Herodotus (Swayne)/Chapter 2

by George Carless Swayne

CHAPTER II.

CYRUS.

"Not vainly did the early Persian make
His altar the high places, and the peak
Of earth-o'ergazing mountains, and thus take
A fit and unwalled temple, there to seek
The Spirit, in whose honour shrines are weak
Upreared of human hands."
—Byron, "Childe Harold."

Before the Medes or Persians made their appearance in history, the Assyrians, according to Herodotus, had ruled over upper Asia for five hundred and twenty years. Asshur appears in Scripture^[1] as a son of Shem, who went out from the land of Shinar and founded Nineveh. Herodotus is supposed to have written a separate history of Assyria, which has been lost; but Layard and others have deciphered for us a new history from the monuments of that wonderful empire. The bearded kings and warriors, with their wars and lion-hunts graven on sandstone slabs, which are to be seen in the British Museum and in the Louvre in Paris, look as fresh as if they had been sculptured yesterday instead of nearly three thousand years ago. The Assyrians were of the Semitic race, of the same family as the Jews and Arabs; while the Medes and Persians were, in Scriptural phrase, of the sons of Japheth—that is, they belonged to the same Aryan, Iranian, or Indo-Germanic family as the Greeks and Romans, and ourselves. The home of the Assyrians and their cognate Babylonians was in the great plain of Mesopotamia, while the Medes lived in the mountains to the east, and the Persians to the south-east. The Median highlanders, being of more hardy habits, first conquered the Assyrian lowlanders, and then, descending to their softer country and habits, were conquered in their turn by the hardier Persians. The decline of Assyria was consummated by the fall of Nineveh, which was taken, about B.C. 625, by Cyaxares, third king of the Medes, in conjunction with the Babylonians. The first king of the Medes is said to have been Deioces, who built the wonderful city called by Herodotus Agbatana,^[2] and less correctly by later writers Ecbatana, with its seven circular walls, one within the other, with the palace and treasuries in the centre. The first wall had white battlements, the second black, the third scarlet, the fourth blue, the fifth orange. The last two walls had their battlements silvered and gilt. They rose one above another on a conical hill, and were supposed to have had a symbolic meaning, as referring to the sun, moon, and five planets, or the deities presiding over the days of the week. The last king of the Medes was Astyages, the son of Cyaxares. He had given his daughter Mandane in marriage to Cambyses, who was, according to our author's account, a poor Persian gentleman, but according to later authorities, a descendant of the first Persian king Achæmenes. Astyages dreamed that he saw a vine spring from the body of his daughter Mandane, which overshadowed the whole of Asia. We know from Scripture how much stress the Chaldeans and the Medes laid on dreams. Fearing that an offspring of Mandane would deprive him of his sovereignty, Astyages ordered the son that was born of her to be destroyed. The courtier Harpagus, who was commissioned to do this, passed on the child to one of the royal herdsmen, that he might expose it to die upon the mountains. But the herdsman's wife, when she saw that it was "a proper child," and plainly of noble birth, adorned for death with gorgeous apparel, took pity on the infant, and as she had just lost one of her own, persuaded her husband to expose the dead child, and save the living one, that she might nurse it. So the future Cyrus lived, while the herdsman's child received a royal funeral. When the boy was ten years old he was playing one day with the children of his village. The game was King and Courtiers. Cyrus was chosen king, and assumed the dignity as if he had been born to it, appointing officers, architects, guards, couriers, and an official called the King's Eye,^[3] (possibly the head of the detective police). In carrying out his character, Cyrus ordered one of the children, the son of a Median of high rank, to be flogged for disobedience. The angry child went to the city and complained to his father, who in turn complained to the real king. Astyages ordered the despotic urchin to be brought into his presence. Unabashed, however, the boy justified himself; and this circumstance, together with a strong family resemblance, led to his recognition by the grandfather, who came at the truth by examining the herdsman and Harpagus. He now dissembled his wrath, pretended that he was glad the child had been saved, and invited Harpagus to send his son to be the companion of the young prince, and to come himself to dinner. After Harpagus had well feasted, Astyages asked him how he liked his entertainment; he said it was excellent. Upon this, a basket was shown to him containing the head, hands, and feet of his own son, on whose flesh he had been feasting. The father, with the dissimulation natural to the subjects of an Oriental despotism, observed that whatsoever the king did was right in his eyes. It is the very answer which the son of Ethelwold is said by William of Malmesbury to have made when King Edgar showed him his father's corpse, slain by him in the royal forest; the English chronicler having evidently borrowed from Herodotus.

