203 History of Art. in Antiquity. make a faithful summary. Aman*s description of the monument is at once more complete and precise. Were this, however, the result of mere padding, done for the sake of infusing a little life and interest into a text he had deemed arid and dry, the terms used for defining details, for instance, would have been vag^ue and obscure, whereas it is the reverse which takes place, every additional stroke serving to bring into relief the character and dis- position of the monument. " As to the tomb itself," he says, " the lower part was a quadrangular mass made of hewn stone ; above 'was a chamber roofed in, and built of the same material ; it had but one small doorway, so narrow that a man of medium size found great difficulty in getting in." ' liis account of the funereal furniture, if a trifle more detailed than Strabo's. does not differ from it, save in what relates to the coffin. This, says Arrian, was put upon the bed.' The first explorers have had no difficulty in accepting the Gabre as the royal tomb seen and examined by Aristobulus ; ' of late, however, some have tried to show that the identification is impossible.* Whichever view is taken, a monument to which rightly perhaps such reminiscences are attached cannot fail to excite interest ; on the other hand, there are very few antique con- structions among the most famous of Greece and Rome, of which we possess a more detailed description than that of the tomb of Cyrus, the principal part of which is in excellent preservation, ' Arrian, Anadasis, vi. 29,
- 'Er lUinf ri}c KXtnTv ^ irucXo« ImiTo 7 to a^tn tt6 Kvpov fxpvtra. This is both
positive and precise; It is true that a little beftwe occur the following Imes, i» S2 olfc^fiari irviov )(pwn]V KtltrOat, iva to crw/ia tov Ki'pov IrWavTO, koi KXiimjv vapa. Tfj irvcAy, which would seem to indicate that the coffin was beside, and not on the bed — a difficulty noticed by Kru^er and Sintenis, Arrian's best editors. They think at the same time diat the expression Ir /Uby is too focmal not to have been intended, and that in the fiist line, where mention of the bed is made, we must cither strike out wapa, or suppose that a copyist put it in by mistake instead of i'tto. We may also explain it in this way. When Arrian incorporated into his narrative the description of (he Arst vkit Aristobulus paid to the tomb, he did not make out that the bed served as support to the coffin, so he added wupi. to make his sentence more clear, and though as he went on he found the true position of affairs plainly stated, it does not seem to have struck him. In any case he did not go over again what he had written, so that the discrepancy was allowed to stand. ' Morier was the first to propose identifying the Gabre with the tomb of Cyrus. AAer him Ker Porter, T6cier, and Coste entertained no doubt on the subject. Stolze is most positive. ' DiEULAFOV, L'Ar/ antiqiUf torn. 1. p. 46. Digitized by Google
