him.*

* Moses of Chorene attributes to him long wars against an
Armenian king named Tigranes; but this is a fiction of a
later age.

Naturally indolent, lacking in decision, superstitious and cruel, he
passed a life of idleness amid the luxury of a corrupt court, surrounded
by pages, women, and eunuchs, with no more serious pastime than the
chase, pursued within the limits of his own parks or on the confines
of the desert. But if the king was weak, his empire was vigorous, and
Nebuchadrezzar, brought up from his youth to dread the armies of Media,
retained his respect for them up to the end of his life, even when there
was no longer any occasion to do so. Nebuchadrezzar was, after all, not
so much a warrior as a man of peace, whether so constituted by nature
or rendered so by political necessity in its proper sense, and he
took advantage of the long intervals of quiet between his campaigns to
complete the extensive works which more than anything else have won
for him his renown. During the century which had preceded the fall of
Nineveh, Babylonia had had several bitter experiences; it had suffered
almost entire destruction at the hands of Sennacherib; it had been given
up to pillage by Assur-bani-pal, not to mention the sieges and ravages
it had sustained in the course of continual revolts. The other cities
of Babylonia, Sippara, Borsippa, Kutha, Nipur, Uruk, and Uru, had been
subjected to capture and recapture, while the surrounding districts,
abandoned in turn to Elamites, Assyrians, and the Kalda, had lain
uncultivated for many years. The canals at the same time had become
choked with mud, the banks had fallen in, and the waters, no longer
kept under control, had overflowed the land, and the plains long since
reclaimed for cultivation had returned to their original condition of
morasses and reed-beds; at Babylon itself the Arakhtu, still encumbered
with the _debris_ cast into it by Sennacherib, was no longer navigable,
and was productive of more injury than profit to the city: in some parts
the aspect of the country must have been desolate and neglected as at
the present day, and the work accomplished by twenty generations had to
be begun entirely afresh. Nabopolassar had already applied himself to
the task in spite of the anxieties of his Assyrian campaigns, and had
raised many earthworks in both the capital and the provinces. But a
great deal more still remained to be done, and Nebuchadrezzar push