[1] This man Amasis, then, was the one against whom Cambyses the son of Cyrus led an army consisting of contingents from all over his empire, including some Ionian and Aeolian Greeks. The reason for the attack arose out of the fact that Cambyses had sent a message to Egypt to ask Amasis for his daughter. It was an Egyptian man who suggested that he make this request; he was motivated by a grudge against Amasis, because Amasis had chosen him out of all the doctors in Egypt, forced him to leave his wife and children, and dispatched him to Persia, when Cyrus had sent a messenger to Amasis requesting the best eye doctor in Egypt. Because he resented this treatment, then, the Egyptian persuaded Cambyses to ask Amasis for his daughter, so that Amasis would either grant the request and suffer or refuse and make an enemy of Cambyses.
Now, Amasis was troubled and anxious about the might of Persia, and was incapable either of handing his daughter over or withholding her. He knew full well that Cambyses was not about to make her his wife, but his concubine. He weighed the matter up and this is what he did. The previous king, Apries, had a daughter called Nitetis, who was very tall and beautiful, and was the only member of Apries’ house left alive. Amasis dressed this girl up in fine clothes and gold jewellery and sent her to Persia as if she were his own daughter. After some time, however, when Cambyses used the girl’s patronymic in addressing her, she said to him, ‘My lord, you don’t realize how Amasis has deceived you. He has dressed me up and sent me to you, as if it were his own daughter he was giving, when in fact I am the daughter of Apries, who was Amasis’ master when Amasis and the Egyptians rebelled against him and murdered him.’ This news made Cambyses the son of Cyrus furious and gave him his reason for attacking Egypt. At any rate, that is what the Persians say.
[2] The Egyptians, however, claim that Cambyses is one of them. In their version, he was the son of this daughter of Apries, and it was Cyrus, not Cambyses, who sent the messenger to Amasis to fetch his daughter. But this account of theirs is wrong. They are in fact perfectly well aware—for no one understands Persian customs better than the Egyptians—first that it is not legal for the Persians to let an illegitimate son become king while a legitimate heir is alive, and second that Cambyses’ mother was Cassandane the daughter of the Achaemenid Pharnaspes, and not an Egyptian woman. Nevertheless, they distort the story because they want to make out that they are related to Cyrus.
[3] So much for that. There is also, however, a story—albeit one which I find unbelievable—that a Persian woman once came to visit Cyrus’ wives, saw Cassandane standing there with her beautiful, tall children, and was so impressed that she paid her lavish compliments. In response, the story goes, Cassandane, who was one of Cyrus’ wives, was moved by her resentment of Nitetis to remark, ‘Although I have borne him children like these, Cyrus treats me with no respect and prefers the new arrival from Egypt.’ The story continues that her eldest son, Cambyses, then said: ‘And that, mother, is exactly why, when I grow up, I’m going to turn Egypt upside down.’ He was about 10 years old when he said this, and the women were astonished. He remembered, however, and so, when he reached adulthood and became king, he attacked Egypt.
[4] This campaign of his was also helped by something else that happened. One of Amasis’ mercenaries was a man called Phanes, from Halicarnassus, who was a resourceful person and a brave fighter. Phanes was disgruntled for some reason with Amasis, so he deserted and escaped from Egypt by sea, with the intention of talking with Cambyses. Now, since Phanes had been a person of some standing among Amasis’ mercenary troops, and since he had very reliable information about Egyptian affairs, Amasis made his capture a priority and set about hunting him down. He sent the most trustworthy of his eunuchs after Phanes in a trireme, and the man did actually capture Phanes in Lycia, but failed to bring him back to Egypt, because Phanes outwitted him. He got his guards drunk and escaped to Persia, where he found Cambyses intending to make war on Egypt, but uncertain about the route he should take across the desert. So on arriving Phanes not only gave him general information about how matters stood with Amasis, but also described the route to him and advised him to send someone to the Arabian king to ask for safe passage across the desert.
[5] The desert affords the only clear way into Egypt. The land from Phoenicia to the borders of the territory of the city of Cadytis belongs to the ‘Palestinian’ Syrians, as they are called; the trading-centres along the coast from Cadytis (which is not much smaller, I should say, than Sardis) to the town of Ienysus are subject to the king of Arabia; the land from Ienysus to Lake Serbonis, which is flanked by the spur of Mount Casius which goes down to the sea, belongs to the Syrians again; and then the land onwards from Lake Serbonis (where the story goes that Typhon was buried) is Egyptian. The tract of land from Ienysus to Mount Casius and Lake Serbonis, which is large enough to take three days to cross, is utterly without water.
[6] I am now going to explain something which few travellers to Egypt have noticed. Every year Egypt imports from all over Greece, and from Phoenicia as well, clay jars full of wine, and yet it is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is not a single empty wine-jar to be seen there. One might well ask: where do they all disappear to? This is yet another issue I can clarify. Every headman has to collect all the jars from his community and take them to Memphis, and then the people of Memphis fill them with water and take them out into the waterless regions of Syria we have been talking about. That is how every jar that is imported into Egypt is taken, once empty, into Syria to join all the earlier jars.
[7] Anyway, it was the Persians who opened up the journey into Egypt in this way, by supplying the route with water as I have described, immediately following their conquest of Egypt. But at the time in question there was no water to be had. So, when Cambyses had found this out from his Halicarnassian visitor, he sent messengers to the king of Arabia, asked for safe passage, and received it. Pledges were given and received between them.
[8] As much as any race in the world, the Arabians regard such pledges as sacred. The way they make such pledges is that a third person stands between the two parties who want to make a pledge and makes a cut on the palms of their hands, near their thumbs, with a sharp piece of stone. Then he takes a tuft of material from each of their cloaks and smears seven stones, which have been placed between the two parties, with their blood, while calling on Dionysus and Urania. Once this ritual is over, the one who is giving the pledge recommends the foreigner (or fellow countryman, as the case may be) to his friends, who consider it their duty to regard the pledge as sacred themselves too. The only gods whose existence they acknowledge are Dionysus and Urania, and they copy Dionysus, they say, in the way they cut their hair—that is, they cut it round in a circle, with their temples shaved. Their names for Dionysus and Urania are, respectively, Orotalt and Alilat.
[9] So since the Arabian king had given his pledge to Cambyses’ agents, he came up with the following plan. He filled camel-skins with water, loaded them on to all his live camels, drove the camels into the desert, and waited there for Cambyses’ army. At any rate, this is the more plausible version; there is also a less plausible version, which I had better recount as well, since it exists. There is a large river in Arabia called the Corys, which issues into the Red Sea. The alternative version of events claims that the Arabian king had the hides of cows and other animals sewn together into a pipe, which was long enough to reach the desert from the river. Then he drew the water from the river through the pipe into big storage-tanks, which had been excavated in the desert to receive and hold the water. It is twelve days’ journey from the river to this desert, and he is supposed to have brought the water to three separate parts of the desert, through three pipes.
[10] Psammenitus the son of Amasis stationed his army at the Pelusian mouth of the Nile and waited for Cambyses. Cambyses invaded Egypt to find Amasis no longer alive; he had died after a reign of forty-four years, during which he had avoided any terrible disasters. After his death and mummification he was buried in the sanctuary, in the burial-vault which he himself had built. During the reign of Psammenitus the son of Amasis something quite astounding occurred: it rained in Egyptian Thebes. As the Thebans themselves point out, this had never happened before and has never happened since, up until my own time. It simply does not rain at all in southern Egypt—but there was a light sprinkling of rain on Thebes then.
[11] When the Persians had marched across the desert, they took up a position close to the Egyptian army, in order to join battle. But then the Egyptian king’s mercenaries, who were Greeks and Carians, found a way to vent their anger at Phanes for bringing a foreign army into Egypt. Phanes’ sons had been left behind in Egypt, so the mercenaries brought them to the Egyptian camp. They set up a bowl between the two armies, in full view of the boys’ father, and then they fetched the children one by one and cut their throats so that the blood spilled into the bowl. When they had finished with all the children, the mercenaries poured wine and water into the bowl, and when they had all drunk some of the blood they joined battle. The fighting was fierce and losses on both sides were very heavy, but in the end the Egyptians were routed.
[12] I saw there something astonishing, which I had heard about from the local inhabitants. The bones of the men from both armies who fell in this battle are strewn over the battlefield, with the bones of the Persians lying on one side and those of the Egyptians on the other, in distinct parts of the battlefield, just as they were originally. Now, the skulls of the Persians are so brittle that if you just hit one with a pebble you would make a hole in it; however, the Egyptians’ skulls are so strong that you would find it hard to break one by striking it with a rock. The reason they gave me for this—and I found it very plausible—is that from childhood onwards the Egyptians shave their heads and the bone thickens up in the sun. (This also explains why they do not go bald; I mean, there are fewer bald men to be seen in Egypt than anywhere else in the world.) So this is why they have thick skulls, and it also explains why the Persians have thin skulls, because they wear felt tiaras from birth and so shelter their heads from the sun. So much for these matters; I also saw something similar in the case of those who fell along with Achaemenes the son of Darius at the battle of Papremis, killed by Inaros the Libyan.
[13] The Egyptians fled from the battlefield in disarray and shut themselves up in Memphis. Cambyses sent a herald, a Persian, up river to Memphis on a Mytilenean ship, to suggest a truce, but as soon as the Egyptians saw the ship approaching Memphis, they streamed out of the city walls en masse, smashed up the ship, tore the crew apart limb from limb, and carried the remains back inside the walls. This led to their being besieged and eventually they surrendered. Meanwhile their neighbours, the Libyans, were so terrified by what had happened in Egypt that they surrendered without a fight, accepted tributary status, and sent gifts to Cambyses. The people of Cyrene and Barca shared the Libyans’ fear and followed their example. Cambyses received the gifts the Libyans sent with benevolence, but he was displeased with the Cyreneans’ offering—because it was so slight, I suppose; they sent five hundred minas of silver, and Cambyses picked up the coins with his own hand and tossed them to his troops.
