nuously and without interruption,
marching straight from one country to another without once revisiting
his capital. He must from time to time have returned to Ecbatana or
Pasargadae; and it is on the whole most probable that, like the Assyrian
monarchs, he marched out from home on a fresh expedition almost every
year. Thus it need cause us no surprise that fourteen years were
consumed in the subjugation of the tribes and nations beyond the Iranic
desert to the north and the north-east, and that it was not till B.C.
539, when he was nearly sixty years of age, that the Persian monarch
felt himself free to turn his attention to the great kingdom of the
south.

The expedition of Cyrus against Babylon has been described already.
Its success added to the Empire the rich and valuable provinces of
Babylonia, Susiana, Syria, and Palestine, thus augmenting its size by
about 240,000 or 250,000 square miles. Far more important, however,
than this geographical increase was the removal of the last formidable
rival--the complete destruction of a power which represented to the
Asiatics the old Semitic civilization, which with reason claimed to be
the heir and the successor of Assyria, and had a history stretching back
for a space of nearly two thousand years. So long as Babylon, "the
glory of kingdoms," "the praise of the whole earth," retained her
independence, with her vast buildings, her prestige of antiquity, her
wealth, her learning, her ancient and grand religious system, she could
scarcely fail to be in the eyes of her neighbors the first power in the
world, if not in mere strength, yet in honor, dignity, and reputation.
Haughty and contemptuous herself to the very last, she naturally imposed
on men's minds, alike by her past history and her present pretensions;
nor was it possible for the Persian monarch to feel that he stood before
his subjects as indisputably the foremost man upon the earth until he
had humbled in the dust the pride and arrogance of Babylon. But, with
the fall of the Great City, the whole fabric of Semetic greatness was
shattered. Babylon became "an astonishment and a hissing"--all her
prestige vanished--and Persia stepped manifestly into the place, which
Assyria had occupied for so many centuries, of absolute and unrivalled
mistress of Western Asia.

The fall of Babylon was also the fall of an ancient, widely spread,
and deeply venerated religious system. Not of course, that the religion
suddenly disappea