Astyages now consulted the Magi (a caste of priests of whom we shall hear more hereafter) as to what was to be done. They said that they considered that Cyrus had ceased to be dangerous, since he had been king already in the children's play. So Astyages sent him away into Persia, to his real parents. Meanwhile Harpagus nursed his revenge, till Cyrus was grown to man's estate, and then he felt his time was come. He sent a letter to the noble youth sewn up in the belly of a hare, bidding him put himself at once at the head of the Persians, and revolt from Astyages. This king—surely under some infatuation from heaven, says the historian—forgetting the deadly wrong which he had done Harpagus, sent him to suppress the revolt. He deserted to Cyrus, and the Medes were easily defeated. Thus Cyrus destroyed the great Median empire, and substituted that of the Persians—becoming, after the downfall of Crœsus, master of all Asia. He treated his grandfather Astyages with all honour to the day of his death.

There was a religious as well as a political dissidence between the two nations. They both worshipped the elements and "all the host of heaven," and planetary deities; but the Persian national creed recognised both a good and an evil principle in nature, constantly at war, whom they called Ormuzd and Ahrirnan. The Persians, according to Herodotus, eschewed images, temples, and altars, and sacrificed to the elemental deity on the tops of mountains. But he has evidently confused the Median worship with theirs. Their habits much resembled those of the old Germans, as described by Tacitus. They were originally a simple people, and compulsory education with them was limited to teaching their sons "to ride, to draw the bow, and speak the truth." Next after lying, they counted running in debt most disgraceful, since "he who is in debt must needs lie." Lepers were banished from society, as they were supposed to have sinned against the sun; even white pigeons being put under "taboo" for a similar reason.^[4] They were very much given to wine;^[5] and discussed every subject of importance twice—first when they were drunk, and again when they were sober. As water was a sacred element, none might defile a river—a sanitary regulation in which we moderns would do well to follow them. The bodies of the dead presented a difficulty. They might not be buried, for the earth was sacred; or thrown into rivers, for water was sacred; or burnt, for fire was sacred. They were therefore exposed to be torn by birds and beasts—a fate of which the Greeks had the greatest horror. The Parsees of India, and the native Australians, dispose of their dead in much the same way. As a compromise, adopted from the Magi, a body might be buried when covered with wax to prevent its contact with the earth.

The Persians, when they had conquered the Medes, soon degenerated from their earlier simplicity, which is celebrated by Xenophon in his romance of the 'Education of Cyrus.'

 

When Cyrus, by the defeat of Crœsus, had made himself master of Lydia, the Greek colonists on the Asiatic seaboard sent to him in alarm, and begged to be allowed to be his vassals on the same terms as they had been to Crœsus. He answered them by a scornful parable: "There was a certain piper who piped on the sea-shore for the fish to come out, but they came not. Then he took a net and hauled out a great draught of them. The fish, in their agonies, began to caper. But he said, 'Cease to dance now, since ye would not dance when I piped to you.'"^[6] This answer drove the Ionian Greeks to fortify their towns and send ambassadors to Sparta for assistance. Their envoy, however, disgusted the Spartans by wearing a purple robe and making a long speech—two things which they detested; and they voted not to send the succours, but despatched a fifty-oared ship to watch the proceedings of Cyrus. When this vessel reached the port of Phocæa, a herald was sent on to Sardis to warn Cyrus from the Spartans not to hurt any Greek city on pain of their displeasure. This caused Cyrus to inquire who these Spartans were, and how many in numbers, that they dared to send him such a message. When he was informed he said, "I am not afraid of people who have a place in their city where they meet to cheat each other and forswear themselves" (meaning the agora or market-place); "and if I live, the Spartans shall have troubles enough of their own, without troubling themselves about the Ionians."

