Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/596

 568 PERSIA [MEDO-PERSIAN 525-521. Persians and made himself very useful in the conquest. It seems that only one great battle was fought, at Pelusium, the gateway of Egypt. The Egyptians, utterly beaten, fled to Memphis, which soon fell into the enemy s hands. Thus Egypt became a province of Persia ; and a pretext was soon found for executing the captured king Psammenitus. This was followed by the submission of the neighbouring Libyans and the princes of the Greek cities of Gyrene and Barca. The peculiar religious feelings of the Egyptians were almost as easily wounded as those of the Jews were in later times. The Persians, flushed with victory, recked little of Egyptian wisdom or folly, least of all recked the brutal king. It is true that even Egyptian inscriptions represent him as a pious worshipper of the Egyptian gods, but this is only the courtly ecclesiastical style, which the Egyptians, partly from servility, partly from long habit, can never drop. And, even if Cambyses did once in a way gratify a pious Egyptian, e.g., by ordering his troops to quit a temple which they had occupied as a barrack, no great importance is to be attached to the fact. No doubt the Egyptian priests grossly exaggerated the king s wicked nesses, but enough remains after all deductions. The dreadful hate which again and again goaded the naturally patient and slavish nation into revolt against the Persians dates from this time ; Darius could not atone for the guilt of Cambyses. The brutality of the latter began with maltreating and burning the mummy of the former king Amasis, who had personally insulted him or his father ; to the Persians, as Herodotus expressly says, the burning of the body was no less an impiety than to the Egyptians. From Egypt he sent an expedition to the shrine of Ammon in the Libyan Desert, but, caught presumably in a simoom, it was never heard of again. He led in person a great expedition to Nubia (&quot;^Ethiopia&quot;). It does not seem to have been such an utter failure as one might at first infer from Herodotus s narrative, for some districts to the south of Egypt were conquered ; but the results purchased by hecatombs of men who perished by fatigue or were buried in the sands were far from contenting the king. Returning to Memphis, he found the people exulting over the discovery of a new Apis. Their joy did not fall in with his mood. In a fury, or perhaps out of a tyrant s caprice, he inflicted with his own hand a mortal wound on the sacred steer and instituted a massacre among its worshippers. We may well believe Herodotus that from that time his barbarity to the Egyptians showed itself in ever darker colours. He spared not even the Persians. Ctesias too calls him bloodthirsty. Added to this was his drunkenness. But his marriage with one or two sisters, at which Herodotus takes offence, was really, according to Persian notions; an act of piety. 1 Similarly, when he put to death a corrupt judge of the highest family and caused his skin to be made into a covering for the seat on which his son was to sit and administer justice, the act was one which all Orientals recognized as truly kingly (Herod., v. 25). The empire was extended in another direction, when Polycrates, the powerful tyrant of Samos and the neighbour ing islands, sought safety in submission to the great king. The false Suddenly, however, the empire rang with the news that king s brother Smerdis had seized the crown in Persis. We are now in possession of Darius s own account of these events, and can fairly dispense with the Greek narratives ; but we may note that here again, in spite of his poetical colouring, Herodotus stands the test much better than Ctesias. 2 Gaumata (in Ionic form Gametes, Justin, i. 9), a Smerdis. 1 Herodotus s Persian informants told him much of the real or pre tended virtues of their people, but concealed things which would have offended him. 2 Small remains of another ancient and trustworthy account are to be found in Justin. Magian, gave himself out as Smerdis (spring of 522) and formally assumed the government. Even Darius s account lets us see that Cambyses was very unpopular, and the same thing appears from the fact that everybody sided with the new king. Cambyses seems to have marched against him as far as Syria, but there he put an end to himself, an end plainly affirmed by the great inscription, and quite in keeping with the wildly passionate nature of the man. Gaumdta reigned, universally acknowledged, and, as it seems, beloved, because he granted extensive remissions of taxes. He appeared in the character of Smerdis, son of Cyrus, and therefore as Persian king. This is enough to show that there can be here no question of a political opposition of the Medes to the Persians, such as Herodotus imagines, nor yet of a religious opposition to the Persians by the Magians. The changes for the worse now intro duced, and abolished again by Darius when he ascended the throne, 3 seem to imply no more than a very intelligible disregard of the leading Persian families, whom Gaumata could not but fear, since they knew much better than the people that he was an impostor. He fell, not through the patriotic indignation of the Persian people, but through the enmity of these families. Seven persons conspired against him ; their names, each with that of his father, are given by Darius in full agreement with Herodotus, while the list of Ctesias presents somewhat more divergence. 4 No doubt they were members of the seven most illustrious houses, but certainly not the actual heads of these houses ; for such a life -and -death enterprise, where all depended upon energy and silence, could not be entrusted to persons who happened to be heads of families and some of them perhaps old men. Moreover, Darius himself, who was undoubtedly from the outset the real leader, was certainly not the head of his house, for his father Hystaspes (Visht- aspa) was still alive and in full vigour, since he afterwards governed a province and fought the rebels. But the ring leaders would choose one out of each of the seven families in order to commit the families themselves. The conspiracy was completely successful ; and the seven killed Gaumata in the fortress Sikathahuvati near Ecbatana, in the land of Nisa in Media. This happened in the beginning of 521. Darius was then made king. He was probably the only one of the seven who was qualified to be so, for he alone belonged to the royal family, of which, it is true, there may have been many members more nearly related to Cambyses. At any rate there was hardly another can didate for the crown as able as he. Darius (Ddrayavahu, in the nominative Ddrayarahnsti) Dar was then, according to Herodotus (i. 209), about thirty years of age. Amongst other measures for securing himself and adding to his dignity he took to wife Atossa, daughter of Cyrus, who had already been married to her brother Cambyses and to the false Smerdis. He soon showed that his six comrades were not his peers by executing Intaphernes, who had forgotten the respect due to the king, together with his whole family. That at first his seat on the throne was far from firm is intimated by Herod otus (iii. 127), who also mentions cursorily an insurrection of the Medes against him (i. 130), but it is only from the king s great inscription that we learn the gigantic nature of the task he undertook when he ascended the throne. He had first to unite the empire again ; one province after Ins _ the other was in insurrection ; the west alone remained * 101 quiet, but it was partly in the hands of governors of^ 3 Unfortunately in this interesting passage of the great Behistun inscription the particulars are very obscure. 4 In Ctesias the name of a son is twice given for that of the father. It is obvious that we are here dealing with the ancestors of the seven great families, and one generation could very easily be named by mistake for another.