s the
most distinguished. The ladies of the court were accustomed to reside in
different palaces, or in different suites of apartments in the same
palace, so that they lived in a great measure isolated from each other.
When Cambyses came to the throne, and thus entered into possession of
his father's palaces, he saw and fell in love with one of his father's
daughters. He wished to make her one of his wives. He was accustomed to
the unrestricted indulgence of every appetite and passion, but he seems
to have had some slight misgivings in regard to such a step as this. He
consulted the Persian judges. They conferred upon the subject, and then
replied that they had searched among the laws of the realm, and though
they found no law allowing a man to marry his sister, they found many
which authorized a Persian king to do whatever he pleased.

Cambyses therefore added the princess to the number of his wives, and
not long afterward he married another of his father's daughters in the
same way. One of these princesses was Atossa.

Cambyses invaded Egypt, and in the course of his mad career in that
country he killed his brother Smerdis and one of his sisters, and at
length was killed himself. Atossa escaped the dangers of this stormy and
terrible reign, and returned safely to Susa after Cambyses's death.

Smerdis, the brother of Cambyses, would have been Cambyses's successor
if he had survived him; but he had been privately assassinated by
Cambyses's orders, though his death had been kept profoundly secret by
those who had perpetrated the deed. There was another Smerdis in Susa,
the Persian capital, who was a magian--that is, a sort of priest--in
whose hands, as regent, Cambyses had left the government while he was
absent on his campaigns. This magian Smerdis accordingly conceived the
plan of usurping the throne, as if he were Smerdis the prince, resorting
to a great many ingenious and cunning schemes to conceal his deception.
Among his other plans, one was to keep himself wholly sequestered from
public view, with a few favorites, such, especially, as had not
personally known Smerdis the prince. In the same manner he secluded from
each other and from himself all who had known Smerdis, in order to
prevent their conferring with one another, or communicating to each
other any suspicions which they might chance to entertain. Such
seclusion, so far as related to the ladies of the royal family, was not
unusual after the death of a kin