Cambyses II ruled the Achaemenid Empire 530–22 BCE. Historian and arch-gossip Herodotus, writing a century later, portrays Cambyses as a sacrilegious despot who descends into madness before succumbing to a gangrenous self-inflicted wound. To explain the “utterly deranged” actions of the king, Herodotus notes that Cambyses was “afflicted from birth by a particularly terrible ailment, called by some the ‘sacred disease’. If so, it would hardly be surprising were a man afflicted by such a serious physical malady to be unsound of mind as well”.