Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/594

 566 PERSIA [M EDO-PERSIAN 547-539. when he offered battle, and captured his capital Sardis after a short siege. Not only Herodotus but also apparently his contemporary Xanthus the Lydian, quite independently of Herodotus, told how Cyrus would have burned Croesus alive. 1 The statements of Ctesias and Xenophon to the same effect are borrowed from Herodotus. But there is also a vase of the time of Pericles representing Croesus seated on a pyre and majestically pouring out a libation. 2 We may not of course infer from this that Croesus offered himself as a willing sacrifice ; but it certainly shows that a hundred years later there was a general belief that Croesus had stood upon the pyre. And it is by no means inconceivable that Cyrus, whom we must picture to our selves, not as the chivalrous and sentimental hero of Xeno phon, but as a savage conqueror, should have destined such a punishment for a vanquished foe, against whom he may personally have been especially embittered. No doubt to pollute the fire with a corpse was even in those days an impiety in the eyes of the Persians, but who knows whether Cyrus in his wrath paid much more heed to such religious maxims than did his son Cambyses 1 ? However, Croesus was pardoned, after all, perhaps because some external circumstance interposed (because a sudden shower pre vented the fire from burning 1), or because the conqueror changed his mind before it was too late. The pious and believing saw in the event a direct intervention of Apollo on behalf of the man who had honoured the Delphic shrine so highly. 3 The date of Croesus s fall is not quite certain. It may have been 547 or 546. When Cyrus had marched away, the Lydian Pactyas, whom Cyrus had appointed guardian of the treasures, raised a revolt, but it was speedily put down by the king s generals. From that time forwards the Lydians never made the slightest attempt to shake off the Persian rule. War with But now began that struggle of the Persians with the Asiatic Greeks which has had so much importance for the history o f t ke world. The Lydian kings had subdued a number of Greek cities in Asia Minor ; but even these latter shrank from submitting to the still barbarous Persians, whose rule was far more oppressive, inasmuch as they ruthlessly required military service. But Harpagus and other Per sian leaders quickly took one Greek town after the other ; some, like Priene, were razed to the ground. Some of the lonians, such as the Teians, and most of the Phocseans, avoided slavery by emigrating. Miletus alone, the most flourishing of all these cities, had early come to an under standing with Cyrus, and the latter pledged himself to lay no heavier burden on it than Croesus had before him. In most of the cities the Persians seem to have set up tyrants, who gave them a better guarantee of obedience than demo cratic or aristocratic governments. In other respects they left the Greeks alone, just as they left their other subjects alone, not meddling with their internal affairs so long as they paid the necessary contributions, and supplied men and ships for their wars. Most of the other peoples in the west of Asia Minor submitted without much resistance, except the freedom -loving Lycians. Driven into Xanthus, the capital, they perished in a body rather than surrender. 4 Some Carian cities also defended themselves stoutly. This Greeks 1 See Nicolaus Dam., 67 (apparently put together from Herodotus and Xanthus). 2 Mon. de VInst, Arch., i. 54. 3 Croesus s good repute amongst the Greeks of the mainland (see Pin dar, Pyth., i. 184 [94]) was due to his liberality to the Delphians. Even 400 years afterwards the Delphians appealed to their old friendship with the people of Sardis (i.e., with Croesus). Bulletin de corresp. hellenique, v. 383, 389 sq. That Croesus could also be inhuman enough is shown by Herod., i. 92. 4 About 500 years later the inhabitants of Xanthus followed their example in the straggle with that champion of freedom, Brutus. may have given a Persian here and there an inkling even then that the little peoples on the western sea were, after all, harder to manage than the nations of slaves in the interior of Asia. Sardis became and remained the mainstay of the Persian rule in western Asia Minor. The governor ship was one of the most influential posts in the empire, and the governor seems to have exercised a certain supre macy over some neighbouring governorships. Though Cyrus had made, and continued to make, con- Babyloi quests in the interior of Asia, he was still without the true ta ken. capital of Asia, Babylon, the seat of primeval civilization, together with the rich country in which it lay, and the wide districts of Mesopotamia, 5 Syria, and the border lands over which it ruled. Now that we know the two Babylonian memorials mentioned above we can dispense with most of the various, often very fabulous, accounts which Greek writers give of the conquest of Babylon ; but when these documents are rightly understood the diver gence between them and the account of Berosus G is, on the main points, not very great. Before the capture of the city, in the summer of 539, a great battle took place, in consequence of which Cyrus occupied the capital without any further serious fighting, since the Babylonian troops had mutinied against their king. Late in the autumn of 539 7 Cyrus marched into Babylon, Nabunaid, the king, having previously surrendered himself. According to Berosus, Cyrus appointed Nabunaid governor of Carmania, east of Persis 8 ; but in the annals inscribed on the tablet it is said to be recorded that Nabunaid died when the city was taken. If both memorials represent Cyrus as a pious worshipper of the Babylonian gods, if, according to the cylinder, the Babylonian god Merodakh, wroth with the king of Babylon because he had hot served him aright, actually himself led and guided Cyrus, such a piece of priestly diplomacy ought not to impose on any student of history. The priests turned to the rising sun, whether they had been on good or bad terms with Nabunaid. Cyrus certainly did not put down the Babylonian worship, as the Hebrew prophets expected ; he must even have been impressed by the magnificence of the service in the richest city of the world, and by the vast antiquity of the rites. But he was no more an adherent of the Babylonian religion, because the priests said he was, than Cambyses and the Roman emperors were worshippers of the Egyptian gods, because Egyptian monuments represent them as doing reverence to the gods exactly in the style of Egyptian kings. Sayce doubts whether Cyrus could read their documents ; we doubt whether Cyrus understood their lan guage at all, and regard it as inconceivable that he learned their complicated writing ; indeed, on the strength of all analogies, we may regard it as scarcely probable that he could read and write at all. 9 The countries subject to 5 We always use &quot; Mesopotamia &quot; in the sense in which alone this geographical conception ought to be used, viz., as equivalent to the Arabic Jazira, i.e., to denote the cultivated land between the middle Euphrates and the Tigris, which is separated by the Mesopotamian desert from the totally different Irak (Babylonia). 6 In Josephus, c. Ap., i. 20. On many particular points in these memorials the Assyriologists themselves hold different opinions ; but the part which concerns us most seems to be free from doubt. 7 On 3d Marheshwan, which month corresponds nearly to our November. The year which begins with 5th January 538 is, in the astronomical cnnon, the first year of Cyras as king of Babylon. If, as the strict rule requires, we make the small remainder of the year after the taking of the city to be the first year of Cyrus s reign, then the events in the text fall in 538. But probably the remainder of the year was not reckoned in, and for this there are analogies. (See below.) 8 This statement is further supported by that of Abydenus, doubt less taken from Berosus, that Darius drove Nabunaid out of Carmania (Euseb., Chron., p. 41). This is certainly not an invention. At the most, the former king of Babylon might have been confounded with another Babylonian prince. 9 Even the comparatively simple Persian cuneiform writing was certainly always the secret of a few ; otherwise it could not have