from Sardeis. No sooner had he set off than Paktyas, hurrying to the coast, employed the means thus placed in his power for the hiring of an army of mercenaries by whose aid he besieged Tabalos in the Sardian akropolis. So great was the anger of Cyrus on hearing of this revolt that he threatened to reduce all the Lydians to slavery. Flight and. Paktyas. But Paktyas was not a man to give the Persian king much trouble. No sooner had he heard that Mazares had been dispatched to inslave all who had taken part with him in the blockade of the Sardian akropolis and to bring Paktyas surrender of himself to Sousa, than he fled in terror to Kymê, whence he was sent on to Mytilene. But the messengers of Mazares still followed him, and the Mytilenaians were just going to give him up when the men of Kymê sent a ship to Lesbos and brought Paktyas away to Chios, where the citizens agreed to surrender him, if in return they might receive the territory of Atarneus on the Mysian coast facing Lesbos. So the bargain was made and Paktyas given up, doubtless to be slain (although Herodotos takes no further notice of him) with frightful tortures at Sousa. But the curse of ill-gotten wealth clung to the Chians, who dared not offer to the gods anything that had been grown on a field of such bad repute. The resistance to Cyrus was now drawing towards its close; and Mazares, having inslaved Priênê, ravaged the beautiful valley of the Maiandros. But he had scarcely done his master's bidding in the lands of Magnesia when he was struck by sudden illness and died, and Harpagos, one of the prominent actors in the mythical history of Astyages, was sent down to take his place. The first city assailed by Harpagos was Phokaia, about twenty miles to the northwest of the mouth of the Hermos. This town The story of the Pho kaians. was, in plain speech, a nest of pirates. Their long marauding expeditions 1 had carried them to the shores of the Hadriatic, and even as far as the region of Tartessos, or Tarshish, hard by the pillars of Herakles, the westernmost bounds of the great inland sea. A natural desire for an easy conquest led Harpagos to express to the Phokaians his readiness to accept, as evidence of their submission, a single breach in their walls and the consecration of a single house in the town. reply the Phokaians demanded one day for deliberation, and the withdrawal of the Persians from the walls for that time. Although he knew, it is said, the meaning of this request, Harpagos did as they wished: and the Phokaians, hastily conveying their women, their children, and all their movable goods to their ships, made In 1 The foundation of Massalia (Marseilles) by these commercial corsairs is ascribed to the year 600 B.C. sail for Chios and left an empty town for the occupation of the Persians. From the Chians they sought to purchase some islets called Oinoussai lying off the northeastern end of the island. The Chians refused, and the latter thereupon determined to betake themselves to their Kyrnian or Corsican colony of Alalia. But they would not depart without striking a blow which should make their departure memorable. Sailing back to Phokaia, they slaughtered the Persian garrison left there by Harpagos, and, sinking a lump of iron in the harbour, bound themselves by a solemn vow never to revisit their old haunts until that iron should float to the surface of the water. But although all now set off for Alalia, less than half carried out the plan. The rest returned to Phokaia: and if we are to infer that even after the loss of his garrison Harpagos yet received them as tributaries of Cyrus, we have in this fact further evidence that the burdens imposed on them by the Lydian king had been light indeed. The con kia. But whatever the Lydian dominion may have been, the Ionians were now to feel the bitterness of the slavery which compelled them to take part in the inslaving of the kindred, quest of Ly- although non-Hellenic, tribes of Karians, Kaunians, and Lykians. The resistance of the Karians seems to have shown but little energy. The resistance of the Lykians and Kaunians was as desperate as that of the Karians was feeble. As soon as the army of Harpagos took up its position on the plains of the Xanthos, they each brought their wives, children, and slaves into the akropolis of their towns, and having set the akropolis on fire, rushed out on the enemy and fought till not a man of them remained alive. Later conquests of Cyrus. But while these isolated communities, whose civilisation was immeasurably beyond that of their conquerors, were being absorbed in the vast mass of Persian dominion, that dominion was being extended far to the east and the south by Cyrus himself, who swept like a whirlwind over all Asia, subduing, as the historian tells us, every