[14] Psammenitus’ reign had lasted six months. Nine days after he had taken the walls of Memphis, Cambyses had a group of Egyptians, including Psammenitus, sit at the outskirts of the city, and he deliberately tormented the Egyptian king, because he wanted to test his courage. He had the king’s daughter dressed as a slave, and sent her out of the city with a pitcher to fetch water, along with other young women, also dressed as slaves, whom Cambyses had selected as being the daughters of the leading men of Egypt. As the young women passed their fathers, they cried out and burst into tears, and all the men who were there responded with cries and tears of their own at the sight of their daughters’ humiliation. However, when Psammenitus saw the girls coming and understood what was happening, he bowed his head down to the ground. Next, once the pitcher-carriers had passed them by, Cambyses sent out the king’s son, along with two thousand other Egyptians of the same age group, all of whom had ropes tied around their necks and bits in their mouths. They were being taken to pay for the murder of the Mytilineans who had been killed along with their ship at Memphis, because the royal judges had decreed that for every death ten leading Egyptians were to die. When Psammenitus saw the young men passing by and realized that his son was being taken to his death, he did not weep and wail like the rest of the Egyptians who were sitting there with him, but he did the same as he had done in the case of his daughter. However, it so happened that once this procession too had passed by, an elderly man, who had been a frequent guest of the king’s, walked past Psammenitus the son of Amasis and the other Egyptians who were sitting there at the edge of the city; this man had lost all his property and been reduced to the status of a beggar, and was begging from the army. When Psammenitus saw him, he let out a loud groan, called out his friend’s name, and struck his head in distress. Now, the guards who were there brought back to Cambyses a report of Psammenitus’ reaction to each procession out of the city, and Cambyses was so surprised at Psammenitus’ behaviour that he sent a messenger to him with the following query: ‘Your master Cambyses wants to know, Psammenitus, why the sight of your daughter being humiliated and your son being taken to his death did not move you to protests and tears, whereas a beggar who, he has been informed, is not related to you at all did receive this mark of respect from you.’
To this question, Psammenitus replied: ‘Son of Cyrus, my personal troubles are too immense to cry over, but when a friend on the threshold of old age has lost a fortune and happiness, and been reduced to beggary, his sorrow calls for tears.’
The Egyptians say that this reply of Psammenitus’ was well received by Cambyses, who thought he had spoken well, and brought tears to the eyes of Croesus (who had come to Egypt with Cambyses) and to the eyes of the Persians who were there at the time. Cambyses himself felt a certain amount of pity for Psammenitus, so he quickly gave the order that the Egyptian’s son was to be rescued from the band of condemned men and that Psammenitus was to be fetched from where he was sitting in the outskirts and brought to his presence.
[15] The people who had gone to fetch Psammenitus’ son were too late to save him, because he had been the first to be killed, but they fetched Psammenitus and brought him to Cambyses. From then on Psammenitus lived an easy life; in fact, if he had been able to steer clear of political involvement, he would have regained Egypt and been able to reign as Cambyses’ regent, since the Persians tend to honour the sons of kings; they even give the sons of kings who have rebelled against them their kingdom back. One can deduce that this is what they usually do from a number of events, including the cases of Thannyras the son of Inaros, who actually regained his father’s kingdom, and Pausiris the son of Amyrtaeus as well, despite the fact that no one ever did the Persians more harm than Inaros and Amyrtaeus. As things turned out, though, Psammenitus conspired against the Persians and reaped the reward: he was caught inciting the Egyptians to rebellion, and when this was made known to Cambyses, he drank bull’s blood and died on the spot. And that was the end of him.
[16] There was something Cambyses wanted to do in Saïs, so he next left Memphis and went there. As soon as he got to Amasis’ residence, he gave orders that Amasis’ corpse was to be taken from its coffin and brought outside. Once these orders had been carried out, he told his men to heap every kind of indignity on the corpse, such as flogging it with their whips, pulling out its hair, and prodding it with their goads. Now, the corpse had been mummified and therefore resisted their efforts and refused to disintegrate at all, so when they reached the point of exhaustion Cambyses gave them a sacrilegious order: he told them to burn the corpse, when fire is considered by the Persians to be a god. In fact cremation of corpses is not allowed in either Persia or Egypt. The Persians forbid it for the reason I have given—they declare it wrong to present a human corpse to a god—and the Egyptians regard fire as a living creature (one which consumes everything it takes hold of until at last, when it is sated, it dies along with the object it has been devouring), and it is absolutely forbidden for them to give a corpse to any kind of creature. (This also explains why they embalm corpses: it is to stop them being eaten in their coffins by worms.) So Cambyses’ command contravened both Egyptian and Persian beliefs.
According to the Egyptians, the Persians were mistaken in thinking that they were heaping these indignities upon Amasis: it was in fact not Amasis, but some other Egyptian, similar in build to Amasis, who was at the receiving end of this treatment. They say that Amasis found out from an oracle what was going to happen to him after his death, and so in order to ward off what was coming he had this other man—the one whose corpse was flogged—buried inside his tomb, just by the entrance, while he told his son to put his own body in a recess of the tomb, as far out of the way as possible. In my opinion, Amasis never gave these instructions about how he was to be buried and about the other man, and it is all just a story told by the Egyptians to make an impression.
[17] Cambyses next began to contemplate three military expeditions, one against the Carthaginians, one against the Ammonians, and one against the long-lived Ethiopians, who live in Libya, on the coast of the southern sea. The conclusion he reached was that he should attack the Carthaginians by sea and the Ammonians by land with a portion of his land forces, and that his first move against the Ethiopians should be to send spies there, ostensibly to take gifts to their king, but in fact to reconnoitre the general state of affairs, and in particular to see whether or not there really was such a thing as the Table of the Sun there.
[18] This Table of the Sun is supposed to be a field on the edge of the town which is covered with the cooked flesh of every kind of four-footed animal. At night the leading citizens, whoever they may be, prepare the meat and put it in the field, and during the daytime anyone who wants to can come and eat. Some of the local inhabitants, however, claim that the earth spontaneously produces the meat every time. Anyway, that is what the so-called Table of the Sun is said to be.
[19] As soon as Cambyses had decided to send spies to Ethiopia, he summoned from the city of Elephantine some members of the tribe of Fish-eaters who knew the Ethiopian language. While they were being fetched, he ordered his navy to set out against Carthage. The Phoenicians, however, refused to obey; they were bound by solemn oaths, they said, and it would be wrong for them to attack their own sons. And without the Phoenicians, the remainder of the navy was not fit for battle. So that is how the Carthaginians escaped being enslaved by the Persians. Cambyses decided not to try to force the Phoenicians to go, because they had joined the Persian forces of their own accord and the whole navy depended on them. (The Cyprians also voluntarily supplied men to serve in the Persian army in the campaign against Egypt.)
[20] When the Fish-eaters arrived from Elephantine, Cambyses told them what they had to say and sent them off to Ethiopia. He gave them gifts to take, including a purple cloak, a gold torque, arm-bands, an alabaster pot of perfume, and a jar of palm wine. The Ethiopians in question, the ones to whom Cambyses sent the delegation, are said to be the tallest and most attractive people in the world. It is said that their customs are quite different from those of any other people, and this applies particularly to the kingship: they think that whichever of their countrymen they judge to be the tallest and to have strength in keeping with his size should be king.
[21] So when the Fish-eaters reached these Ethiopians, they offered the gifts to the king and said, ‘It is because Cambyses, king of Persia, wants to be your guest-friend and your ally that he has sent us with instructions to hold talks with you, and that is also why he is giving you these gifts, which he particularly enjoys using.’
The Ethiopian king, however, realized that they had come as spies, so he said to them: ‘The Persian king has not sent you with gifts because he really wants my friendship. You’re lying: the real reason you are here is to spy on my kingdom. Your master’s behaviour is reprehensible too. If he were a good man, he would not have wanted to possess any land other than his own, and he wouldn’t have enslaved people who have done him no wrong. That is how things are, so I want you to give him this bow and say to him: “Here is a word of advice from the king of the Ethiopians. When the Persians can draw bows of this size as easily as I do now, then he can march against the long-lived Ethiopians—with an army that considerably outnumbers ours. In the mean time, he should be grateful to the gods for not making the sons of Ethiopia think of acquiring additional lands besides their own.”’
[22] With these words he unstrung the bow and handed it over to the visitors. Then he took hold of the purple cloak and asked what it was and how it was made. The Fish-eaters explained about the murex and the process of dyeing, but he called them liars and said that their clothing was not what it appeared to be either. Next he asked about the gold—the torque and the arm-bands. When the Fish-eaters described how gold was used for decoration, the king laughed and, imagining that the objects were shackles, said that they had stronger shackles than these in his country. Then he asked about the perfume, and when they explained how it was made and applied to the body, the king’s response was the same as it had been with the cloak. When he came to the wine, however, and asked how it was made, he was delighted with it. He went on to ask what the king of Persia ate and what was the maximum age a man lived to in Persia. They replied that the king ate bread and described how wheat was grown, and said that eighty years was the maximum extent of a man’s life. To this the Ethiopian replied that he was not surprised that their lives were so short if they ate manure; in fact, he said, they would not live even that long if they did not revive themselves with their drink—and he indicated the wine—which was the one thing the Persians did better than them, he said.
[23] Next it was the Fish-eaters’ turn to ask the king how long people lived there and what they ate. He replied that it was common for people to live to be 120 years old, although some lived even longer, and that they ate cooked meat and drank milk. When the spies expressed surprise at the length of their lives, the king took them to a spring whose water made anyone washing in it more sleek, as if it had been olive oil, and which gave off a scent like violets. In their report, the spies said that the water of this spring was so soft that nothing could float on it, not wood or even anything lighter than wood; everything sank to the bottom. Assuming the truth of the reports of this water, it would explain why these Ethiopians are long-lived, if they use it for everything. Then they left the spring and were taken to a prison, where all the prisoners were shackled with golden chains; among these Ethiopians the rarest and most valuable substance of all is bronze. After they had seen the prison, they also saw the so-called Table of the Sun.
[24] Finally, after the Table of the Sun, they saw their coffins, which are said to be made out of transparent stone. What the Ethiopians do is dry the corpse (perhaps in the same way that the Egyptians do, or perhaps by some other method), and then smear the corpse all over with chalk and paint it, making it as lifelike as possible; then they enclose the body in a hollow pillar of transparent stone, which is plentiful there and easily dug out of the ground. The corpse can be seen inside the pillar—in fact, it is as completely visible as if there were nothing but the corpse there—but it does not have any disagreeable odours or anything else unpleasant about it. The dead person’s closest relatives keep the pillar in their home for a year, during which time they bring the corpse all their first-fruits and offer it sacrifices; then they remove the pillar from the house and set it up near the town.
