Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/204

 186 HISTORY OF GREECE. wound inflicted on that prince at Kunaxa by his brother Cyrus the younger, 1 he had better opportunities even than Herodotus of conversing with sober-minded Persians ; and that the discrep- ancies between the two statements are to be taken as a proof of the prevalence of discordant, yet equally accredited, stories. Herodotus himself was in fact compelled to choose one out of four. So rare and late a plant is historical authenticity. That Cyrus was the first Persian conqueror, and that the space which he overran covered no less than fifty degi-ees of longitude, from the coast of Asia Minor to the Oxus and the Indus, are facts quite indisputable ; but of the steps by which this was achieved, we know very little. The native Persians whom he conducted to an empire so immense, were an aggregate of seven agricultural and four nomadic tribes, all of them rude, hardy, and brave, 2 dwelling in a mountainous region, clothed in skins, ignorant of wine or fruit, or any of the com- monest luxuries of life, and despising the very idea of purchase or sale. Their tribes were very unequal in point of dignity, probably also in respect to numbers and powers, among one another : first in estimation among them stood the Pasargadce ; and the first phratry, or clan, among the Pasargadse were the Achaemenidae, to whom Cyrus himself belonged. Whether his relationship to the Median king whom he dethroned was a mat- ter of fact, or a politic fiction, we cannot well determine. But Xenophon, in noticing the spacious deserted cities, Larissa and Mespila, 3 which he saw in his march with the Ten Thousand 1 Xenophon, Anabas. i, 8, 26. 8 Herodot. i, 71-153; Arrian, v, 4; Strabo, xv, p. 727; Plato, Legg. iii p. 695. 3 Xenophon, Anabas. iii, 3, 6 ; iii, 4, 7-12. Strabo had read accounts which represented the last battle between Astyages and Cyrus to have been fought near Pasargndae (xv, p. 730). It has been rendered probable by Hitter, however, that the ruined city which Xenophon called Mespila was the ancient Assyrian Nineveh, o.iid the other deserted city which Xenophon calls Larissa. situated as it was on the Tigris, must have been originally Assyrian, and not Median. See about Nineveh, above, the Chapter on the Babylonians, vol. iii, ch. xix, p. 305, note. The land east of the Tigris, in which Nineveh and Arbela were situated, Kerns to have been called Aturia, a dialectic variation of Assyria (Strabo xvi, p. 737 ; Dio Cass. Ixviii, 28).