ineveh to be
the burial-place of Sardanapalus. They declared that Cyrus had pulled it
down in order to strengthen his camp during the siege of the town, and
that formerly it had borne an epitaph afterwards put into verse by the
poet Choerilus of Iassus: "I reigned, and so long as I beheld the light
of the sun, I ate, I drank, I loved, well knowing how brief is the
life of man, and to how many vicissitudes it is liable." Many writers,
remembering the Assyrian monument at Anchiale in Cilicia, were inclined
to place the king's tomb there. It was surmounted by the statue of a
man--according to one account, with his hands crossed upon his breast,
according to another, in the act of snapping his fingers--and bore the
following inscription in Chaldaic letters: "I, Sardanapalus, son of
Anakyndaraxes, founded Anchiale and Tarsus in one day, but now am dead."
Thus ten centuries of conquests and massacre had passed away like a
vapour, leaving nothing but a meagre residue of old men's tales and
moral axioms.

In one respect only does the civilisation of the Euphrates seem to have
fairly held its own. Cossaea, though it had lost its independence, had
lost but little of its wealth; its former rebellions had done it no
great injury, and its ancient cities were still left standing, though
shorn of their early splendour. Uru, it is true, numbered but few
citizens round its tottering sanctuaries, but Uruk maintained a school
of theologians and astronomers no less famous throughout the East than
those of Borsippa. The swamps, however, which surrounded it possessed
few attractions, and Greek travellers rarely ventured thither. They
generally stopped at Babylon, or if they ventured off the beaten track,
it was only to visit the monuments of Nebuchadrezzar, or the tombs of
the early kings in its immediate neighbourhood. Babylon was, indeed, one
of the capitals of the empire--nay, for more than half a century, during
the closing years of Artaxerxes I., in the reign of Darius II., and
in the early days of Artaxerxes IL, it had been the real capital; even
under Ochus, the court spent the winter months there, and resorted
thither in quest of those resources of industry and commerce which Susa
lacked. The material benefits due to the presence of the sovereign seem
to have reconciled the city to its subject condition; there had been no
seditious movement there since the ill-starred rising of Shamasherib,
which Xerxes had quelled with ruthless seve