of the Persians against the Medes; whilst
Astyages--to fill up the Grecian conception of madness as a precursor to
ruin--sends an army against the revolters, commanded by Harpagus
himself. Of course the army is defeated--Astyages, after a vain
resistance, is dethroned--Cyrus becomes king in his place--and Harpagus
repays the outrage which he has undergone by the bitterest insults.

Such are the heads of a beautiful narrative which is given at some
length in Herodotus. It will probably appear to the reader sufficiently
romantic; though the historian intimates that he had heard three other
narratives different from it, and that all were more full of marvels, as
well as in wider circulation, than his own, which he had borrowed from
some unusually sober-minded Persian informants. In what points the other
three stories departed from it we do not hear.

To the historian of Halicarnassus we have to oppose Ctesias--the
physician of the neighboring town of Cnidus--who contradicted Herodotus,
not without strong terms of censure, on many points, and especially upon
that which is the very foundation of the early narrative respecting
Cyrus; for he affirmed that Cyrus was no way related to Astyages.
However indignant we may be with Ctesias for the disparaging epithets
which he presumed to apply to an historian whose work is to us
inestimable--we must nevertheless admit that, as surgeon in actual
attendance on king Artaxerxes Mnemon, and healer of the wound inflicted
on that prince at Cunaxa by his brother Cyrus the younger, he had better
opportunities even than Herodotus of conversing with sober-minded
Persians, and that the discrepancies between the two statements are to
be taken as a proof of the prevalence of discordant, yet equally
accredited, stories. Herodotus himself was in fact compelled to choose
one out of four. So rare and late a plant is historical authenticity.

That Cyrus was the first Persian conqueror, and that the space which he
overran covered no less than fifty degrees of longitude, from the coast
of Asia Minor to the Oxus and the Indus, are facts quite indisputable;
but of the steps by which this was achieved, we know very little. The
native Persians, whom he conducted to an empire so immense, were an
aggregate of seven agricultural, and four nomadic tribes--all of them
rude, hardy, and brave--dwelling in a mountainous region, clothed in
skins, ignorant of wine, or fruit, or any of the commonest luxuries of
life