Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume V.djvu/625

 CYRUS 621 greatness predicted by the dreams, was sent to Persia to his parents. When he grew up, following the secret advice of Harpagus, he prepared to dethrone his grandfather. The hardy and warlike Persians were easily in- duced to shake off the yoke of Media. Harpagus betrayed the first army, sent under his com- mand against the rebels; and with a second the king himself was defeated near Pasargadae, and made prisoner. Cyrus was acknowledged by the Modes as ruler of the new empire of Persia and Media, of which they became the second nation. He now marched against Croe- sus, king of Lydia, who crossed the Halys to revenge his fallen ally and brother-in-law As- tyages. A bloody but indecisive battle was fought in Cappadocia. Croesus thought it wiser to return to his own country, hoping to recommence the campaign with reinforcements from his allies, the kings of Egypt and Baby- lonia, and the Lacedemonians. But before these arrived Cyrus had in his turn crossed the Halys, vanquished the celebrated Lydian cavalry on the plain before Sardis, taken that city, and made Croesus prisoner. The Greeks of Asia Minor, who had rejected the previous invitations of Cyrus to revolt against the Lyd- ians, were now conquered by an army under Harpagus. A part of the Phocaeans, how- ever, preferred emigration to the distant re- gions of the west. The Carians, Caunians, Lycians, and others were next subdued by the same general, while Cyrus himself was prepar- ing and partly executing his more important eastern conquests. For the reduction of Baby- lonia, the second great empire of western Asia, by Cyrus, we have the concurring testimony of the three above mentioned Greek historians, as well as of the Scriptures, though according to Xenophon he acted only as general of his uncle Cyaxares II., son of Astyages, king of Media. Herodotus describes how, on his march from the northeast against Babylon, Cyrus chastised the river Gyndes, an affluent of the Tigris, for drowning one of his sacred white horses, by digging 360 channels, " so that women in future should cross it without wetting their knees ;" how he turned the Euphrates by a canal into the artificial lake made by the Babylonian queen Nitocris, " on which the river sank to such an extent, that the natural bed of the stream became ford- able;" how through this bed the Persians en- tered the city and took it by surprise ; and how, " owing to the vast size of the place, the inhabitants of the central parts (as the resi- dents at Babylon declare), long after the outer portions of the town were taken, knew noth- ing of what had chanced, but, as they were engaged in a festival, continued dancing and revelling until they learned the capture but too certainly." Confirming these statements, the Hebrews dwell on the exploits of their de- liverer from the Babylonish captivity ; on the "one from the north" and "from the rising of the sun," who comes " upon princes as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth clay;" who executes " on Babylon the vengeance of the Lord ;" " that saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers; that saith of Cy- rus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure ; even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built ; and to the temple, Thy foun- dation shall be laid" (Isaiah). They relate how " the mighty men of Babylon have for- borne to fight, they have remained in their holds, their might hath failed; they became as women ; " how one post runs " to meet another, and one messenger to me*et another, to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end " (Jeremiah). After the fall of the capital (538), which seems to have been greeted by many oppressed nations of Asia as the commencement of an era of justice and freedom, all the provinces of the Babylonian empire speedily surrendered to the conqueror, who was now master of nearly all the coun- tries between the Indus and the ^Egean, the Oxus and the Eed sea. Satisfied with this vast dominion, which he ruled wisely and justly, Xenophon makes him die in peace and in his bed with a Socratic speech on his lips ; but Arrian attributes to him afterward an in- vasion of India across the desert of Arachosia ; Ctesias, an expedition against the Derbices, a people in the Caucasian regions, in which he is slain; and Herodotus, an attack upon the Massagetae, northern nomads ruled by a queen, Tomyris, and greatly resembling the Scythians, in whose country he was defeated and slain in a bloody battle. There is, how- ever, some testimony that he was buried in Pasargadaa in his native province, " where his tomb was honored and watched until the breaking up of the empire, while his mem- ory was held in profound veneration among the Persians." " There is much reason to believe," says Rawlinson, "that the tomb of Cyrus still exists at Murgab, the ancient Pa- sargadaa. On a square base, composed of im- mense blocks of white marble, rising in steps, stands a structure so closely resembling the description of Arrian, that it seems scarcely possible to doubt that it is the tomb which in Alexander's time contained the body of Cyrus. It is a quadrangular edifice or chamber, built of blocks 5 ft. thick, which are shaped at the top into a sloping roof. Internally the cham- ber is 10 ft. long, 7 wide, and 8 high. There are holes in the marble floor, which seem to have admitted the fastenings of a sarcophagus. The tomb stands in an area marked out by pil- lars, where occurs repeatedly the inscription (written both in Persian and the so-called Me- dian), 'I am Cyrus the king, the Achaeme- nian.' It is called by the natives the tomb of the mother of Solomon." II. The Younger, second son of Darius Nothus, king of Persia, received from his father at an early age the satrapy of Lydia, Phrygia, and other parts of Asia Minor (407 B. 0.). When his elder brother, Artaxerxes II., ascended the throne,