nation without passing over one. Of the details of these conquests, with one exception, we know nothing: and even in this solitary instance the mists which rest on Mesopotamian history generally, leave little clear beyond the fact that the sceptre of the old Babylonian or Assyrian kings was broken by the despot of Persia. Babylon and its people. But as the historical scene changes from Ionia to Babylon, we are driven to note the contrast between the intense individual energy of the autonomous Hellenic communities with their woful lack of political combination, and the iron system of Asiatic centralisation which could accomplish the most 1 Herod. i. 177. gigantic tasks by dint of sheer manual labour, the multitude as a political machine being everything, the individual man nothing. Between the Assyrians and Babylonians on the one hand and the Hellenic tribes on the other, the Phenicians and Carthaginians occupy a middle ground, combining the rigid manipulation of masses with the exercise of those higher independent faculties which won for them both fame and wealth from the coasts of Tyre to the Mediterranean gates. But generally it may be said that, in the measure in which it prevailed, the monotony of Eastern despotism became the seed-bed in which an imposing but utterly imperfect civilisation was forced to an early maturity. The plains of Bagdad and Mosul are now a dreary and desolate waste; but these arid sands were thrice in the year covered with a waving sea of corn, in the days when Sennacherib or Nebucadnezzar ruled at Nineveh or Babylon. Crushing and pitiless as may have been their despotism, they yet knew that their own wealth must be measured by the fertility of the soil, and thus they took care that their whole country should be parcelled out by a network of canals, the largest of which might be a high road for ships between the Euphrates and the Tigris. On the soil thus quickened grew the tree which attracted to itself an affectionate veneration: and while the date palm yielded both wine and bread, the grain of corn, of millet, or of sesame was multiplied, as the more cautious said, fifty or an hundred fold, or, as Herodotos believed, in years of exceptional abundance even three hundred fold. Scarcely less dazzling than this picture of cereal wealth produced in a land where rain scarcely ever fell is the description which Herodotos gives of the magnificence of Babylon, and he saw the great city after it had been given up to plunder by Dareios and robbed of its costliest treasures by Xerxes. The colouring of his sketch must be heightened, if we would realise the grandeur of that royal town inclosed amidst exquisite gardens within the stupendous walls which rose to a height, it is said, of three hundred feet, each side of the square extending to fifteen English miles, and giving the means of ingress and egress by five-and-twenty brazen gates. Within this wall rose at some distance another, less huge, but still very strong; and within this were drawn out the buildings and streets of the city in rectangular blocks reaching down to the wall, which was carried from one end of the town to the other along the banks of the river, broken only by the huge brazen gates which at the end of each street gave access to the water. High above the palaces and houses around it towered the mighty temple of Bel, story above story, to a height, it is said, of six hundred feet, from a base extending over more than 1200 feet on each side, while the stream was spanned by a bridge, the several portions of which were drawn aside at night, but which was used during the day by such as might not care to enter the ferry boats stationed at each landing-place along the river walls. Siege and capture of Babylon, It might have been thought that this great seat of theocratic despotism could within its network of canals and behind its stupendous walls have bidden defiance to the utmost efforts of Cyrus. For a year the coming of the invader was, we are told, delayed by the grave duty of avenging on the river Gyndes the insult which it had offered to one of the sacred white horses. This stream which joins the Tigris near the ancient Opis and the modern Bagdad dared to drown the beast which had rashly plunged into it, and the fiat of the king went forth that the river should be so lowered by the dispersion of its waters through a hundred canals that women should henceforth cross it without wetting their knees. This seeming freak, which we might be tempted to compare with the scourging of the Hellespont by Xerxes, is ascribed by some to a wise and deliberate design by way of preparing his army for the more momentous task of diverting the Euphrates as the means for surprising Babylon. But he can scarcely suppose that Cyrus could know, a year