Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/857

Rh SMERDIS. mounting his horse to march against the usurper. Before his death he assembled the Persians, con- fessed to them that he had murdered his brother, and conjured them not to submit to a Mede and a Magian. But the words of Cambyses did not meet with much belief ; and Prexaspes positively- denied that he had put Smerdis to death, as it would not have been safe for him to have admitted that he had murdered one of the sons of Cyrus. Tiie false Smerdis was thus acknowledged as king by the Persians, and, with the assistance of his brother Patizeithes, reigned for seven months with- out opposition. But the leading • Persian nobles seem never to have been quite free from suspicion ; and this suspicion was increased by the king never inviting any of them to the palace and never appearing in public, as well as by his wish to con- ciliate the subject nations by granting them ex- emption from taxes and military service for three year^ Among the nobles who entertained these suspicions was Otanes, whose daughter Phaedima had been one of the wives of Cambyses, and had been transferred together with the rest of the royal liarem to his successor. The new king had some years before been deprived of his ears by Cyrus for some offence ; and Otanes now persuaded his daughter to ascertain whether her master had really lost his ears. Phaedima undertook the dangerous task, ascertained that the king had no ears, and communicated the decisive information to her father. Otanes thereupon organized a con- spiracy to get rid of tlie pretender, and in conjunc- tion with six other noble Persians, succeeded in forcing his way into the palace, where they slew the false Smerdis and his brother Patizeithes in the eighth month of their reign, B. c. 521. Their death was followed by a general massacre of the Magians. The events which followed, the dissen- sion between the seven conspirators respecting the form of government which should be established in Persia, and the accession of Dareius son of Hystas- pes, are related elsewhere. [Dareius.] (Herod, iii. 30, 61—79.) The account of Ctesias is very different from that of Herodotus. Ctesias gives the name of Tanyoxarces to the brother of Cambyses, and re- lates that Cyrus had left him satrap of Bactria and the surrounding countries. He further says, that a Magian of the name of Spendadates accused Tanyoxarces to the king of an intention to revolt, in consequence of which he was secretly put to death, but in order to deceive Amytis, the mother of Cambyses, Spendadates, who bore a striking re- semblance to the deceased prince, was ordered to personate him, and governed Bactria for five years as if he were the real brother of Cambyses. The ! fraud was at length discovered by Amytis, who I put an end to her own life by poison, after impre- j eating curses on Cambyses. The king died soon I after of a wound at Babylon, whereupon Spenda- dates mounted the throne, and reigned for a time under the name of Tanyoxarces. His im- posture, however, was at length discovered, and he was put to death in his palace by seven noble Persians, who had conspired against him (Ctesias, Pers. cc. 8, 10—14). Xenophon {Cy rop. viii. 7. § 1 1 ) calls the brother of Cambyses Tanaoxares, which is merely another form of the name in Ctesias, but assigns to him the satrapies of the Medes, Armenians, and Cadusii. On the other hand, the names given to him by Aeschylus (^From. SMILIS. 845 780), and Justin (i. 9), are merely other forms of Smerdis. The former writer calls him Merdis, the latter Merdis or Mergis. Both Herodotus and Ctesias, however, agree in the most important part of the history, namely, that the usurper was a Magian. The true nature of the revolution has been pointed out by Heeren and Grote. It was an attempt on the part of the Medes, to whom the Magians belonged, to obtain the supremacy, of which they had been deprived by Cyrus. This appears from the words which Herodotus (iii. 65) puts into the mouth of Cambyses on his death-bed, in which he adjures the Persians not to allow the sovereignty to revert again to the Medes, as well as from the speeches of Gobryas, one of the seven Persian conspirators (Herod, iii. 73), and of Prexaspes (iii. 75). Plato (de Leg. iii. p. Q9B) in like man- ner, says that Cambyses was deprived of the sove- reignty by the Medes. The assassination of the false Smerdis and the accession of Dareius Hys- taspis again gave the ascendancy to the Persians ; and the anniversary of the day on which the Ma- gians were massacred, was commemorated among the Persians by a solemn festival, called Magopho- nia, on which no Magian was allowed to show himself in public. The real nature of the trans- action is also shown by the revolt of the Medes which followed the accession of Dareius. (Heeren, Historical Researches, vol. i. p. 346, Engl. Transl. ; Grote, Hist, of Greece., vol. iv. pp. 296 — 304.) SMERDO'MENES {1.pLip^opi.^vns son of Otanes, was one of the generals who had the supreme command of the land forces of Xerxes in his invasion of Greece (Herod, vii. 82, 121). SMILIS (2/i7Ats), the son of Eucleides, of Aegina, a sculptor of the legendary period, whose name appears to be derived from aniXi], a knife for carving wood, and afterwards a sculptor'' s chisel. In the accounts respecting this artist, there is a great confusion between the mythical and histo- rical elements ; but the only safe conclusion to be drawn from those accounts is that the name is purely mythical, and that Srailis is the legendary head of the Aeginetan school of sculpture, just as Daedalus is the legendary head of the Attic and Cretan schools. Pausanias (vii. 4. § 4) makes Smilis a contem- porary of Daedalus, but inferior to hijn in fame, and states (§ 5. s. 7) that the Eleians and the Samians were the only people to whom he tra- velled, and that he made for the latter the statue of Hera in her great temple in the island. From this tradition, coupled with another preserved by Clemens Alexandrinus {Protrept. 4, p. 40), which referred the statue of Hera to the time of Procles, an attempt has been made to fix the date of Srailis to the period of the Ionian migration, which took place, according to tlie chronologers, about 100 years after the Trojan War, or about b. c. 1044, er. Eratosth., or 988, er. Callim. (Clinton, F. H. vol. i. pp. 119, 140), and in which migration it is assumed that Smilis accompanied the colonists from Epidaurus, under Procles, who settled at Samos (Miiller, Aegin. p. 98 ; Thiersch, Epoclien, pp. 45, 46, 194), Few examples could be better, of the absurdities which result from the attempt to make up chronological history by piecing together different legends. In the first place the statement of Pausanias, that Smilis was contemporary with Daedalus, has to be modified to suit a conclusion for which Pausanias himself is made the chief