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 23 were greatly disconcerted at the appearance of the fictitious elephants, and a kind of panic took place; but the trick which had imposed upon them was soon discovered, and the real elephants advancing to the charge, carried everything before them. It was now the turn of Semiramis to flee. Most of her army perished in the field, or in attempting to regain the right bank of the river. She herself, severely wounded during a personal encounter with Stauro- bates, made her escape with difficulty with a mere handful of troops, and retiring into the interior with humbled pride, dreamed no more of crowning her fame by the conquest of India.

Notwithstanding the circumstantiality with which the Indian expedition of Semiramis is detailed, it is impossible to doubt that the whole account is coloured, and in many parts not less fictitious than her elephants. Of the enormous army which she is said to have collected. Sir Walter Raleigh quaintly and shrewdly observes, that no one place on the earth could have nourished so vast a concourse of living creatures, "had every man and beast but fed on grass." Similar exaggeration is apparent in other parts of the narrative; and grave doubts have even been raised as to the individual existence of Semiramis, whom some maintain to have been a creation of Assyrian mythology, and others to have been the common name of an Assyrian dynasty. As Ctesias, from whom Diodorus borrowed the account, is said to have extracted it from Persian records, it is not improbable that its ba.sis of fact has been overlaid with the embellishments which usually adorn a Persian tale.

When India is next brought under notice, the portion of it lying along the right or west bank of the Indus figures as a satrapy or province of the Persian empire. This position it naturally assumed when the Assyrian empire was overthrown by Cyrus the Great. Thus incorporated, it paid nearly a third of the whole tribute which Darius levied from his twenty satrapies, and must, therefore, be presumed to have been the wealthiest and most populous, if not the most extensive of them all. In this fact it is easy to find a more rational account of the curiosity which Darius Hystaspes felt in regard to the Indus, than that which is assigned by Herodotus. According to him, the Persian monarch was merely desirous to know where the river had its mouth, and with this view caused some ships to be fitted out, and gave the command of them to Scylax, a Greek of Caryanda, who, after sailing down the stream to the ocean, turned west, and spent two years and a half in a tedious voyage along the coast.

That Darius, when he fitted out the expedition, entertained the thought of enlarging his dominions by new conquests, is confirmed by the statement which Herodotus adds, that immediately after the voyage was completed, he made himself master of the sea and subdued the Indians. These terms, how- ever, are so general, that no definite limits can be assigned to the new territory thus subjected to Persian rule.