before, that he would have either the need or the opportunity of putting this plan into action, or that with his unbounded command of labour, insuring the same results at one time as at another, he should find it necessary thus to rehearse the most troublesome scene in the coming drama. He might rather expect that he would be compelled to fight his way inch by inch from one canal to another, and that a series of victories in the open plain might render a siege of the great city superfluous. If we may trust the traditional narratives, his expectations were in every particular disappointed. The road lay open before him without resistance to the very gates of Babylon; and Cyrus resolved to see whether the stream to which his enemies most trusted for their safety might not be made the means of achieving their destruction. But whether we take the narrative of Herodotos or that of Xenophon, we are following a story which is full of difficulties. On one point only are they agreed,—that the city was taken by surprise during a time of festival. This surprise was effected, according to Herodotos, by drawing off the waters of the Euphrates into a large reservoir dug considerably to the north of the city, like the lake ascribed to queen Nitokris. But this lake is said to have been designed to receive the overflow of the river in seasons of flood; and a basin which might suffice for this purpose would be ludicrously insufficient to take off the whole stream so far as to leave the remainder easily fordable. In short, the mode by which Herodotos supposes the work to have been done may fairly be pronounced impossible: but this objection cannot be urged with the same apparent force against the account, given by Xenophon, that Cyrus drew off the water into two large canals or trenches, which ran round the walls on both sides of the river and discharged it again into its natural bed.1 There remain in this case two difficulties, one lying in the vastness of the labour of digging trenches to inclose an area as large as that of the Landgraviat of Hesse Homburg, 2-trenches, moreover, deeper necessarily than the bed of the stream, in default of a dam or barrier across the river which would at once have betrayed his design to the enemy, and of which not a hint is given by any historian. The other difficulty is more serious. The whole design assumes that the feast would be accompanied by the incredible carelessness of not merely withdrawing all the guards from the river walls but of leaving open all the gates in these walls, a carelessness, moreover, which made the whole task of canal-digging a superfluous ceremony, for, the gates being open and the guards withdrawn, boats would have furnished means of access for the assailants vastly more easy, rapid, and sure, than the oozy bed of an alluvial stream which would in all likelihood have insured the destruction of the whole army. In truth, here, as elsewhere, the main fact may rest on adequate evidence: the details must remain unknown. Babylon was surprised by Cyrus,-how, we cannot venture positively to say. Last scenes in the drama of the life of Babylon was treated, it would seem, much like the cities of Ionia and Lydia. The walls, it is said, were breached,3 and a tribute was imposed; but it underwent neither the cruelties nor the spoliation which followed the visits of Dareios or Xerxes, and the population remained pro- Cyrus. bably undiminished. From Babylon the thirst of conquest led Cyrus, according to Herodotos, against the Massagetai, a nomadic tribe whom he places on the further bank of the Araxes; and here he received the first and last check in his career of unbroken success. Cyrus, it is said, was slain; but the impulse which his 1 It is well to see what is implied in this statement. The amount of water conveyed by the Euphrates at Hillah, according to the dimensions now assigned to the stream at that point, is not much less than that of the Thames at London Bridge. According to Herodotos, the walls of Babylon formed a square of which each side was fourteen miles in length; and thus, if we follow Xenophon, Cyrus dug two canals, each capable of conveying half the contents of the Euphrates, and each about thirty miles in length, at the least. This, moreover, he did on the mere chance of being able to surprise the town in some unguarded moment on which he had no right to count. 2 I take Mr. Rawlinson's illustration, Anc. East. Mon. ii. 340. 3 Mr. Rawlinson, East. Mon. iii. 519, affirms the fact: Mr. Grote denies it. 4 The plan of Herodotos rendered this arrangement indispensable. That the Persian or other traditions represented his course as less prosperous is clear from the statement of Arrian, vi. 24, that Cyrus lost his whole army in the attempt to invade India through Gedrosia. |