Cyriades

Cyriades stands first in the list of the Thirty Tyrants enumerated by the Historia Augusta (writing under the name of Trebellius Pollio), from whose brief, indistinct, and apparently inaccurate narrative we gather that, after having robbed his father, whose old age he had embittered by dissipation and vice, he fled to the Persians, stimulated Shapur I to invade the Roman provinces, and, having assumed the purple together with the title of Augustus, was slain by his own followers after a short career of cruelty and crime.

Edward Gibbon thinks fit to assume that these events took place after the defeat and capture of Valerian (a. d. 260) ; but our only authority expressly asserts, that the death of the usurper happened while the emperor was upon his march to the East (a. d. 258 or 259); and by that statement we must, in the absence of all other evidence, be content to abide. The medals published by Groltzius and Mediobarbus are rejected by Numismatics as unquestionably spurious.