[25] Once they had reconnoitred everything, the spies left Ethiopia and returned to Egypt. Their report made Cambyses so angry that he immediately set out to attack the Ethiopians, without having requisitioned supplies or considered the fact that he was intending to make an expedition to the ends of the earth. Instead, the Fish-eaters’ report made him so enraged and insane that he just set off with all his land forces, but without the Greek troops who were based in Egypt, who were ordered to stay behind.
When the expeditionary force reached Thebes, he detached about fifty thousand of his men and gave them the job of reducing the Ammonians to slavery and burning down the oracle of Zeus, while he himself marched against the Ethiopians with the rest of the army. However, they completely ran out of food before they had got a fifth of the way there, and then they ran out of yoke-animals as well, because they were all eaten up. Had Cambyses changed his mind when he saw what was happening, and turned back, he would have redeemed his original mistake by acting wisely; in fact, however, he paid no attention to the situation and continued to press on. As long as there were plants to scavenge, his men could stay alive by eating grass, but then they reached the sandy desert. At that point some of them did something dreadful: they cast lots to choose one in every ten men among them—and ate him. When Cambyses heard about this, fear of cannibalism made him abandon his expedition to Ethiopia and turn his men back. He arrived back in Thebes with a severely depleted army, and from there went downriver to Memphis, where he released his Greek troops so that they could sail back home.
[26] That was what happened to Cambyses’ expedition to Ethiopia. As for the detachment he had sent to attack the Ammonians, they set out from Thebes with guides, and they clearly arrived at the town of Oäsis. This is a town which is inhabited by Samians who are said to belong to the Aeschrionian tribe, and which is seven days’ journey from Thebes across the desert; the name of the place, translated into Greek, is the Isles of the Blessed. So by all accounts the army reached this place, but after that the only information available comes directly or indirectly from the Ammonians themselves; no one else can say what happened to them, because they did not reach the Ammonians and they did not come back either. The Ammonians, however, add an explanation for their disappearance. They say that after the army had left Oäsis and was making its way across the desert towards them—in other words, somewhere between Oäsis and their lands—an extraordinarily strong south wind, carrying along with it heaps of sand, fell on them while they were taking their midday meal and buried them. Anyway, that is what the Ammonians say about this army.
[27] Now, Cambyses’ return to Memphis coincided with an appearance of Apis, whom the Greeks call Epaphus. As soon as this happened, the Egyptians put on their best clothes and started their celebrations. Cambyses interpreted these thanksgiving celebrations as being held because of the failure of his expedition, and he summoned the governors of Memphis to his presence. When they came before him he asked them why the Egyptians were behaving in this way now that he was in Memphis after the loss of most of his army, when they had never done anything like it when he had been in Memphis before. They explained that the god had appeared, that there was usually a long interval between one appearance and the next, and that the whole Egyptian population celebrated with a holiday whenever he appeared. But Cambyses accused them of lying and condemned them to death on those grounds.
[28] After he had executed the governors, he next summoned the priests of Apis to his presence. When they gave the same explanation as the governors, Cambyses said that he would see if some tame god had arrived in Egypt, and then he told the priests to bring Apis to him, and they went off to comply. Now, this Apis, or Epaphus, is a calf born from a cow which cannot conceive offspring from then on. According to the Egyptians, a beam of light descends from the sky to the cow and from it she gives birth to Apis. This calf, which is known as Apis, has certain features: it is black, except for a white diamond on its forehead and the image of an eagle on its back, its tail hairs are double, and it has a beetle-shaped mark under its tongue.
[29] When the priests brought Apis to him, Cambyses, who was more or less insane, drew his dagger, aimed for Apis’ stomach, but missed and hit his thigh. Then he said to the priests with a laugh: ‘You poor fools! Is this what gods are like? Are they creatures of flesh and blood, capable of being wounded by weapons? Well, this is the god you Egyptians deserve. But you won’t get away with making me a laughing-stock.’ He then ordered those of his men who were in charge of discipline to flog the priests, and to kill any other Egyptians who were caught celebrating the festival. But in addition to the dissolution of the Egyptians’ festival and the punishment of the priests, Apis lay in the sanctuary wasting away from his thigh wound. After his death, the priests secretly buried him, without Cambyses knowing about it.
[30] Because of this crime, Cambyses very soon went completely mad, according to the Egyptians. He had not been entirely sane previously, and now his first atrocity was to do away with his brother Smerdis, born from the same father and mother as himself. He had already sent him back from Egypt to Persia, because he was jealous of the fact that he was the only Persian who could draw the bow which the Fish-eaters had brought back from the Ethiopian king; Smerdis could draw it only to the breadth of two fingers, but none of the other Persians could do even that much. While Smerdis was on his way back to Persia, Cambyses dreamt that a messenger came to him from Persia to tell him that Smerdis was sitting on the royal throne with his head touching the sky. The dream made Cambyses fear for his life; he thought his brother would kill him and gain power. So he sent Prexaspes, the Persian he trusted most, to Persia to kill Smerdis, and Prexaspes went to Susa and did so. The story goes that he took Smerdis out hunting and killed him there, although there is also an alternative account, that he led him down to the Red Sea and drowned him.
[31] So this is the first atrocity they say Cambyses committed, and the second was to do away with his sister, who had come with him to Egypt. She was also his wife, as well as being his full sister, despite the fact that previously it was not at all customary for Persians to marry their sisters. Cambyses had been in love with another of his sisters, and had wanted to marry her. Because there was no precedent for this plan of his, he summoned all the royal judges, as they are called, and asked them if there was a law inviting anyone who wanted to marry his own sister to do so. These royal judges are a select band of Persians, who hold office until they die or until they are found to have committed a crime; their job is to adjudicate lawsuits for the Persians and to interpret ancestral laws and customs, and all such matters are referred to them. Anyway, their response to Cambyses’ question was safe, as well as being within the letter of the law: they said that they could find no law inviting a man to marry his own sister, but that they found another law that the ruler of the Persians could do whatever he wanted. So by finding a regulation which could support Cambyses’ desire to marry his sisters, they did not let fear of Cambyses make them break the law, but they also did not destroy themselves while maintaining the law. So Cambyses married the sister he was in love with then, but a short while later he also took another one of his sisters to be his wife. It was the younger of these two sisters who had gone with him to Egypt and whom he killed.
[32] There are two alternative accounts of her death, just as there are about Smerdis. The Greek version is that Cambyses pitted a lion cub against a young dog, and that this wife of his was one of the spectators at the fight. The puppy was losing, but its brother broke its leash and came to its defence, and then the two of them defeated the lion cub. Cambyses thought it had been a good show, but his wife sat there and cried. When Cambyses noticed, he asked her why she was crying, and she replied that the sight of the puppy helping its brother had moved her to tears because it reminded her of Smerdis and she realized that there was now no one to come to Cambyses’ defence. It was because of this reply of hers, according to the Greeks, that she was killed by Cambyses. The Egyptian version is that Cambyses and his wife were sitting at their table for a meal, when she picked up a lettuce, pulled off its leaves, and then asked her husband whether the lettuce was better stripped bare or with its leaves on. When he replied that it was better with its leaves on, she said, ‘But you have stripped the house of Cyrus as bare as this lettuce.’ He jumped on her in anger, and this caused her to miscarry the baby she was carrying in her womb and to die.
[33] These were the mad acts Cambyses committed against his closest relatives. It might have been the Apis affair that drove him mad, or it might have been something else, because men’s lives are generally beset by many misfortunes. And Cambyses is said to have had a terrible sickness—the sacred disease, as it is sometimes called—ever since he was born. So it is hardly surprising that lack of mental health should accompany such a terrible physical ailment.
[34] He committed mad acts against the rest of the Persians as well. The case of Prexaspes, for instance, is mentioned. Cambyses gave Prexaspes the outstanding honour of bringing messages to him, and Prexaspes’ son was Cambyses’ wine-server, which was also a distinguished position to hold. It is said that Cambyses once asked him, ‘Prexaspes, what sort of man do the Persians think I am? What do they say about me?’
‘Master,’ Prexaspes replied, ‘they have nothing but good to say about you, except in one respect: they say that you are rather too fond of wine.’
Prexaspes’ news about what the Persians were saying made Cambyses angry, and he retorted, ‘In fact the Persians are saying that my fondness for wine is driving me mad and making me lose my mind. It follows, then, that their earlier statements were false.’
The point is that once before, at a meeting between Cambyses, his Persian advisers, and Croesus, Cambyses asked what sort of man they thought him to be, compared to his father Cyrus. The Persians replied that he was a better man than his father, because he had control over the whole of his father’s possessions, while also adding dominion over Egypt and the sea. Croesus was there, however, and the Persians’ reply did not satisfy him, so he said to Cambyses, ‘In my opinion, my lord, you do not bear comparison with your father, because you do not yet have a son of the calibre of the one he left behind.’ Cambyses was delighted with this reply of Croesus’ and used to mention it with approval.
[35] This is what he was remembering when he spoke angrily to Prexaspes. ‘You’ll see whether the Persians are speaking the truth,’ he said, ‘or whether in saying this they are out of their minds. There’s your son, standing on the porch. I’ll shoot at him, and if I hit him right in the heart, that will be proof that the Persians are talking nonsense, whereas if I miss, you can say that the Persians are right and that I am out of my mind.’
With these words, he drew his bow and shot the boy with an arrow. The boy fell to the ground and Cambyses ordered his men to slit him open and examine the wound. When it was found that the arrow had pierced his heart, he turned to the boy’s father with a laugh and said delightedly, ‘So there you have it, Prexaspes! This proves that I am quite sane, and the Persians are out of their minds. Now, tell me: do you know anyone else in the world who can shoot an arrow with such accuracy?’
Prexaspes saw that he was quite mad and was afraid for himself. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I don’t think that even the god could have made such a good shot.’
That is what Cambyses did then, and on another occasion he found twelve of the highest-ranking Persians guilty of a paltry misdemeanour and buried them alive up to their necks in the ground.
[36] Croesus of Lydia considered it his duty to rebuke Cambyses for this behaviour. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t just give way to your youth and passion; use some self-restraint and control. It is good to exercise forethought, and intelligent to look ahead. You are killing men who are your own countrymen, after convicting them of trivial misdemeanours; you are killing children. If you go on behaving like this, you had better watch out or the Persians will rise up against you. This is me, Croesus, speaking; your father Cyrus often told me to rebuke you and to suggest a good course of action to you, if I saw one.’
