Hyrcania's political history reads like a catalog of rebellions. When Darius the Great crushed the usurper Gaumata in September 522 BC, revolts erupted across the empire, and by December, Hyrcania had risen in support of the Median leader Phraortes. The rebellion was suppressed by May, but the pattern was set. Under Alexander the Great, the satrap Autophradates rebelled in 328 BC and was eventually executed at Pasargadae. Under the Arsacid dynasty, Hyrcanians launched revolts that lasted decades, with rebels sending envoys to Emperor Nero requesting Roman aid against their own Parthian overlords. Even under the Sasanians, the governor Vistahm rose in revolt in the 590s AD, conquering much of the eastern empire before his defeat in battle. Hyrcania sat at the edge of every great empire's reach, close enough to be claimed but remote enough to resist.

Under Arsacid rule, the Great Wall of Gorgan was constructed across the Hyrcanian plain, a defensive line of forts and outposts designed to protect the province from raids by the Dahae tribes to the north. The Dahae were the people who gave the archaic name Dahistan to the region north of Hyrcania, and they were a persistent threat. The wall stretched for nearly 200 kilometers, making it one of the longest defensive barriers in the ancient world. It is far less famous than its Chinese counterpart, but it served a similar purpose: holding the line between settled agricultural civilization and the nomadic peoples of the steppe. The fortifications had been preceded by Achaemenid-era defenses, suggesting that protecting Hyrcania's fertile lowlands was a problem every dynasty inherited.

Some of Hyrcania's most memorable moments belong to the realm of myth layered over fact. In 420 AD, the Sasanian king Yazdegerd I was assassinated while staying in the province. The nobility who killed him spread a story: a white horse had emerged from a stream, kicked the king to death, and vanished back into the water. The horse, they claimed, was an angel sent by Ahura Mazda to punish Yazdegerd's tyranny. The myth served its political purpose, transforming regicide into divine justice. Later, during the reign of Peroz I, the Hepthalites invaded Hyrcania and captured both the king and his son Kavadh in battle near Gurgan. Hyrcania's position at the crossroads of empires meant that it accumulated not just political history but the stories that justified it.

Hyrcania entered Western literature through its tigers. Virgil's Aeneid has the abandoned Dido accuse Aeneas of having been nursed by Hyrcanian tigers. Shakespeare borrowed the image repeatedly: the Hyrcan tiger appears in Macbeth, the Hyrcanian beast in Hamlet, and the Tygers of Hyrcania in Henry VI. The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice invokes Hyrcanian deserts as a measure of wildness. Sir Walter Scott mentioned Hyrcanian tigers in Ivanhoe. The name even reached medieval Ireland through Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, appearing in Irish poems as early as 665 AD. Robert E. Howard placed his fictional Hyrkania alongside an inland sea in the Conan the Barbarian universe. From Old Persian wolves to Roman tigers to comic-book warriors, Hyrcania has been reinvented by every culture that encountered its name.