The ideal king in the Shahnameh walked away from power at his height

Evidence

And then he laid it down. Fearing that endless power would, in the end, twist even his own heart into pride — the pride that had destroyed Jamshid long ago — Kai Khosrow gave away his treasures, named a worthy successor, and walked up into the mountains. His closest companions followed him into the rising snow, and there, the story says, he passed out of the world entirely. He is the one king in the whole epic who left the throne while he was still good — who understood that the hardest victory is over yourself. — , A Year of World Stories, 11069

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the usual divine-right/sovereign-power arc — resonates with Cicero’s ideal of voluntary retirement and the Stoic model of limiting one’s own power before it corrupts.
• SEED: Angle on ‘the hardest victory is over yourself’ as a leadership lesson — the leader who steps down at the peak as the rarest and highest virtue.