Despite the fact that this advice was obviously given with goodwill, Cambyses replied, ‘How can you have the audacity to give me advice? Look how well you ruled over your own country! Look how well you advised my father, when you told him to cross the River Araxes and attack the Massagetae, when they were prepared to cross over into our own territory! You brought about your downfall through your incompetence as a leader of your country, and you brought about Cyrus’ death through his trust in you. But you won’t get away with it: I’ve been wanting to find an excuse to have a go at you for a long time.’
With these words, he grabbed his bow and arrows with the intention of using them against Croesus, but Croesus leapt to his feet and ran out of the room. Foiled in his attempt to shoot him, Cambyses ordered his attendants to find him and kill him. But they knew what Cambyses was like and kept Croesus hidden, so that if he changed his mind and missed Croesus, they could produce him and win a reward for keeping him alive, while if he did not change his mind and never felt in need of him, then they could do him in. In fact, a short while later Cambyses did miss Croesus, and when the attendants realized this they told him that Croesus was still alive. Cambyses replied that he shared their happiness that Croesus was alive, but added that those who had kept him alive would not go unpunished, because he would put them to death—which he did.
[37] These are a few examples of the insanity of his behaviour towards the Persians and his allies. During his time in Memphis he even opened some ancient tombs and examined the corpses. Likewise, he even went into the sanctuary of Hephaestus and made a great deal of fun of the cult statue. Now, the statue of Hephaestus there very closely resembles the Pataïci, which the Phoenicians carry around on the prows of their ships. In case anyone is not familiar with what these Pataïci look like, it will help if I say that they resemble dwarfs. Cambyses also went into the sanctuary of the Cabiri, which no one is allowed to enter except the priest, and went so far as to burn the statues there, after subjecting them to a great deal of ridicule. The statues of the Cabiri also look like those of Hephaestus; in fact, the Cabiri are supposed to be his children.
[38] Everything goes to make me certain that Cambyses was completely mad; otherwise he would not have gone in for mocking religion and tradition. If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best. So it is unlikely that anyone except a madman would laugh at such things.
There is plenty of other evidence to support the idea that this opinion of one’s own customs is universal, but here is one instance. During Darius’ reign, he invited some Greeks who were present to a conference, and asked them how much money it would take for them to be prepared to eat the corpses of their fathers; they replied that they would not do that for any amount of money. Next, Darius summoned some members of the Indian tribe known as Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of the Greeks, with an interpreter present so that they could understand what was being said, how much money it would take for them to be willing to cremate their fathers’ corpses; they cried out in horror and told him not to say such appalling things. So these practices have become enshrined as customs just as they are, and I think Pindar was right to have said in his poem that custom is king of all.
[39] At the same time as Cambyses’ campaign against Egypt, the Lacedaemonians attacked Samos, where Polycrates the son of Aeaces had overthrown the government and taken power. At first he had divided the town into three parts and shared it with his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson, but later he had put Pantagnotus to death and banished his youngest brother Syloson, so that he was in complete control of Samos. Then he formed ties of guestfriendship with King Amasis of Egypt, and the relationship was sealed with an exchange of gifts. Before long Polycrates’ affairs were prospering and became the subject of conversation throughout the whole of Greece, not just Ionia, because every military campaign he directed was completely successful. He acquired a fleet of a hundred penteconters and an army of a thousand archers, and raided everyone indiscriminately—even friends, because he claimed that he would be doing a friend more of a favour if he returned what he had taken than if he had not taken it in the first place. He conquered a great many of the Aegean islands, and a number of communities on the mainland too. Among his conquests were the Lesbians, who had sent their whole fighting force to help Miletus, but Polycrates defeated them in a sea battle. The prisoners he took dug the whole trench around the town wall on Samos, even though they were in shackles.
[40] Now, as it happened, Polycrates’ remarkable good fortune did not go unnoticed by Amasis. He was concerned about it, and as Polycrates’ successes continued to mount he wrote the following letter to him at Samos: ‘Amasis to Polycrates: Although I am glad to hear that a man who is a guest-friend and ally is prospering, I worry about your remarkable good fortune, because I know that the gods are jealous of success. In fact, my wish for myself and for those I care about is a mixture of success and failure, and so to spend one’s life with varied fortune rather than doing well in everything. Why? Because I have never heard tell of a single case of someone doing well in everything who did not end up utterly and horribly destroyed. So please do as I suggest. In the face of your success I think you should decide what your most valuable possession is—that is, the one whose loss would upset you most—and throw it away, making sure that it will never reappear among mortal men. If from then on your good luck does not meet with varied disasters, continue to try to cure it in the way I have suggested.’
[41] When Polycrates read this letter and realized the extent of Amasis’ goodwill towards him, he thought long and hard about which of his precious possessions it would upset him most to lose, and he came to the conclusion that it was the signet-ring he wore, which was made from an emerald set in gold, and was the work of Theodorus the son of Telecles of Samos. Once he had decided that this was what he would throw away, he manned a penteconter, went on board, and then told them to sail out into the open sea. When they were a long way from the island, he took off his ring and, in plain view of the whole crew, threw it into the sea. Then he sailed back to the island, went home, and mourned his loss.
[42] Four or five days later, it so happened that a fisherman caught a huge, beautiful fish, and decided to present it to Polycrates. He brought it to the entrance of his residence and asked permission to appear before Polycrates. Permission was granted, and he offered Polycrates the fish with the following words: ‘My lord, I decided not to take this fish I caught to the town square, even though I make my living as a fisherman, because it seemed to me to be good enough for you and your rule. So I’ve brought it here as a gift for you.’
Polycrates was delighted with the man’s speech and replied, ‘That’s very good of you. I thank you twice—once for your words and once for the gift. I’d like to invite you to dine with me.’
The fisherman felt very proud and went back home. Meanwhile, Polycrates’ attendants cut open the fish and there, inside its stomach, they found his ring! They grabbed hold of it as soon as they saw it, carried it in triumph to Polycrates, and gave it to him, along with the story of its discovery. It occurred to Polycrates that this might be a religious portent, so he wrote in a letter a thorough account of what he had done and what had happened and sent it to Egypt.
[43] When Amasis read the letter from Polycrates, he realized that it was impossible for one person to rescue another from what was going to happen and that, because he was so completely lucky that he even found things he had thrown away, Polycrates was fated to die miserably. He therefore sent a herald to Samos to dissolve their guest-friendship, so that he would not be as upset as he would be at the loss of a friend, when great and dreadful disaster overwhelmed Polycrates.
[44] Polycrates, then, met with success in everything he did. This was the man against whom the Lacedaemonians launched a campaign. They had been asked to help by those Samians who subsequently founded Cydonia in Crete. Polycrates had surreptitiously sent a message to Cambyses the son of Cyrus, who was mustering an army to attack Egypt, asking him to send to him in Samos a request for troops. When Cambyses received Polycrates’ message, he was happy to comply, and he sent a message to Samos asking Polycrates to send a naval force to help him against Egypt. So Polycrates selected those citizens who he suspected were most likely to revolt and sent them off in forty triremes, and he told Cambyses not to send them back to Samos again.
[45] There are those who say that the Samians Polycrates sent never reached Egypt, but only sailed as far as Carpathos, where on reflection they decided not to continue with their voyage. In another version, they did reach Egypt, where they were held in custody, but escaped. When they sailed back to Samos, this version continues, Polycrates came out against them with his fleet and engaged them in battle; the returning voyagers won and landed on the island, but they were beaten in a land battle there and so sailed to Lacedaemon. Yet another version claims that these Samians from Egypt overthrew Polycrates, but I do not think this can be right, since they would not have had to send for the Lacedaemonians, if they were capable of bringing Polycrates down on their own. Besides, it also does not make sense to think that someone with vast numbers of mercenaries and native archers at his disposal would have been beaten by the few returning Samians. As a safeguard against his subjects’ treacherously helping the homecomers, Polycrates shut their wives and children in the shipyards, which he had prepared for this purpose, so that he could burn them up, sheds and all, if he had to.
[46] When the Samians Polycrates had expelled reached Sparta, they gained an audience with the authorities and spoke at a length commensurate with their need. The Lacedaemonian response to this first audience, however, was to say that they had forgotten the earlier parts of the Samians’ speech, and could not follow the later parts. The Samians gained a second audience, however, at which they said nothing at all, except that they brought a bag with them and said, ‘This bag needs grain.’ The Lacedaemonians replied that the word ‘bag’ was redundant, but they still decided to help them.
[47] So the Lacedaemonians made their preparations and set out to attack Samos. According to the Samians, the Lacedaemonians undertook this campaign to repay the Samians for the favour they had done them some time before, when they had sent ships to reinforce the Lacedaemonian expedition against Messenia. According to the Lacedaemonians, however, the campaign was undertaken not so much in response to the Samians’ request for help as because they wanted to avenge the theft of the bowl which they stole while it was being transported to Croesus, and for the theft of the breastplate which King Amasis of Egypt had been sending as a gift to Sparta. The Samians had stolen this breastplate the year before they had stolen the bowl; it was made out of linen, had a large number of creatures woven into it, and was embellished with gold and cotton thread. What is incredible is that every single thread of the breastplate, for all its fineness, consisted of 360 separate threads, all of which were visible. Amasis dedicated another one like it to Athena in Lindos.
[48] The Corinthians were also happy to contribute towards the realization of the expedition against Samos, because a generation previously (at about the same time as the theft of the bowl) they too had met with offensive treatment at the hands of the Samians. Periander the son of Cypselus had sent to Alyattes at Sardis three hundred male children, the sons of the leading families of Corcyra, for castration. The Corinthians who were taking the boys there put in at Samos, and when the Samians found out the reason why the boys were being taken to Sardis, the first thing they did was teach the boys about making contact with the sacred ground of the sanctuary of Artemis, and then they made sure that no one dragged the boys out of the sanctuary once they had taken refuge there. When the Corinthians cut off the boys’ provisions, the Samians instituted a festival (which is in fact still celebrated in the same way nowadays), which involved unmarried girls and boys dancing every night, for the duration of the Corcyran boys’ asylum in the sanctuary, and then they made it a rule of the festival that the dancers had to carry snacks of sesame and honey, so that the Corcyran boys could snatch them out of their hands and get food. This went on until the Corinthians who were guarding the boys gave up and went away; then the Samians took the boys back to Corcyra.
