on the Jaxartes (Arrian iv. 2. 3; Curt. vii. 6. 16; Strabo xi. 517, called Cyreskhata by Ptolem. vi. 12. 5). In 530, having appointed his son Cambyses king of Babel, he set out for a new expedition against the East. In this war he was killed (Herod.) or mortally wounded (Ctesias). According to Herodotus he attacked the Massagetae beyond the Jaxartes; according to Ctesias, the Derbices, a very barbarous tribe (cf. Strabo xi. 520; Aelian, Var. Hist. iv. 1) on the border of the Caspian, near the Hyrcanians (Strabo xi. 514; Steph. Byz.; Curt. vii. 2. 7; Dion. Perieg. 734 ff.; Pomp. Mela iii. 5), or on the Oxus (Plin. vi. 48; Ptolem. vi. 10. 2; Tab. Peuting.). Berossus (ap. Euseb. Chron. i. 29) simply says that he fell against the Dahae, i.e. the nomads of the Turanian desert. His death occurred in 528 B.C., as we have a Babylonian tablet from the Adar of the tenth year of Cyrus, i.e. February 528; for in Babylon the first year of Cyrus began in the spring of 538.
In his native district Cyrus had built a city with a palace, called after his tribe Pasargadae (now Murghab), and here he was buried (see Pasargadae). In a short time he, the petty prince of an almost unknown tribe, had founded a mighty empire, which extended from the Indus and Jaxartes to the Aegaean and the borders of Egypt. This result shows that Cyrus must have been a great warrior and statesman. Nor is his character without nobility. He excels in the humanity with which he treated the vanquished. He destroyed no town nor did he put the captive kings to death; in Babylonia he behaved like a constitutional monarch; by the Persians his memory was cherished as “the father of the people” (Herod. iii. 89), and the Greek tradition preserved by Aeschylus (cf. above) shows that his greatness was acknowledged also by his enemies. He therefore deserves the homage which Xenophon paid to him in choosing him as hero for his didactic novel.
2. Cyrus the Younger, son of Darius II. and Parysatis, was born after the accession of his father in 424. When, after the victories of Alcibiades, Darius II. decided to continue the war against Athens and give strong support to the Spartans, he sent in 408 the young prince into Asia Minor, as satrap of Lydia and Phrygia Major with Cappadocia, and commander of the Persian troops, “which gather into the field of Castolos” (Xen. Hell. i. 4. 3; Anab. i. 9. 7), i.e. of the army of the district of Asia Minor. He gave strenuous support to the Spartans; evidently he had already then formed the design, in which he was supported by his mother, of gaining the throne for himself after the death of his father; he pretended to have stronger claims to it than his elder brother Artaxerxes, who was not born in the purple. For this plan he hoped to gain the assistance of Sparta. In the Spartan general Lysander he found a man who was willing to help him, as Lysander himself hoped to become absolute ruler of Greece by the aid of the Persian prince. So Cyrus put all his means at the disposal of Lysander in the Peloponnesian War, but denied them to his successor Callicratidas; by exerting his influence in Sparta, he brought it about that after the battle of Arginusae Lysander was sent out a second time as the real commander (though under a nominal chief) of the Spartan fleet in 405 (Xen. Hell. ii. 1. 14). At the same time Darius fell ill and called his son to his deathbed; Cyrus handed over all his treasures to Lysander and went to Susa. After the accession of Artaxerxes II. in 404, Tissaphernes denounced the plans of Cyrus against his brother (cf. Plut. Artax. 3); but by the intercession of Parysatis he was pardoned and sent back to his satrapy. Meanwhile Lysander had gained the battle of Aegospotami and Sparta was supreme in the Greek world. Cyrus managed very cleverly to gather a large army by beginning a quarrel with Tissaphernes, satrap of Caria, about the Ionian towns; he also pretended to prepare an expedition against the Pisidians, a mountainous tribe in the Taurus, which was never obedient to the Empire. Although the dominant position of Lysander had been broken in 403 by King Pausanias, the Spartan government gave him all the support which was possible without going into open war against the king; it caused a partisan of Lysander, Clearchus, condemned to death on account of atrocious crimes which he had committed as governor of Byzantium, to gather an army of mercenaries on the Thracian Chersonesus, and in Thessaly Menon of Pharsalus, head of a party which was connected with Sparta, collected another army.
