Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/201

 RISE OF CYRUS. 183 nicia in Egypt, reigned the native king Amasis, powerful and affluent, sustained in his throne by a large body of Grecian mer- cenaries, and himself favorably disposed to Grecian commerce and settlement. Both with Labynetus and with Amasis, Croesus was on terms of alliance; and as Astyages was his brother-in^ law, the four kings might well be deemed out of the reach of calamity. Yet within the space of thirty years or a little more, the whole of their territories had become embodied in one vast empire, under the son of an adventurer as yet not known even by name. The rise and fall of Oriental dynasties has been in all times distinguished by the same general features. A brave and adven- turous prince, at the head of a population at once poor, warlike, and greedy, acquires dominion, while his successors, abandon- ing themselves to sensuality and sloth, probably also to oppres- sive and irascible dispositions, become in process of time victims to those same qualities in a stranger which had enabled their own father to seize the throne. Cyrus, the great founder of the Persian empire, first the subject and afterwards the dethroner of the Median Astyages, corresponds to this general description, as far at least as we can pretend to know his history. For in truth, even the conquests of Cyrus, after he became ruler of Media, are very imperfectly known, whilst the facts which pre- ceded his rise up to that sovereignty cannot be said to be known at all : we have to choose between different accounts at variance with each other, and of which the most complete and detailed is stamped with all the character of romance. The Cyropaedia of Xenophon is memorable and interesting, considered with refer cnce to the Greek mind, and as a philosophical novel : l that it should have been quoted so largely as authority on matters of history, is only one proof among many how easily authors have been satisfied as to the essentials of historical evidence. The narrative given by Herodotus ol the relations between Cyrus and Astyages, agreeing with Xenophon in little more than the fact that it makes Cyrus son of Kambyses and Mandane, and 1 Among the lost productions of Antisthenes, the contemporary of Xeno- phon and Plato, and emanating like them from the tuition of SokratSs, ATM one Kvoof, ?/ nepl Ba^i^eiaf (Diogenes Latrt. vi, 15).