[49] If, after Periander’s death, the Corinthians and the Corcyrans had been on good terms with one another, the Corinthians would not have had this pretext for assisting the expedition against Samos. But in fact, despite their kinship,† they have been hostile towards one another ever since Corinth colonized the island, and so the Corinthians retained their grudge against the Samians.
It was revenge that motivated Periander to select and send the sons of the leading families of Corcyra to Sardis for castration; for the Corcyrans had earlier begun by committing, without provocation, an atrocity against him.
[50] What happened was this. Periander killed his own wife Melissa and, as if that was not enough, another disaster befell him, as follows. Melissa had borne him two sons, who were 17 and 18 years old. Procles, the tyrant of Epidaurus, who was the boys’ grandfather on their mother’s side, invited them to stay and made them as welcome as one would expect, given that they were his daughter’s sons. But when he was seeing them off, his parting words were: ‘Boys, do you know who killed your mother?’
Now, the elder of the two brothers did not pay any attention to what Procles said, but the younger brother, whose name was Lycophron, was so upset by Procles’ words that when he got back to Corinth he refused to speak to his father, on the grounds that he was his mother’s killer, and would not join in any conversation Periander started or answer any question he put to him. Eventually, Periander got so angry with him that he threw him out of the house.
[51] Once Periander had banished Lycophron from his home, he asked his older son what their grandfather had said to them. The boy told Periander that Procles had made them welcome, but he could not recall his parting words to them, because he had not taken them in. Periander insisted that he must have made some kind of suggestion to them, and he kept on and on asking his son what it was. At last the boy remembered and told him about that too. Now Periander understood what was going on. He did not want to show any signs of weakness, so he sent a message to the people in whose house the son he had banished was staying and ordered them not to let him stay there. And so it went on: whenever Lycophron was driven out of one house and found another one to live in, he would be driven out of that one too, with Periander issuing threats to anyone who took him in and ordering them to shut their doors against him. Each time he was driven out of one house, Lycophron would go to another one of his friends’ homes, and although they were afraid of the consequences, they would take him in, because he was Periander’s son.
[52] Eventually, Periander published an edict that anyone who took his son into his house or even spoke to him was to pay a specified amount of money as a sacred fine to Apollo. So, faced with this edict, no one was prepared to speak to Lycophron or to take him into their homes. Besides, he himself did not think it right to defy the prohibition, but he kept himself going by roaming the porticoes. Three days after the edict, Periander saw him in his unwashed, starving state and felt sorry for him. Letting his anger go, he went over to his son and said, ‘Son, what would you rather do? You can either carry on with what you’re doing now or become reconciled with me, your father, and inherit my kingdom and all the advantages of my position. You are my son and a member of the royal family of the prosperous city of Corinth, but you have chosen to live like a tramp, because you are feeling hostility and anger towards me, when I am the last person in the world you ought to treat this way. If something terrible has happened to make you suspicious of me, remember that it is me it happened to; it affects me above all, because I was the one who did it. You now know how much better it is to be envied than pitied, and also what it is like for people to be angry with their parents and their betters. So come home now.’
Lycophron, however, made no reply to this attempt by his father to persuade him, except to say that he owed a sacred fine to Apollo for talking to him. When Periander realized how terrible, hopeless, and incurable his son’s state was, he had him shipped off to Corcyra (which was part of his empire), so that he would not have to keep seeing him. Then he sent his army against his father-in-law Procles, on the grounds that he more than anyone else was responsible for his present troubles; he took Epidaurus and made Procles his prisoner.
[53] Time passed. When Periander was getting on and began to realize that administering and managing his affairs was starting to be beyond him, he sent a message to Corcyra inviting Lycophron to come back and take over as tyrant; he regarded his older son as rather stupid and did not think that he would be up to the job. Lycophron, however, did not even bother to give Periander’s messenger a reply. Periander was reluctant to give up on the young man, so he tried again. This time he sent his daughter, Lycophron’s sister, since he thought that he would listen to her, if anyone. Once she arrived on Corcyra, she said, ‘Do you want the tyranny to fall into others’ hands, child? Do you want your father’s house to be torn apart? Wouldn’t you rather come home and have it yourself? Come home; stop punishing yourself. Stubborn pride warps a person, and two wrongs don’t make a right. There are plenty of precedents for doing what is reasonable rather than what is strictly right—and also plenty of cases where siding with the mother has meant losing a paternal inheritance. Absolute power is difficult and dangerous; there are always lots of people who lust after it, and he is an old man now, past his prime. Don’t give others the good things in life which are rightfully yours.’
Her father had taught her what to say to try to win him over, but Lycophron replied that he would never come to Corinth as long as he heard that his father was still alive, and this was the message she brought back to Periander. He tried a third time, however. He sent a message expressing his own willingness to come and live on Corcyra and suggesting that Lycophron come to Corinth to take his place as tyrant. Lycophron agreed to these terms, and the two of them were all set to move, Periander to Corcyra and Lycophron to Corinth. When the Corcyrans heard the details of their plan, however, they killed the young man to stop Periander coming to their island. This was why Periander was taking revenge on the Corcyrans.
[54] A strong force of Lacedaemonians came and blockaded Samos. They attacked the town wall and scaled the tower which stands on the edge of the seaward side of the town, but then Polycrates came in person with a sizeable band of reinforcements and drove them out. At the inland tower, which stands on the ridge of the hill, the Samians and their mercenaries sallied out in large numbers, but after withstanding the Lacedaemonian advance for a short while, they retreated to the town walls, with the Lacedaemonians harrying them and killing them.
[55] Now, if all the Lacedaemonians there that day had been the equals of Archias and Lycopes, Samos would have fallen. Archias and Lycopes were the only ones who followed the retreating Samians all the way back inside the town walls, where they were cut off from retreat, and so they died there inside the town of Samos. Once, in Pitana (which was his native village), I personally met another Archias, who was the grandson of the Archias I have just been talking about, since he was the son of Samius the son of Archias. This Archias honoured the Samians more than any other foreigners, and he told me that his father had been given the name Samius because of the heroic death his father Archias had died on Samos. He explained that the reason he thought well of the Samians was because they had given his grandfather a public funeral.
[56] After forty days, the Lacedaemonian blockade of Samos was still getting nowhere, so they returned to the Peloponnese. As a rather silly story has it, Polycrates struck a large quantity of local coinage in lead, which he then covered in gold and used to bribe them, and they took it and left Samos. This was the first time Dorians from Lacedaemon had launched a military strike against anywhere in Asia.
[57] The Lacedaemonian decision to leave prompted the Samians who had taken up arms against Polycrates to sail away as well. They went to Siphnos, because they were short of money, and Siphnos was at that time at the height of its prosperity; its gold-and silver-mines had made it the richest of the Aegean islands. The mines were so productive that from a mere tenth of the wealth generated by them a treasury at Delphi was established, which was one of the richest there, and every year they used to distribute the revenue from the mines among the citizen body. When they were building the treasury at Delphi, they asked the oracle if their current good fortune was likely to last for a considerable length of time. The Pythia replied as follows:
When on Siphnos the town hall turns white
And so do the brows of the square, then the wise man must beware
The ambush of wood and the red messenger.
And at this time the Siphnian town square and town hall were fitted out with Parian marble.
[58] The Siphnians were unable to interpret this oracle either right at the time or when the Samians arrived. For the first thing the Samians did when they reached Siphnos was send ambassadors to the town on one of their ships. Now, in the old days all ships were painted scarlet; that was what the Pythia was referring to when she warned the Siphnians to beware of ‘the ambush of wood and the red messenger’. Anyway, when the messengers arrived in the town, they asked the Siphnians to lend them ten talents. The Siphnians refused, so the Samians set about plundering their land. As soon as they found out, the Siphnians came to the rescue and gave battle, but were defeated, and a considerable number of their men were pinned inside the town by the Samians, who subsequently made them pay a hundred talents.
[59] From the people of Hermione, the Samians accepted instead of money the island of Hydrea, which is off the Peloponnese and which they entrusted to the people of Troezen for safe keeping. They themselves colonized Cydonia in Crete. The original purpose of their voyage to Crete was to expel the Zacynthians from their island, not to found a colony, but they stayed there for five years and formed a prosperous community—so much so that they are the ones who built the sanctuaries which can still be found in Cydonia.† In the sixth year, however, they were defeated at sea by a combined force of Aeginetans and Cretans and were enslaved; the Aeginetans cut off the boar-shaped prows which the Samians had on their ships and dedicated them in the sanctuary of Athena on Aegina. The reason for all this was that the Aeginetans bore a grudge against the Samians, because earlier, while Amphicrates was the king of Samos, the Samians had made war on Aegina and caused a great deal of suffering to the islanders (although there were losses on the Samian side too). Anyway, that was their pretext.
[60] I have gone on about the Samians at some length because three of their achievements are unsurpassed in the Greek world. The first is a tunnel which was dug right through the bottom of a hill 150 fathoms high, so that there is an opening at either end; the tunnel is seven stades long and eight feet in both height and width. Along the whole of its length another channel has been dug, which is twenty cubits deep and three feet wide, and which carries water from a great spring through pipes to the town. The master builder of this tunnel was a Megarian called Eupalinus the son of Naustrophus. The second of the three achievements is a mole in the sea, over two stades long, enclosing the harbour in water which is as much as twenty fathoms deep. The third thing they built is the largest temple ever seen; its original design was drawn up by Rhoecus the son of Phileas, who was a native of Samos. These achievements of theirs are my justification for going on about them at some length.
[61] While Cambyses the son of Cyrus was spending his time in Egypt insane, two Magian brothers rebelled against him. One of these two rebels was the man Cambyses had appointed steward of his household in his absence. He realized that Smerdis’ death had been kept secret, and that few Persians knew about it, and in fact that the majority were sure Smerdis was still alive. Taking advantage of these circumstances he plotted to usurp the kingdom. What he did was this. His brother—who was, as I have said, his accomplice—was very similar in appearance to Smerdis the son of Cyrus, whom Cambyses had killed, despite the fact that he was his own brother. Not only did this Magus’ brother look like Smerdis, but his name was Smerdis as well. The Magus, Patizeithes, convinced this brother of his that he would take care of everything for him, and went and seated him on the throne. Then he sent messengers all over the place, including Egypt, to tell the army that in the future they were to take their orders from Smerdis the son of Cyrus, not Cambyses.
