A silent film nearly 100 years old will get a fresh airing complete with new music tonight (March 3) in Baltimore. I have yet to see D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” but I’m intrigued. It tells four different historical moments of intolerance, the first of which deals with the fall of Babylon to Cyrus II. 
I can’t tell if Cyrus is depicted as intolerant or the Babylonians before his arrival. If anyone has heard of Cyrus today, they seem immediately to equate him with tolerance and human rights (following his own declarations of liberty for the disparate peoples of his empire). But not many people have heard of him today, which differs from a century ago when people even on this side of the Atlantic recognized his as the name of a great, ancient leader. His persian empire effected huge change in a world just beginning to identify with the dichotomy of east and west and around the time when the Bible began to take its earliest shape within that very empire.
