In the Bible (Chapter 6 of the Book of Daniel), Darius the Mede was forced to sentence his friend Daniel to be thrown into a den of lions, in accordance to a law that he created to force people to worship him. When he found that Daniel was alive through God's angel closing the lions' mouths, he ordered his soldiers to throw Daniel's enemies and their families to the den to be eaten by its lions.
I wonder, did the Achaemenid Persians use lions' dens (other than hanging on the gallows, as shown in the book of Esther) to execute criminals?
The Achaemenid king would have certainly not asked for to be worshipped as a god. That is an obvious deviation from the Zoroastrian fundaments that considered Ahuramazda as the supreme god and the cause of creation. This could even more certainly have not been asked by Darius. Every single inscription, which mounts to over 20 at this point relating to the time of Darius starts with the saying: " A great god is Ahuramazda who created this earth, who created heaven, who created man, who created happiness for man". That does not require an extensive research. Throwing prisoners into a den of lions might have been practiced by the Achaemenids but does not seem to represent anything else they have done throughout their history. This is not a tiny Empire for which a king asks to be worshipped and lashes out at an individual for not doing so and then orders them thrown into a den of lions. It is an Empire of 45 nations, over 50 million population and 6 million sqaure kilometers of land. That is no joke. The story appears to be more seemingly in line with Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian kingdoms. These were local kingdoms of much much smaller size, with kings keen to practice lion hunts and furthermore show excessive signs of violence, an attribute almost distinguishably particular to the Assyrians and Babylonians.