[62] So all the messengers made this proclamation, including the one who had been detailed to go to Egypt, although in fact he found Cambyses and his army at Ecbatana in Syria. He took his stand and made a public announcement of the orders he was carrying from the Magus. When Cambyses heard what the messenger had to say, he believed that he was telling the truth; that is, he believed that Prexaspes (the man he had sent to kill Smerdis) had betrayed him and had not done it. So he looked at Prexaspes and said, ‘Is this how you carried out the task I set you, Prexaspes?’
‘Master,’ Prexaspes replied, ‘the man must be lying. Your brother Smerdis has certainly not rebelled against you. He’ll never defy you over anything, big or small. I personally carried out the mission you gave me and buried the corpse with my own hands—these hands here. If the dead are rising from their graves, you should expect Astyages the Mede to rise against you as well. But if everything is as usual, you need never expect any trouble from that quarter. Now, it seems to me that we should track down this messenger and get him to tell us who sent him with this announcement about taking orders from King Smerdis.’
[63] Cambyses approved of Prexaspes’ idea and so the hunt was on straight away for the messenger. When he had been fetched back to the camp, Prexaspes interrogated him. ‘You there!’ he said. ‘You say you came here as a messenger from Smerdis the son of Cyrus. Tell the truth now, and then you can leave without further ado: was it Smerdis himself who personally gave you your instructions, or was it one of his retainers?’
‘No,’ the man replied, ‘I haven’t laid eyes on Smerdis the son of Cyrus since King Cambyses set out for Egypt. It was the Magus whom Cambyses appointed as steward of his household who gave me my mission and told me that the order to take this message to you came from Smerdis the son of Cyrus.’
This was nothing but the truth, of course. ‘Prexaspes,’ Cambyses said, ‘you are perfectly innocent. You acted properly and carried out your orders. But the question is: which of the Persians can it be who has usurped Smerdis’ name and is rising against me?’
‘My lord,’ Prexaspes replied, ‘I think I know what has happened. It is the Magi who have rebelled against you—Patizeithes, the one you left behind as steward of your household, and his brother Smerdis.’
[64] When Cambyses heard the name ‘Smerdis’ he was struck by the truth of what Prexaspes had said and saw the true meaning of the dream, in which someone had brought him a message that Smerdis was sitting on the royal throne with his head touching the sky. When he realized that he had pointlessly killed his brother, he was overwhelmed with grief for him. He was so miserable and upset at the whole disaster that he leapt on to his horse, with the intention of setting out for Susa without delay and attacking the Magus. As he did so, the tip of his scabbard came off and the exposed sword struck him on the thigh. He was wounded in exactly the same spot that he had previously wounded the Egyptian god Apis. Cambyses felt that the wound was fatal; he asked what was the name of the place where they were, and they told him it was Ecbatana. Now, the oracle in Buto had earlier† told him that he would die in Ecbatana. He had supposed that he would die of old age in Ecbatana in Media, which was the administrative centre of his empire, but the oracle, as it turned out, had meant Ecbatana in Syria. When in answer to his question he heard the name of the place, although the troubles the Magus had caused him and his wound had driven him insane, he now came to his senses, understood the oracle, and said, ‘This is the place where Cambyses the son of Cyrus is destined to die.’
[65] That is all he said then, but about twenty days later he sent for the most eminent Persians who were there in Syria with him. ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘I have no choice under the circumstances but to disclose something I have done my best to conceal. You see, while I was in Egypt I had a dream—I wish it had never happened! I dreamt that a messenger came from my palace and told me that Smerdis was sitting on the royal throne with his head touching the sky. I was afraid of losing my reign to my brother, so I acted with more haste than wisdom. I mean, a man does not—as I now see—have the resources to deflect his destiny, but I foolishly sent Prexaspes to Susa to kill Smerdis. Once this terrible deed had been done, I lived without fear, never imagining that anyone else would rise up against me now that Smerdis was out of the way. I completely misunderstood what was going to happen, and I killed my own brother, when I had no need to do so, and I have still lost my kingdom. And it turns out that it was Smerdis the Magus whose rebellion my personal deity was warning me about in my dream.
‘So that is what I did, and you have to understand that Smerdis the son of Cyrus is no longer alive to help you; my kingdom is in the hands of the Magus I left in charge of my palace and his brother Smerdis; and the person who, if anyone, should punish the Magi for the disgrace I have suffered has died an abominable death at the hands of his closest relative. Since he is no longer alive, I must do the next best thing: it has become imperative that I get you, men of Persia, to carry out my dying wishes. And so I call on the gods who oversee kingship as I enjoin you—all of you, but especially those of you here who are Achaemenidae—not to let power fall once more into Median hands. No, whatever part treachery played in their acquisition of power must be matched by treachery on your side in depriving them of it again; whatever part force played in bringing them success must be matched by sheer force on your side in regaining control. If you do this, you will be and remain for ever free men, and I pray that the earth may be fruitful for you and that your wives and flocks may be prolific. However, if you do not regain power or make some attempt to get it back, I pray that exactly the opposite of this may be your lot, and also that every man in Persia may meet a death like mine.’ With these words, Cambyses expressed his grief at what he had done.
[66] All the Persians responded to their king’s distress by rending the clothes they were wearing and giving themselves over to unmitigated grief. Later, gangrene of the bone and mortification of the thigh quickly brought about the death of Cambyses the son of Cyrus. His reign had lasted a total of seven years and five months, and he was completely childless, since he left no sons or daughters. However, the Persians who were there refused to believe that the Magi had assumed authority; they were sure that Cambyses had said what he said about Smerdis’ death in order to embroil all of Persia in a war against him.
[67] They were sure that it was Smerdis the son of Cyrus who had been made king. Prexaspes too was now vehemently denying that he had killed Smerdis, since with Cambyses dead it was dangerous for him to admit that he had been personally responsible for the death of a son of Cyrus. So after Cambyses’ death, the Magus had nothing to fear as he ruled under his assumed name of Smerdis the son of Cyrus. His reign lasted seven months, up to the end of what would have been the eighth year of Cambyses’ reign. During his reign he acted very generously towards all his subjects, so that after his death he was greatly missed by all the inhabitants of Asia except the Persians. For he sent couriers to every tribe within the empire and proclaimed that they were to be exempt from military service and taxes for three years.
[68] He proclaimed this edict at the very beginning of his reign, but seven months later his hoax was exposed. This is how it happened. One of the noblest and wealthiest Persians was a man called Otanes, whose father was Pharnaspes. Otanes was the first to suspect that the Magus was not Smerdis the son of Cyrus and to guess his true identity. He came to this conclusion because Smerdis never left the acropolis and never called any Persian of standing into his presence.
Now, Cambyses had married Otanes’ daughter, whose name was Phaedymia, and at the time in question she was married to the Magus, who had taken not just her but all Cambyses’ other wives as well to be his own wives. Once Otanes had begun to be suspicious of Smerdis, he got a message to his daughter, asking her who it was she was going to bed with—whether it was Smerdis the son of Cyrus or someone else. She sent a message in reply saying that she did not know, because she had never seen Smerdis the son of Cyrus and therefore did not know who her husband was. Otanes sent her a second message, which ran: ‘Even if you yourself cannot recognize Smerdis the son of Cyrus, you can still find out from Atossa who it is that both she and you are married to. After all, she’s bound to know her own brother.’
The message his daughter sent in reply said: ‘I can’t talk to Atossa or meet any of her handmaidens, because at the very beginning of his reign this man—whoever he is—separated us by assigning each of us different quarters.’
[69] When Otanes heard this message, things started to become clear. He sent his daughter a third message, saying, ‘Daughter, your noble birth means that you have to accept any risk I, your father, tell you to run. If this man is not Smerdis the son of Cyrus, but is who I suspect he is, he can’t be allowed to get away with taking you to bed and with ruling Persia. No, he should be punished. What you must do is this. When you’re in bed with him, wait until you’re sure he’s asleep, and then feel for his ears. If it’s clear that he has ears, you can assume that your husband is Smerdis the son of Cyrus; but if he doesn’t have ears, you should conclude that it is Smerdis the Magus.’
In her message back to him Phaedymia pointed out the considerable risks involved for her in carrying out this plan, because if he did not in fact have ears, and she was caught feeling for them, she was sure he would murder her—but she said that she would do it all the same. So she promised her father that she would do his bidding. (Cyrus the son of Cambyses had in the course of his reign punished this Magus Smerdis for some serious crime or other by cutting off his ears.) So this Phaedymia, the daughter of Otanes, kept her promise to her father in all respects. In Persia, wives sleep with their husbands in rotation, so when it was her turn to go to the Magus, she went and lay with him, and when he was fast asleep, she felt for his ears. It was no difficult task for her to discover that he had no ears, and the next day she immediately sent a message telling her father what had happened.
[70] Otanes found Aspathines and Gobryas—eminent Persians who were close and trustworthy friends—and told them the whole business. They too had in fact had their suspicions that this might be going on, and so they accepted Otanes’ account. They decided that each of them should recruit another Persian—the one he trusted most. So Otanes brought in Intaphrenes, Gobryas brought in Megabyzus,† Aspathines brought in Hydarnes, and now they were six. At this juncture, Darius the son of Hystaspes arrived in Susa from Persia, where his father was governor, and the six Persian conspirators decided to recruit Darius too.
[71] The seven of them met and conferred, and exchanged pledges. When it was Darius’ turn to express his opinion, he said, ‘I thought I was the only one who knew that it was the Magus who was ruling over us and that Smerdis the son of Cyrus was dead. In fact, that’s exactly why I was eager to come here—to bring about the Magus’ death. But since, as it turns out, you too know what’s going on, and I am not alone, I suggest we act immediately. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by delay.’
It was Otanes who replied to him. ‘Darius,’ he said, ‘your father was a good man, and it looks as though you are proving yourself to be at least his equal. But I think it would be unwise of you to push this enterprise along too fast, rather than taking a more cautious approach to it. I mean, we should wait until there are more of us before striking.’
