Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/249

 REVOLT OF BABYLON. -ZOPYRUS. 231 one of tlie most frightful enormities recorded in his history. Tc make their provisions last out longer, they strangled all the women in the city, reserving only their mothers, and one woman to each family for the purpose of baking. 1 We cannot but sup- pose that this has been magnified from a partial into an universal destruction. Yet taking it even with such allowance, it illustrates that ferocious force of will, and that predominance of strong nationality, combined with antipathy to foreigners, over all the gentler sympathies, which seems to mark the Semitic nations, and which may be traced so much in the Jewish history of Josephus. Darius, assembling all the forces in his power, laid siege to the revolted city, but could make no impression upon it, either by force or by stratagem. He tried to repeat the proceeding by which Cyrus had taken it at first ; but the besieged were found this time on their guard. The siege had lasted twenty months without the smallest progress, and the Babylonians derided the besiegers from the height of their impregnable walls, when a distinguished Persian nobleman Zopyrus, son of Megabyzus, who had been one of the seven conspirators against Smerdis, presented him- self one day before Darius in a state of frightful mutilation : his nose and ears were cut off, and his body misused in every way. He had designedly so maimed himself, " thinking it intolerable that Assyrians should thus laugh the Persians to scorn," 2 in the intention which he presently intimated to Darius, of passing into the town as a deserter, with a view of betraying it, for which purpose measures were concerted. The Babylonians, seeing a Persian of the highest rank in so calamitous a condition, readily believed his assurance, that he had been thus punished by the king's order, and that he came over to them as the only means of procuring for himself single vengeance. They intrusted him with the command of a detachment, with which he gained several advantages in different sallies, according to previous concert with Darius, until at length, the confidence of the Babylonians becero- 1 Herodot. iii, 150. 2 Herodot. iii, 155. tietvov TL iroievfievof, 'Aaavpiov Hfpar<ci. Karays&pv Compare the speech of Mardonius, vii, 9. The horror of Darius, at the first sight of Zopyrus in this condition, it J'rongly dramatized by Herodotus.