generation)?
That specific dynasty maintained meticulous records in Persepolis. Those archive and whatever historic records they may have contained however went up in smoke with the rest of the complex when Alexander paid a visit.
So, that contemporary Greeks (or any other non-Persians in the greater empire) had little access to Persian empire records and thus relied on oral lore seems to be a given. But that has little bearing on whether Persians were generationally clueless about their grand parents as you allege, or not.
But yes, a generation or two was probably an exaggeration. It was likely closer to a 100 years or so. e.g. it seems that by the time of the Parthian empire the Greeks and Roman "knew" considerably more about the Achaemenid Persia than the Persian themselves.
> It was likely closer to a 100 years or so. e.g. it seems that by the time of the Parthian empire the Greeks and Roman "knew" considerably more about the Achaemenid Persia than the Persian themselves.
That is a pretty ridiculous notion. First let's break down what you mean by Persians. Do you mean a Dehghaan (land owner / farmer) or a member of the ruling families or some random Persian cranking around somewhere? How about Greece? Did Greeks uniformly had access to the same knowledge about Greeks and Greece?
So we are talking about either what outsiders or national elite classes knew and maintained. And your 100 year limit is based on the ignorance of the foreigners and various bits of court gossip, (Greek) mercenaries, and whatever else passed for a "public space of discourse" back then. Correspondences, tavern songs, stuff like that.
Iran has suffered 3 cataclysmic invasions and each featured destruction of the state and intelligentsia. For this reason it is 100% true that quite a lot of Iran's history was "news" to latter day Iranians but to claim someone of a given cultural and educational background in Persia in say early years of Hellenic occupation had no clue what had happened does not seem reasonable. At all.
Plutarch is best.