‘Gentlemen,’ Darius said to the assembled company, ‘if you follow Otanes’ advice, you will die horribly—you can be sure of it. Motivated by the desire for personal profit, someone will denounce us to the Magus. You really ought to have proceeded with this by making the assault on your own, but since you decided to let more people in on it and you’ve told me about it, then let’s either act today or, I have to tell you, if you let today slip by, no one will be quicker than me in turning informer: I’ll tell the Magus all about it.’
[72] When he saw how upset Darius was, Otanes said, ‘Since you’re forcing us to hurry along and allowing us no delay, you had better tell us how we’re to get into the palace and attack them. You must have personally seen or at least heard about all the guards who have been posted throughout the palace. How are we going to get past them?’
‘Otanes,’ Darius replied, ‘many things cannot be clarified by words, but can by action. Then again, some things may be clearly describable but lead to nothing spectacular. You know it isn’t hard to get past the guards on duty. In the first place, they’re bound to let people like us past, out of either respect or fear. In the second place, I myself can provide us with a very plausible excuse for getting in, since I can claim that I’ve just come from Persia and want to give a message from my father to the king. Where a lie is necessary, let it be spoken. Our objective is the same whether we use lies or the truth to achieve it. People lie when they expect to profit from others’ falling for their lies, and they tell the truth for the same reason—to attract some profit to themselves or to gain more room to manoeuvre in. In other words, the means may differ but we’re after the same thing. If there’s no profit to be gained, our truth-teller might as well lie and our liar might as well tell the truth. Any guard who willingly lets us past will be better off in the long run, and if any of them tries to block our way, we must immediately mark him as our enemy, then push past him and set to our work.’
[73] Gobryas spoke next. ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘will there ever be a better time for us to regain power, or failing that to die in the attempt, than now when we Persians have a Mede, a Magus, as our king—and one who has lost his ears too? Those of you who were with Cambyses while he was ill will have no trouble remembering how on his death-bed he cursed any Persians who failed to try to regain power. At the time we didn’t believe him; we thought he was motivated by malice. As things are, then, I vote that we listen to Darius and not disband this meeting except to go and attack the Magus.’ This is what Gobryas said and all the other conspirators approved.
[74] Now, while they were making their plans, the Magi were also coincidentally making plans of their own, to win Prexaspes over to their side. They bore in mind, first, the horrific way he had been treated by Cambyses, when Cambyses had shot and killed his son with an arrow; second, the fact that he was the only one who knew about the death of Smerdis the son of Cyrus, because he had been personally responsible for killing him; and third, the great respect in which the Persians held him. So they invited him to a meeting and won his allegiance by exchanging oaths and pledges, which bound him to keep their secret and not tell anyone how they were deceiving the Persians, and by guaranteeing to make him unbelievably wealthy. Once the Magi had won him over, and Prexaspes had promised to comply with their wishes, they put a second proposal to him. They suggested convening the whole Persian population under the palace wall, and that he should climb up to the top of a tower and address the crowd, telling them that they were being ruled by Smerdis the son of Cyrus, and nobody else. They pretended that they wanted him to be the one to do this because there was no one who was more likely to be trusted by the Persians than him, and because he had often stated that in his opinion Smerdis the son of Cyrus was alive, and had denied that his murder had ever taken place.
[75] Prexaspes said that he was prepared to do this as well, so the Magi convened the Persians, sent Prexaspes up to the top of the tower, and told him to address the crowd. But he deliberately ignored everything they had asked him to say, and instead went through Cyrus’ ancestry, from Achaemenes all the way down to Cyrus himself, at which point he described all the benefits which Cyrus had achieved for the Persians. Then after all this he told the truth and explained that there were events which it would previously have been dangerous for him to reveal and so he had kept them secret, but now, he said, circumstances left him no choice but to bring them to light. And so he told them how he had been forced by Cambyses to kill Smerdis the son of Cyrus and that it was the Magi who were ruling the empire. He laid many curses on the Persians if they failed to regain power and take vengeance on the Magi, and then he threw himself head first down from the tower. And that was the end of Prexaspes, who had been throughout his life a man of distinction.
[76] Now, the seven Persians came to the conclusion that they should attack the Magi straight away, without any delay, so they offered up prayers to the gods and set out. They knew nothing of the business with Prexaspes; in fact, it was not until they were halfway there that they found out what had happened to him. They stood at the side of the road and talked things over between themselves once more. Otanes and his supporters were forcefully presenting the case for waiting and not attacking while matters were unsettled, whereas Darius and his supporters were arguing that they should get a move on and carry out their plans immediately, without waiting. But while they were hurling arguments back and forth seven pairs of hawks appeared, chasing and harrying and clawing two pairs of vultures. The sight of the birds made all seven come round to Darius’ point of view, and so they carried on towards the palace, encouraged by the birds.
[77] When they reached the gates, everything happened more or less as Darius had predicted. The guards were very respectful of such eminent Persians and, without suspecting them of anything underhand, sent them on their divinely appointed way; not one of them asked the conspirators any questions. They got as far as the courtyard and there they met the eunuchs whose job it was to take messages in to the king. The eunuchs enquired what business had brought them there, began to threaten the guards with punishment for letting them in, and stopped the seven when they wanted to go further in. At a signal, the seven drew their daggers, attacked the eunuchs who were blocking their way, and cut them down on the spot. Then they ran towards the main hall.
[78] The two Magi happened to be inside at the time, discussing the consequences of Prexaspes’ actions. When they saw the eunuchs in uproar and shouting, they both leapt to their feet. As soon as they realized what was happening, they set about defending themselves; one of them first snatched up his bow and arrows, while the other took up his spear. Then the fight was on. The Magus who had grabbed the bow found that it was no use at all, since his opponents were close at hand and were crowding in on him; the other wielded his spear and wounded Aspathines in the thigh and then Intaphrenes in the eye. In fact, Intaphrenes lost his eye as a result of this wound, but it did not prove fatal.
While one of the Magi was inflicting these wounds, the other took refuge in a bedroom that was off the main hall, when his bow and arrows proved useless. He intended to bar the doors, but two of the seven, Darius and Gobryas, were hard on his heels and followed him into the room, where Gobryas started grappling with him. Darius stood there in a quandary, because it was dark and he was worried about hitting Gobryas. Gobryas saw that Darius was standing by ineffectively and asked him why he was not lending a hand. ‘I’m worried about hitting you,’ Darius said.
‘Use your dagger,’ Gobryas replied, ‘even if you run both of us through.’ Darius obeyed Gobryas and thrust with his dagger—and somehow managed to hit only the Magus.
[79] Once they had killed the Magi, the conspirators cut off their heads. They left their wounded comrades where they were, because they were incapacitated and because the acropolis needed guarding. Taking the heads of the Magi with them, they ran out of the palace. They raised the alarm as they went and shouted out their news to all the rest of the Persians, showing them the heads and calling them to arms. Meanwhile, they killed any Magi they came across. When the Persians learnt of the hoax the Magi had practised and realized what the seven had done, they decided to follow their lead; they drew their daggers and began to kill any Magi they could find, and if night had not intervened they would not have left a single one alive. This is now the most important day of the year in the Persian public calendar, and they spend it celebrating a major festival which they call the Magophonia. During the festival, no Magus is allowed to appear outdoors; they have to stay inside their houses all day long.
[80] Five days later, when things had settled down, the conspirators against the Magi met to discuss the general state of things. There are those in Greece who are not convinced of the authenticity of the speeches that were delivered there, but they did take place. Otanes recommended entrusting the management of the country to the Persian people. ‘It is my view’, he said, ‘that we should put an end to the system whereby one of us is the sole ruler. Monarchy is neither an attractive nor a noble institution. You have seen how vicious Cambyses became and you have also experienced similar behaviour from the Magus. How can monarchy be an orderly affair, when a monarch has the licence to do whatever he wants, without being accountable to anyone? Make a man a monarch, and even if he is the most moral person in the world, he will leave his customary ways of thinking. All the advantages of his position breed arrogant abusiveness in him, and envy is ingrained in human nature anyway. With these two qualities he has in himself every evil: all his atrocities can be attributed to an excess of abusiveness or envy. Now, you might think that an absolute ruler is bound to be free from envy, since there is nothing good that he lacks, but in fact his natural attitude towards his people is the opposite of what you would expect. He resents the existence of the best men, while the worst of them make him happy. There is no one better than him at welcoming slander, and there is no one more erratic in his behaviour. I mean, if your admiration for him is moderate, he is offended at your lack of total subservience, and if you are totally subservient, he is angry at you as a flatterer. And now I come to the most important problems with monarchy. A monarch subverts a country’s ancestral customs, takes women against their will, and kills men without trial. What about majority rule, on the other hand? In the first place, it has the best of all names to describe it—equality before the law. In the second place, it is entirely free of the vices of monarchy. It is government by lot, it is accountable government, and it refers all decisions to the common people. So I propose that we abandon monarchy and increase the power of the people, because everything depends on their numbers.’ These were Otanes’ thoughts.
[81] Next Megabyzus spoke in favour of oligarchy. ‘Otanes’ arguments for abolishing monarchy’, he said, ‘represent my own views too. However, in so far as he was recommending the transference of power to the general populace, his argument is flawed. A mob is ineffective, and there is nothing more stupid or more given to brutality. People are hardly going to tolerate escaping from the brutality of a despot only to fall into the brutal clutches of the unruly masses, when any action taken by a despot is the action of someone who knows what he is doing, but knowledge and the masses are incompatible. How could anyone know what is right without either having been taught it or having innate awareness of it? No, the approach of the general populace is that of a river swollen with winter rain: they rush blindly forward and sweep things before them. Let us leave democracy to Persia’s enemies, while we choose a number of the best men and put power in their hands. After all, we will be members of such a company, and it is reasonable to assume that the best men make the best decisions.’ This was Megabyzus’ proposal.
