Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/203

Rh of the Persians against the Medes; whilst Astyagês to fill up the Grecian conception of madness as a precursor to ruin—sends an army against the revolters, commanded by Harpagus himself. Of course the army is defeated,—Astyagês, after a vain resistance, is dethroned,—Cyrus becomes king in his place, and Harpagus repays the outrage which he has undergone by the bitterest insults.

Such are the heads of a beautiful narrative which is given at some length in Herodotus. It will probably appear to the reader sufficiently romantic, though the historian intimates that he had heard three other narratives different from it, and that all were more full of marvels, as well as in wider circulation, than his own, which he had borrowed from some unusually sober-minded Persian informants. In what points the other three stories departed from it, we do not hear.

To the historian of Halikarnassus, we have to oppose the physician of the neighboring town Knidus, Ktêsias, who contradicted Herodotus, not without strong terms of censure, on many points, and especially upon that which is the very foundation of the early narrative respecting Cyrus; for he affirmed that Cyrus was noway related to Astyagês. However indignant we may be with Ktêsias, for the disparaging epithets which he presumed to apply to an historian whose work is to us inestimable,—we must nevertheless admit that as surgeon, in actual attendance on king Artaxerxes Mnemon, and healer of the