Page:Historical Works of Venerable Bede vol. 2.djvu/317

The Fifth Age.

year, in the second month, they laid the foundations of the temple, in the seventy-second year after it had been burnt, according to Africanus; but in the thirty-second according to Eusebius's Chronicles. But the work was interrupted until the second year of Darius, through the opposition of the Samaritans, who, in the reign of Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes, wrote an accusation against the Jews, whereupon Artaxerxes gave commandment that Jerusalem should not be built. Tarquin, the seventh Tarquinius Superbus [A.M. 3495 B.C. 509] king of Rome, reigned 35 years, and was driven from the kingdom for the sake of the younger Tarquin, his son, because he had ravished Lucretia.

A.M. 8431 [4779].

Cambyses Cambyses, son of Cyrus, reigned 8 years. He conquered Egypt, and from abhorrence of its religion, pulled down its temples and interrupted its worship. He built Babylon in Egypt. They say that he was called Nebuchadnezzar the second by the Hebrews, to whose reign the history of Judith belongs.

A.M. 3432 [4780].

The Magi brethren reigned 7 months. The illustrious men of this period are Jeshua the high priest, and Zerubbabel the prince of the Jewish nation, the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, and PythagorasPythagoras natural philosopher.

A.M. 3468 [4816].

Darius reigned 36 years. We find in the books of the Chronicles of Eusebius, that two Magi brethren reigned between Darius and Cambyses. But Jerome, in his exposition of Daniel, writes that Smerdos the Magian reigned after Cambyses, whose daughter Pantaphthe he married, and that he was slain by seven Magi, and that Darius succeeded to the empire, and married the same Pantaphthe, who bore him his son Xerxes.