respecting him there seems, though amid constant fighting, very little
cruelty. Xenophon has selected his life as the subject of a moral
romance which for a long time was cited as authentic history, and which
even now serves as an authority, express or implied, for disputable and
even incorrect conclusions. His extraordinary activity and conquests
admit of no doubt. He left the Persian empire extending from Sogdiana
and the rivers Jaxartes and Indus eastward, to the Hellespont and the
Syrian coast westward, and his successors made no permanent addition to
it except that of Egypt. Phenicia and Judaea were dependencies of
Babylon, at the time when he conquered it, with their princes and
grandees in Babylonian captivity. As they seem to have yielded to him,
and became his tributaries without difficulty; so the restoration of
their captives was conceded to them. It was from Cyrus that the habits
of the Persian kings took commencement, to dwell at Susa in the winter,
and Ekbatana during the summer; the primitive territory of Persis, with
its two towns of Persepolis and Pasargadae, being reserved for the
burial-place of the kings and the religious sanctuary of the empire. How
or when the conquest of Susiana was made, we are not informed. It lay
eastward of the Tigris, between Babylonia and Persis proper, and its
people, the Kissians, as far as we can discern, were of Assyrian and not
of Aryan race. The river Choaspes near Susa was supposed to furnish the
only water fit for the palate of the great king, and it is said to have
been carried about with him wherever he went.

While the conquests of Cyrus contributed to assimilate the distinct
types of civilization in Western Asia--not by elevating the worse,
but by degrading the better--upon the native Persians themselves
they operated as an extraordinary stimulus, provoking alike their
pride, ambition, cupidity, and warlike propensities. Not only did the
territory of Persis proper pay no tribute to Susa or Ekbatana--being
the only district so exempted between the Jaxartes and the
Mediterranean--but the vast tributes received from the remaining empire
were distributed to a great degree among its inhabitants. Empire to them
meant--for the great men, lucrative satrapies or pachalics, with powers
altogether unlimited, pomp inferior only to that of the great king, and
standing armies which they employed at their own discretion sometimes
against each other--for the common soldiers, dr