Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/317

 BABYLON AS SEEN BY IIEIIODOTUS J,ol In order to present any conception of what Assyria was, in the early days of Grecian history, and during the two centuries pre- ceding the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus in 536 B. c., we un- fortunately have no witness earlier than Herodotus, who did not see Babylon until near a century after that event, about seventy years after its still more disastrous revolt and second subjugation by Darius, Babylonia had become one of the twenty satrapies of the Persian empire, and besides paying a larger reg- ular tribute than any of the other nineteen, supplied from its ex- uberant soil provision for the Great King and his countless host of attendants during one-third part of the year. 1 Yet it was then in a state of comparative degradation, having had its im- mense walls breached by Darius, and having afterwards under- gone the ill usage of Xerxes, who, since he stripped its temples, and especially the venerated temple of Belus, of some of their richest ornaments, would probably be still more reckless in his mode of dealing with the civil edifices. 2 If in spite of such in- flictions, and in spite of that manifest evidence of poverty and suffering in the people which Herodotus expressly notices, it con- tinued to be what he describes, still counted as almost the chief city of the Persian empire, both in the time of the younger Cy- rus and in that of Alexander, 3 we may judge what it must once have been, without either foreign satrap or foreign tribute,' 1 under its Assyrian kings and Chaldean priests, during the last of the two centuries which intervened between the era of Nabon- assar and the capture of the city by Cyrus the Great. Though several of the kings, during the first of these two centuries, had contributed much to the great works of Babylon, yet it was during the second century of the two, after the capture of Nineveh by the Medes, and under Nebuchadnezzar and Nitokris, that the kings attained the maximum of their power, and the city its greatest enlargement. It was Nebuchadnezzar who constructed 1 Herodot. i, 196. 3 Xcnoph. Anab. i. 4, 11 ; Arrian. Exp. Al. iii. 16, 3. Kal il/ta TOV -ofyuov rd uiW.ov if Bat3v?.uv Kal ru Sovcra c^an'ero. 4 See the statement of the large receipts of the satrap Tritantaechmcs and his immense establishment of horses and Indian dogs (Herodot. i 192).
 * Arrian, Exp. Al. iii, 16, 6; vii, 17, 3; Quint. Curtius, iii, 3, 16.