Page:The Book of the Courtier.djvu/701

 NOTES TO THE THIRD BOOK OF THE COURTIER King Mausolus of Caria, a state on the western coast of Asia Minor. On her husband's death in 352 B.C., she reigned two years until she pined away for grief. The monument, Mausoleum, erected by her to his memory at Halicar- nassus, was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world — the others being: the Egyptian pyramids, the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the walls and hanging gardens of Babylon, Phidias's statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Colossus at Rhodes, and the lighthouse at Alexandria. Zenobia, an Arab by birth, was the second wife of Odenathus, King of Palmyra, which lay to the east of Syria. On the death of her husband, about 266 A.D., she acted as regent for her sons and seems to have shown great talent for war as well as for the arts of wise administration; but in her effort to extend her sway over the entire East, she was defeated by the Emperor Aurelian, and adorned his triumph in golden chains at Rome. She was allowed to spend the remainder of her life in dignified retirement at Tibur (Tivoli). Semiramis was the legendary daughter of the Syrian goddess Derketo, and with her husband Ninus was regarded as the founder of Nineveh. On his death she assumed the government of Assyria, built the city of Babylon and its wonderful gardens, conquered Egypt, etc. To her the Greeks ascribed nearly everything marvellous in the East. Her name appears in inscriptions as that of the consort of an Assyrian ruler who reigned 811-782 B.C. Cleopatra, (69-30 B.C.), was directly descended in the eighth generation from Ptolemy I, the most noted of Alexander the Great's generals and the founder of the Egyptian dynasty that ended with her life. Her establishment as sole ruler, to the exclusion of her two brothers, w^as due to the favour of Julius Caesar, who is said to have acknowledged the paternity of her son Caesarion, ultimately put to death by order of Augustus. Her love of literature, and the refine- ment of her luxury, show her to have been no mere voluptuary. Note 405, page 206. Sardanapalus, — Assurbanipal, the Asnapper of the Old Testament, — ruled over Assyria from 668 to 626 B.C., and was the last monarch of the empire reputed to have been founded by Ninus and Semiramis. His name became a by-word for effeminate luxury, but in recent times the dis- covery and study of the larger part of the tablets composing his library, prove him to have been a vigorous king and an intelligent patron of art and literature. Note 406, page 207. In his life of Alexander, Plutarch extols the magnanimity with which the youthful monarch treated the captive mother, wife and two daughters, of Darius, the last King of Persia, whom he had utterly defeated in the battle of Arbela, 331 B.C. In furtherance of his plan of uniting his Euro- pean and Asiatic subjects into one people, Alexander afterwards married Ber- sine, the elder of Darius's two daughters. Note 407, page 208. This incident is narrated in Valerius Maximus's "Mem- orable Sayings and Doings" as having occurred in the first Spanish campaign of Scipio Africanus Maximus, 210 B.C., when that commander was in his twenty -fourth year. 401