Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/234

 216 HISTORY OF GREECE. ceded to them. It was from Cyrus that the habits jf the Pen- eian kings took commencement, to dwell at Susa in the winter, and Ekbatana during the summer ; the primitive territory of Persis, with its two towns of Persepolis and Pasargadre, being reserved for the burial-place of the kings and the religious sanc- tuary of the empire. How or when the conquest of Susiana was made, we are not informed ; it lay eastward of the Tigris, be- tween Babylonia and Persis proper, and its people, the Kissians, as far as we can discern, were of Assyrian and not of Arian race. The river Choaspes, near Susa, was supposed to furnish the only water fit for the palate of the Great King, and is said to have been carried about with him wherever he went. 1 While the conquests of Cyrus contributed to assimilate the dis- tinct types of civilization in western Asia, not by elevating the worse, but by degrading the better, upon the native Per- sians themselves they operated as an extraordinary stimulus, provoking alike their pride, ambition, cupidity, and warlike pro- pensities. Not only did the territory of Persis proper pay no tribute to Susa or Ekbatana, being the only district so ex- empted between the Jaxartes and the Mediterranean, but the vast tributes received from the remaining empire were distributed to a great degree among its inhabitants. Empire to them meant, for the great men, lucrative satrapies, or pachalics. with powers altogether unlimited, pomp inferior only to that of the Great King, and standing armies which they employed at their own discretion, sometimes against each other, 2 for the common soldiers, drawn from their fields or flocks, constant plunder, abun- dant maintenance, and an unrestrained license, either in the suite of one of the satraps, or in the large permanent troop which moved from Susa to Ekbatana with the Great King. And if the entire population of Persis proper did not migrate from their abodes to occupy some of those more inviting spots which the immensity of the imperial dominion furnished, a dominion ex- tending (to use the language of Cyrus the younger, before the battle of Kunaxa) 3 from the region of insupportable heat to 1 Hcrodot. i, 188 ; Plutarch, Artaxerxcs, c. 3 ; Diodor. xvii, 71. 3 Xenophon, Anabas. i, 7, 6 ; Cyropsed. viii, 6, 19.
 * Xenophon, Anabas. i, 1, 8.