In the spring of 401 Cyrus united all his forces and advanced from Sardis, without announcing the object of his expedition. By dexterous management and large promises he overcame the scruples of the Greek troops against the length and danger of the war; a Spartan fleet of thirty-five triremes sent to Cilicia opened the passes of the Amanus into Syria and conveyed to him a Spartan detachment of 700 men under Cheirisophus. The king had only been warned at the last moment by Tissaphernes and gathered an army in all haste; Cyrus advanced into Babylonia, before he met with an enemy. Here ensued, in October 401, the battle of Cunaxa. Cyrus had 10,400 Greek hoplites and 2500 peltasts, and besides an Asiatic army under the command of Ariaeus, for which Xenophon gives the absurd number of 100,000 men; the army of Artaxerxes he puts down at 900,000. These numbers only show that he, although an eyewitness, has no idea of large numbers; in reality the army of Cyrus may at the very utmost have consisted of 30,000, that of Artaxerxes of 40,000 men. Cyrus saw that the decision depended on the fate of the king; he therefore wanted Clearchus, the commander of the Greeks, to take the centre against Artaxerxes. But Clearchus, a tactician of the old school, disobeyed. The left wing of the Persians under Tissaphernes avoided a serious conflict with the Greeks; Cyrus in the centre threw himself upon Artaxerxes, but was slain in a desperate struggle. Afterwards Artaxerxes pretended to have killed the rebel himself, with the result that Parysatis took cruel vengeance upon the slayer of her favourite son. The Persian troops dared not attack the Greeks, but decoyed them into the interior, beyond the Tigris, and tried to annihilate them by treachery. But after their commanders had been taken prisoners the Greeks forced their way to the Black Sea. By this achievement they had demonstrated the internal weakness of the Persian empire and the absolute superiority of the Greek arms.
The history of Cyrus and of the retreat of the Greeks is told by Xenophon in his Anabasis (where he tries to veil the actual participation of the Spartans). Another account, probably from Sophaenetus of Stymphalus, was used by Ephorus, and is preserved in Diodor. xiv. 19 ff. Further information is contained in the excerpts from Ctesias by Photius; cf. also Plutarch’s life of Artaxerxes. The character of Cyrus is highly praised by the ancients, especially by Xenophon (cf. also his Oeconomics, c. iv.); and certainly he was much superior to his weak brother in energy and as a general and statesman. If he had ascended the throne he might have regenerated the empire for a while, whereas it utterly decayed under the rule of Artaxerxes II. (See also Persia: Ancient History.) (Ed. M.)
CYSTOFLAGELLATA (so named by E. Haeckel), a group
of Mastigophorous Protozoa, distinguished from Flagellata by
their large size (0.15–1.5 mm.), and their branched endoplasm,
recalling that of Trachelius among Infusoria, within a firm
ectosarc bounded by a strong cuticle. Nutrition is holozoic,
a deep groove leading down to a mouth and pharynx. A long
fine flagellum arises from the pharynx in Noctiluca (E. Suriray)
and Leptodiscus and (R. Hertwig); and in the former genus, a
second flagellum, thick, long and transversely striated, rises
farther out, in the groove; this was likened by E. R. Lankester
to a proboscis, whence his name of Rhynchoflagellata, which
we discard as unnecessary and posterior to Haeckel’s. Noctiluca
has thus the form of an apple with a long stalk. Leptodiscus
(R. Hertwig) has the form of a medusa without a proboscis—it
is menisciform with the thin contractile margin produced
inwards like a velum on the concave side, while the mouth is on
the convex surface and the single flagellum springs from a blind tube on the same surface. Craspedotella (C. A. Kofoid), the
third genus, is still more medusiform, with a broad velum, and
the mouth in a convex central protrusion of the roof of the bell;
and a thick flagellum springs from a blind tube on the convex
surface. All three genera are pelagic and phosphorescent,
this property being seated in the ectoplasm; Noctiluca miliaris
is indeed the chief source of the phosphorescence of our summer
seas. O. Bütschli, like other writers, regards the Cystoflagellates
as closely allied to the Dinoflagellates, the small flagellum
