Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/318

 302 HISTORY OF GBEBCE. Mie seaport Teredon, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and who probably excavated the long ship canal of near four hundred miles, which joined it, which was perhaps formed partly from a natural western branch of the Euphrates. 1 The brother of the poet Alkajus, Antimenidas, who served in the Babylonian army, and distinguished himself by his personal valor (600-580 B. c.), would have seen it in its full glory : 2 he is the earliest Greek of whom we hear individually in connection with the Babylo- nians. It marks 3 strikingly the contrast between the Persian kings and the Babylonian kings, on whose ruin they rose, that while the latter incurred immense expense to facilitate the com- munication between Babylon and the sea, the former artificially impeded the lower course of the Tigris, in order that their resi- dence at Susa might be out of the reach of assailants. That which strikes us most, and which must have struck the first Grecian visitors much more, both in Assyria and Egypt, is. the unbounded command of naked human strength possessed by these early kings, and the effect of mere mass and indefatigable perseverance, unaided either by theory or by artifice, in the ac- 1 There is a valuable examination of the lower course of the Euphrates, with the changes which it has undergone, in Hitter, West-Asien, b. iii. Ab- theil. iii, Abschnitt i, sect. 29, pp. 45-49, and the passage from Abydcnus in the latter, page. For the distance between Tori-don or Diridotis, at the mouth of the Eu- phrates (which remained separate from that of the Tigris until the first century of the Christian era), to Babylon, see Strabo, ii, p. 80; xvi, p. 739). It is important to keep in mind the warning given by Hitter, that none of the maps of the course of the river Euphrates, prepared previously to the publication of Colonel Chesney's expedition in 1836, are to be trusted. That expedition gave the first complete and accurate survey of the course of the river, and led to the detection of many mistakes previously committed by Mannert, Reichard, and other able geographers and chartographers. To the immense mass of information contained in Hitter's comprehensive and laborious work, is to be added the farther merit, that he is always careful in pointing out where the geographical data arc insufficient and full short of certainty. See Wcst-Asicn, B. iii, Abtheilung iii, Abschnitt i, sect. 41, p 959. 2 Strabo, xiii, p. 617, with the mutilated fragment of Alkrcus, which Miiller has so ingeniously corrected (Rhcnisch. Museum, i, 4, p. 287). 3 Strabo, xvi, p. 740.