Cyrus had other business on his hands at present than to punish the Greeks; he therefore went back to Ecbatana, leaving a strong garrison in Sardis. But while he was on his way he heard that one Pactyas had induced the Sardians to revolt, and was besieging the garrison in the citadel. Troops were sent to put down the revolt; Pactyas, however, did not wait for their arrival, but fled to Cyme, on which the Persian general demanded his extradition. The men of Cyme sent to ask advice at a neighbouring oracle of Apollo, and the answer came that Pactyas was to be given up. Some of the citizens, not satisfied with this answer, thought the envoys must have made a mistake, and sent again to remonstrate with the god, but the answer was repeated; whereupon Aristodicus, the principal envoy, went round the temple and cleared away all the nests of sparrows and other birds that he found there. While he was thus engaged, a voice came from the sanctuary,—"Unholy man, darest thou to tear my suppliants from my temple?" on which Aristodicus, by no means abashed, replied,—"O king, thou canst protect thine own suppliants, and yet thou orderest the Cymteans to surrender theirs." "I do," answered the god, "that you may the sooner perish; for it was in the naughtiness of your hearts that you came to consult me on such a matter."^[7] Eventually they sent Pactyas to Chios for safety; but the Chians gave him up to the Persians, even tearing him from the temple of Minerva; and Atarneus, a district opposite Lesbos, was paid them as the price of blood. But there was a curse on the produce of Atarneus for ever.

The Persians now proceeded to punish the revolted Lydians and lonians, and Harpagus, the king-maker, who had deposed Astyages, forthwith beleaguered Phocæa. The inhabitants of this city, however, preferred exile to slavery; taking an oath never to return until a bar of iron, which, they sank in the sea, should rise and float, they set sail, and, after a multitude of adventures, found a resting-place on the coast of Italy.

Most of the other towns on the coast were subdued after a gallant resistance, and the islanders gave themselves up. Then Harpagus turned inland against the Carians and Lycians. The Carians deserve notice as the reputed inventors of crests to helmets, and of heraldic devices. The Lycians were early advocates of the rights of women; naming men not after their fathers, as was usual, but after their mothers. The Lycians of Xanthus^[8] made a desperate resistance. Finding they could not beat the Persians in the field, they made a great pile on which they burnt their wives and children, and all their valuables, and then sallied out and perished in battle to a man. Their example was imitated by Saguntum in Spain in the second Punic war. While Harpagus was thus subduing the coast, Cyrus was pursuing his conquests in Upper Asia. He turned his arms against Labynetus, king of Babylon. This renowned city, says our historian, formed a vast square fifty-five miles in circuit. Its double walls were 340 feet high (nearly as high as St Vincent's rock at Bristol) and 85 feet thick. The measurements seem enormous, yet the great wall of China shows such works to be possible, when absolute power commands unlimited labour. The city itself was cut in two by the river Euphrates, the quays being fenced by walls with water-gates for communication. One half contained the king's palace, the other the great sacred tower of Belus (Bel or Baal) with its external winding ascent. Babylon was in fact a fortified province rather than a city; it resembled Jeddo in Japan, in being a collection of country houses with small farms and gardens attached. It seems to have been the ideal of what a great city ought to be, especially in days of internal railroads, London, containing its millions, with its thin houses laterally squeezed together, or Paris, with its horizontal piles of flats, and no corresponding spaces, would have excited the horror of the ancients, who in some respects were more civilised than ourselves. Herodotus attributes the great engineering works about Babylon, to prevent the Euphrates from overflowing the country, chiefly to two queens, Semiramis^[9] and Mtocris, between whom he places an interval of five generations. Of this latter he relates a striking anecdote.

"She built for herself a tomb above the most frequented gateway of the city, exactly over the gates, and engraved on it the following inscription: 'If any of the kings of Babylon who come after me shall be in need of money, let him open my tomb and take therefrom as much as he will; but unless he is in need, let him not open it, else will it be worse for him.' Now this tomb remained undisturbed until the kingdom fell to Darius. But he thought it absurd that this gateway should be made no use of—for it was not used, because one would have had to pass under the dead body as one went out—and that when money was lying there idle, and calling out for some one to take it, he should not lay his hand on it. So he opened the tomb and found no money at all, "but only the dead body, and these words written—'If thou wert not the greediest of men, and shameless in thy greed, thou wouldst not have disturbed the resting-place of the dead.'"

