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 230 HISTORY OF GREKCK. rus a just, systematic, and laborious administration, such as their own experience did not present to them in Asia. Probably He- rodotus had visited Ekbatana (which he describes and measures like an eye-witness, comparing its circuit to that of Athens), and there heard that Dei'okes was the builder of the city, the earliest known Median king, and the first author of those public customs which struck him as peculiar, after the revolt from Assyria : the interval might then be easily filled up, between Median auton- omy and Median despotism, by intermediate incidents, such as would have accompanied that transition in the longitude of Greece. The features of these inhabitants of Upper Asia, for a thousand years forward from the time at which we are now ar- rived, under the descendants of Dei'okes, of Cyrus, of Arsakes, and of Ardshir, are so unvarying, 1 that we are much assisted in detecting those occasions in which Herodotus or others infuse into their history indigenous Grecian ideas. Phraortes (G58-636 B. c.), having extended the dominion of the Medes over a large portion of Upper Asia, and conquered both the Persians and several other nations, was ultimately de- feated and slain in a war against the Assyrians of Nineveh : who, though deprived of their external dependencies, were yet brave and powerful by themselves. His son Kyaxares (63G-595 B. c.) followed up with still greater energy the same plans of conquest, and is said to have been the first who introduced any organiza- tion into the military force ; before his time, archers, spearmen, and cavalry had been confounded together indiscriminately, until this monarch established separate divisions for each. He ex- tended the Median dominion to the eastern bank of the Halys, which river afterwards, by the conquests of the Lydian king Cro2sus, became the boundary between the Lydian and Median empires ; and he carried on war for six years with Alyattes king of Lydia, in consequence of the refusal of the latter to give up a 1 When the Roman emperor Claudius sends the young Parthian princo Moherdates, who had been an hostage at Rome, to occupy the kingdom which the Parthian envoys tendered to him, he gives him some good advice, ronccived in the school of Greek and Roman politics: "Addidit prae cepta, ut non dominationcm ac servos, scd rectorem ct cives, cogitaret : clem entiarmjue ae justitiam quanto ignara barbaris, tanto toleratiora, capcsscret. f Tacit Annal. xii, 11.)