Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/228

 210 HISTORY OF GREECE. taken at all, or, indeed, how a hostile army could have even reached it. Herodotus informs us that the Babylonian queen Nitokris mother of that very Labynetus who was king when Cyrus attacked the place had been apprehensive of invasion from the Medes after their capture of Nineveh, and had executed many laborious works near the Euphrates for the purpose of obstructing their approach. Moreover, there existed what was called the wall of Media (probably built by her, but certainly built prior to the Persian conquest), one hundred feet high and twenty feet thick, 1 across the entire space of seventy-five miles which joined the Tigris with one of the canals of the Euphrates. And the canals themselves, as we may see by the march of the Ten Thousand Greeks after the battle of Kunaxa, pre- sented means of defence altogether insuperable by a rude army such as that of the Persians. On the east, the territory of Babylonia was defended by the Tigris, which cannot be forded 1 See Xenophon, Anabas. i, 7, 15 ; ii, 4, 12. For the inextricable difficul- ties in which the Ten Thousand Greeks were involved, after the battle of Kunaxa, and the insurmountable obstacles which impeded their march, assuming any resisting force whatever, see Xenoph. Anab. ii, 1,11; ii, 2, 3; ii, 3, 10; ii, 4, 12-13. These obstacles, doubtless, served as a protection to them against attack, not less than as an impediment to their advance ; and the well-supplied villages enabled them to obtain plenty of provisions : hence the anxiety of the Great King to help them across the Tigris out of Babylonia. But it is not easy to see how, in the face of such difficulties, any invading army could reach Babylon. Hitter represents the wall of Media as having reached across from the Euphrates to the Tigris at the point where they come nearest together, about two hundred stadia or twenty-five miles across. But it is nowhere stated, so far as I can find, that this wall reached to the Euphrates, still less that its length was two hundred stadia, for the passages of Strabo cited by Ritter io not prove either point (ii, 80 ; xi, 529). And Xenophon (ii, 4, 12) gives the length of the wall as I have stated it in the text, = 20 parasangs = 600 stadia = 75 miles. The passage of the Anabasis (i, 7, 15) seems to connect the Median wall with the canals, and not with the river Euphrates. The narrative of Herodotus, as I have remarked in a former chapter, leads us to suppose that he descended that river to Babylon ; and if we suppose that the wall did DDt reach the Euphrates, this would afford some reason wh f he makes no mention of it See Hitter, "West Asien, b. iii, Abtheilung iii, Abschn. i, Met 29, pp. 19-22.