Although the author notices most of the wonders of Babylon, he makes no mention of the hanging-gardens, which excited the astonishment of later writers. Nebuchadnezzar is said to have constructed them out of affection for a Median wife, that she might not be afflicted with a Swiss longing for her native mountain scenery.^[10]

Having defeated the Babylonians in battle, Cyrus drove them inside their huge walls. There they laughed at his efforts, having good store of provisions for many years. But their enemy proved himself as good an engineer as any of their queens, historical or fabulous. Taking advantage of reservoirs previously existing, he turned off by a canal the waters of the Euphrates, and the Persians walked into the city dry-shod by the bed of the river, even the water-gates having been left open by incomprehensible carelessness. Those who were in the centre of the city, says Herodotus, were still feasting, dancing, and revelling, after the Persians had entered. It is the night described in the Book of Daniel, when the terrible "handwriting" was seen upon the wall.^[11]

The Babylonians were a luxurious people. Their full dress was a long linen tunic, with, a woollen robe over it, and a short white cloak or cape over the shoulder. Though they wore their hair long, they swathed their heads in turbans, and perfumed themselves all over. Each citizen carried his walking-staff, carved at the top with the likeness of some natural object—such as an apple, a rose, a lily, or an eagle—and had also his private signet. Of these seals (which are hollow cylinders) great numbers have been found during the late explorations, and brought to Europe.^[12]

Herodotus records one of their customs, which, whether in jest or earnest, he declares to be the wisest he ever heard of. This was their wife-auction, by which they managed to find husbands for all their young women. The greatest beauty was put up first, and knocked down to the highest bidder; then the next in the order of comeliness—and so on to the damsel who was equidistant between beauty and plainness, who was given away gratis. Then the least plain was put up, and knocked down to the gallant who would marry her for the smallest consideration,—and so on till even the plainest was got rid of to some cynical worthy who decidedly preferred lucre to looks. By transferring to the scale of the ill-favoured the prices paid for the fair, beauty was made to endow ugliness, and the rich man's taste was the poor man's gain. The Babylonian marriage-market might perhaps be advantageously adopted in some modern countries where marriage is still made a commercial matter. It at least possesses the merit of honesty and openness, and tends to a fair distribution of the gifts of fortune.

Another Babylonian custom, of which Herodotus strongly approves, was that of employing no professional physicians, but placing the sick in the gate of the city, that they might get advice respecting the treatment of their diseases from every passer-by, and thus profit by the experience of those who had been afflicted in the same way as themselves. Whatever may be thought of the absence of regular practitioners, the alternative would certainly seem one of the exceptional cases where wisdom is not found in a multitude of counsellors.

Having annexed this great and rich province to his dominions, Cyrus seems to have been intoxicated with success, or, in our author's view, to have filled up the measure of his prosperity, which now began to run over in insolent self-confidence. He made an expedition against the Massagetæ or Greater Goths, who lived in the steppes near the Caspian Sea, and were ruled by an Amazonian widow named Tomyris. While encamping against her, Cyrus dreamed that Darius, the son of Hystaspes, a young noble of the royal house of Persia, appeared to him with wings on his shoulders (like some of the Assyrian gods whose figures he must have seen), with one of which he overshadowed Asia and the other Europe. This portended his fall, and the ultimate accession of Darius. At first he gained a partial advantage by the stratagem of leaving a camp stored with wine to be plundered by the water-drinking Massagetæ, and then returning and massacring them in their sleep. This was the shrewd advice of Crœsus the Lydian, whom Cyrus had taken with him on the expedition. Among the prisoners taken was the son of the Massagetan queen. Cyrus released him from his bonds at his own request; but the youth, unable to bear his disgrace, only took advantage of his liberty to kill himself. At length the invaders were forced to a general action—the fiercest, says Herodotus, ever fought between barbarian armies. The Persians were completely defeated, and Cyrus himself was slain, after a reign of twenty-nine years. Queen Tomyris, exasperated by the treacherous slaughter of her army and the death of her son, had threatened to give the bloodthirsty invader his fill of blood; she kept her word by filling a skin with it, and plunging into it his severed head.

Such is the account which Herodotus gives of the death of the great Eastern conqueror, so famous both in sacred and profane history. He confesses that he has only chosen one legend out of many. There is little doubt, however, that he died in battle. But the Persian poets assigned a very different fate to their national hero, Kai Khusru, as his name stands in their language. They will not allow that he died at all. When he grew old, they say, he one day took leave of his attendants on the banks of a pleasant stream, and was seen no more. But, as in the case of Arthur and Barbarossa, and all the great favourites of a nation, they looked forward to his coming again, more powerful and glorious than ever.

These Massagetæ, says our author, resembled the Scythians, but could fight on foot as well as on horseback, their favourite weapon being, as with the Anglo-Saxons, a battle-axe or bill. They had the peculiar custom of sacrificing their old people, and then feasting on them, and natural death was considered a misfortune. This curious people, whose descendants may be now in northern or western Europe, knew nothing of tillage, and lived on flesh, fish, and milk. Their only deity, known to Herodotus, was the Sun. To him they sacrificed the horse, with the notion that it was right to bestow the swiftest of creatures on the swiftest of gods. The Persians also attached a certain sanctity to some breeds of horses, and the Teutonic conquerors of Britain bore a horse as their cognisance. Some say that Hengist and Horsa were not names of men, but only represented a people using this national symbol. This rude heraldry of our northern ancestors—or conquerors—may still be traced in the "White Horse" cut out on the chalk-hills in more than one place on our Berkshire and Wiltshire downs.

1. Gen. x. 11, 22.
2. In the Behistun inscription it is Hagmatána.
3. This officer is introduced in Aristophanes' comedy of 'The Acharnians.' He appears in a mask (as in a modern burlesque) with a single huge eye in the centre. He is brought to Athens by some envoys who have been at the court of Persia. Dicseopolis (an honest farmer who is present at the reception) is indignant at their waste of time and the public money.
   "Envoy.—We've brought you here a nobleman—Shamartabas
   By name, by rank and office the King's Eye.
   Dicœop.—God send a crow to peck it out, say I!
   And yours th' ambassadors' into the bargain."
   —Frere's Transl.
   
   
4. So to this day, in India, all white animals are looked upon much in the way in which we ourselves regard albinoes—a kind of unhealthy lusus naturæ.
5. Their successors retain the taste. "It is quite appalling," says Sir H. Rawlinson, "to see the quantity of liquor which some of these topers habitually consume, and they usually prefer spirits to wine."
6. This Eastern apologue may serve as an illustration of the parable in Matt. xi. 16.
7. The remarkable answer attributed here to the oracle may serve to illustrate the permission given to Balaam to go with the messengers of Balak. Even to the heathen mind, there were questions of conscience so clear, that to consult heaven specially in the matter was a mockery. [See the almost parallel case of Glaucus, ch. viii.]
8. About thirty years ago the British Museum was enriched by some beautiful marbles brought from Xanthus by an expedition which explored Lycia under the conduct of Sir Charles Fellowes.
9. This queen appears to have really reigned in conjunction with her husband. She is probably not the great queen known by the same name.
10. So a great fox-hunter, who could not find it in his heart to leave England, is said to have turned his conservatory into a little Italy for his delicate wife.
11. The names of the Eastern kings are so variously given, that it is almost impossible to identify them either in sacred or profane history. The Labynetus of Herodotus is Nabonidus, or Nabonadius, in other writers. The "Belshazzar" whom Daniel calls "king" was probably his son, associated with him in the government. His name appears in inscriptions as Bilshar-uzur. We know from other authorities that Labynetus himself was not in the city at its capture.—See Rawlinson's Herodotus, i. 524, &c.
12. They are commonly of some composition, but occasionally have been found in amethyst, cornelian, agate, &c.—Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, 602, &c.