[82] The third person to express his opinion was Darius, and he said, ‘I think Megabyzus was right in what he said about the masses, but wrong about oligarchy. There are three choices before us, and let us suppose that each of them is the best of its kind—the best democracy, the best oligarchy, and the best monarchy. In my opinion, the best monarchy far outstrips the others. I mean, if you have a single person, and he is the best person in the world, how could you hope to improve on that? His views are the best there are, he can govern the people blamelessly, and he is particularly good at keeping to himself his plans against hostile opponents. In an oligarchy, however, a number of people are trying to benefit the community, and in this situation violent personal feuds tend to arise, because every one of them wants to come out on top and have his own views prevail. This leads them to become violently antagonistic towards one another, so that factions arise, which lead to bloodshed, which leads ultimately to monarchy—which just goes to show that it is by far the best system. Then again, corruption is inevitable in a democracy. So, in the context of corruption in the political sphere, the corrupt ones become firm friends, rather than opponents, because corrupt practitioners of politics act by forming alliances. This kind of thing goes on until someone emerges as a champion of the people and puts an end to these corrupt politicians. But by doing this he wins the admiration of the people, and then he turns out to be a monarch. So he again is proof that monarchy is the best system. One point sums the whole thing up—where did we get our independence from and who gave it to us? Was it the people or an oligarchy or a monarch? My view, then, is that since we gained our freedom thanks to a single individual, we should keep to this way of doing things. And I would add that we should not abolish our ancestral customs, which serve us well. That is not the way to improve matters.’
[83] These were the three views that were put forward for consideration. Four out of the seven endorsed Darius’ view. Finding that his proposal recommending for Persia the idea of equality before the law had been defeated, Otanes spoke openly to all of them. ‘My fellow conspirators,’ he said, ‘whether we choose by lot, or give the Persian people the chance to elect their preferred candidate, or use some other method, it will obviously be one of us who is to become king. Under these circumstances, I am not going to stand against you as a candidate; I have as little desire to be a ruler as I have to be ruled. However, I renounce my claim to the kingdom on one condition—that I and my descendants should never be ruled by any of you.’ The other six agreed to his idea, so he stood down and did not compete against them for the kingdom. And to this day the house of Otanes is the only house in Persia which remains free and, while obeying the laws of the Persians, is subject to the king only to the extent that it wishes to be.
[84] The remaining six conspirators turned to discussing the fairest way of installing a king. They decided that in the event of one of them becoming king, Otanes and his descendants in perpetuity should be awarded certain privileges annually, namely a set of Median clothing and every gift which the Persians find most precious. They decided to give him these things since he had been the prime mover of the conspiracy and had brought them all together. These special privileges were reserved for Otanes, but they also decided on certain prerogatives to be shared by all seven of them, namely that any of them should be allowed to enter the royal palace whenever he wanted to, without being announced, except when the king was sleeping with a woman, and that the king was not to marry outside the families of his fellow revolutionaries. As for choosing a king, they decided that they should all mount their horses at the edge of the city and that the kingdom should be given to the rider of the first horse to neigh after sunrise.
[85] Now, one of Darius’ slaves was an astute groom called Oebares. When the conspirators’ meeting was over, Darius found Oebares and said, ‘What we’ve decided to do as regards the kingdom, Oebares, is give it to the rider of the first horse to neigh at sunrise after we’ve mounted. So if you know some technique, fix it so that we can be the ones to win this prize, not any of the others.’
Oebares replied, ‘Master, if that’s all it takes to make you king, you can be perfectly confident that no one will beat you to the kingdom. I have the perfect solution.’
‘If you really do have a clever ruse for this,’ Darius said, ‘now is the time to set it up. There’s no time for delay—the contest will take place tomorrow.’
Now, Darius’ horse was partial to one particular mare. So what Oebares did in response to Darius’ instructions was wait for nightfall and then take the mare to the edge of the city and tie her up there. Then he brought Darius’ horse to the spot. At first he walked him around near the mare, bringing him ever closer to her, but eventually he let the stallion mount her.
[86] At daybreak the six met on horseback as they had agreed, and rode around the outskirts of the city. When they approached the spot where the mare had been tied up the previous night, Darius’ horse ran up to it and whinnied. And just as the horse did this, there was a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder, even though the sky was clear. These extra phenomena clinched it for Darius; it was as if there were some prior agreement that they should happen. The others jumped off their horses and knelt before him.
[87] There is an alternative version of Oebares’ trick; in fact, the Persians tell the story both ways. This account claims that he rubbed the mare’s genitals with his hand and then kept his hand hidden in his trousers. At dawn, just as the riders were about to move out, Oebares brought his hand out and passed it near Darius’ horse’s nostrils, and the smell made the stallion snort and whinny.
[88] So Darius the son of Hystaspes was made king. Thanks to Cyrus’ and later Cambyses’ conquests, all the peoples in Asia were his subjects—except for the Arabians, who were never reduced to slavery by the Persians. In fact, the Arabians had an alliance with Persia, because they had given Cambyses safe passage into Egypt, and the Persian invasion of Egypt would have been impossible without Arabian support.
Darius’ first marriages were with Persian women. He married Cyrus’ two daughters, Atossa (who had previously been married first to her brother Cambyses and then to the Magus) and Artystone (who had not been married before). Then he also married the daughter of Smerdis the son of Cyrus, whose name was Parmys, and the daughter of Otanes, who had exposed the Magus.
Everything was filled with Darius’ power. The first thing he did was erect a statue in stone featuring a man on horseback, with the following inscription carved on it: ‘Darius the son of Hystaspes gained the Persian kingdom through the prowess of his horse’—he inserted the horse’s name—‘and that of his groom Oebares.’
[89] Next he established within the Persian empire twenty provinces, or satrapies, as the Persians call them. Once he had established the provinces and appointed governors, he fixed the tribute which each people was to pay—a ‘people’ being counted as including not only the neighbouring tribes, but also, past the immediate neighbours, certain more remote tribes, which were variously assigned to the various peoples. The provinces and their annual tribute payments were divided as follows. First, however, those who were paying in silver were told to use the Babylonian talent, while those who were paying in gold were told to use the Euboïc talent; the Babylonian talent is the equivalent of seventy Euboïc minas.† Now, during the reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses there was no such thing as a fixed amount of tribute, but the various peoples brought donations. Because he established the tribute system and other related systems too, the Persians describe Darius as a retailer (since he put a price on everything), Cambyses as a master (since he was cruel and restrictive), and Cyrus as a father (since he was kind and everything he set up was for their good).
[90] For the purposes of the payment of tribute, the Ionians, Asian Magnesians, Aeolians, Carians, Lycians, Milyans, and Pamphylians were assessed as a single unit and contributed a revenue of 400 talents of silver. This was the first tax province, and the second consisted of the Mysians, Lydians, Lasonians, Cabalians, and Hytenneans, who contributed a revenue of 500 talents. The third consisted of the Hellespontines on the right as one sails in, the Phrygians, Asian Thracians, Paphlagonians, Mariandynians, and Syrians, whose combined tribute was 360 talents. The Cilicians, who constituted the fourth province, contributed 360 white horses, one for each day in the year, and 500 talents of silver, 140 talents of which went towards the upkeep of the cavalry garrison in Cilicia, and the other 360 to Darius.
[91] The whole region stretching from the town of Posideium (which was founded by Amphilochus the son of Amphiaraus on the border between Cilicia and Syria) to Egypt, excluding Arabian territory (which was exempt) had to pay a tribute of 350 talents; this region, which constituted the fifth province, encompasses the whole of Phoenicia, Palestinian Syria, and Cyprus. The sixth province consisted mainly of Egypt, but the Libyans adjacent to Egypt, and Cyrene and Barca were also assessed as part of the province of Egypt. This province contributed 700 talents, not counting the revenue of silver from the fish of the lake of Moeris and also a fixed amount of grain—120,000 sacks—which was issued to the Persians and their auxiliaries who were based in White Wall in Memphis. The seventh province consisted of the Sattagydae, Gandarians, Dadicae, and Aparytae, who between them contributed 170 talents. The eighth province, consisting of Susa and the rest of the land of the Cissians, contributed 300 talents.
[92] Babylon and the rest of Assyria—the ninth province—contributed 1,000 talents of silver and 500 child eunuchs. Ecbatana, the rest of Media, and also the Paretacenians† and Orthocorybantians, formed the tenth province and contributed 450 talents. The eleventh province consisted of the Caspians, Pausicae, Pantimathi, and Daritae, who together contributed 200 talents. The twelfth province consisted of Bactria, as far as the Aegli, and their tribute was 360 talents.
[93] The thirteenth province, comprising Pactyican territory, Armenia, and their neighbours as far as the Euxine Sea, contributed 400 talents. The fourteenth province consisted of the Sagartians, Sarangae, Thamanaeans, Utians, Mycians, and the inhabitants of the Red Sea islands (where the Persian king settles the people known as ‘the Dispossessed’), who together contributed 600 talents. The fifteenth province consisted of the Sacae and the Caspians, and they paid 250 talents. The sixteenth province, consisting of the Parthians, Chorasmians, Sogdians, and Arians, contributed 300 talents.
[94] The seventeenth province consisted of the Paricanians and Asian Ethiopians, and contributed 400 talents. The Matieneans, Saspeires and Alarodians, who made up the eighteenth province, had an assessed tribute of 200 talents. Three hundred talents were required from the Moschians, Tibarenians, Macrones, Mossynoecians, and Mares, who together made up the nineteenth province. The twentieth province consisted of the Indians, who are by far the most numerous people in the known world, and who contributed more than any other province—namely, 360 talents of gold-dust.
[95] If the Babylonian silver is assessed in terms of the Euboïc talent it comes to 9,880 talents, and if gold is calculated as thirteen times more valuable than silver, the Indian gold-dust will be found to be the equivalent of 4,680 Euboïc talents. So the sum total, in Euboïc talents, of the annual tribute paid to Darius, is 14,560 talents. Here I omit any amount smaller than these round numbers.
[96] This was the tribute Darius levied from Asia and a few places in Libya. Later, further revenue was raised from the Aegean islands and from settlements in Europe as far as Thessaly. The Persian king stores this revenue of his by melting it down and pouring it into clay jars; then, when each jar is full, he removes the surrounding clay. Whenever he wants money, he slices off as much as he needs at the time.
[97] So much for the provinces and the tribute assessment. The only part of the empire that I have not mentioned as taxable is Persia itself, because any land occupied by Persians is exempt. There are also some peoples which were not required to pay any tribute, but tended to bring donations. First, there are the Ethiopians who live on the border with Egypt (whom Cambyses conquered while he was on his way to attack the long-lived Ethiopians) and the Ethiopians who live in the region of the holy mountain Nysa and who celebrate festivals sacred to Dionysus. (The seed used by these Ethiopians and their neighbours is the same as that of the Indians of the Callantiae tribe; also, they live in underground dwellings.) These two peoples together used to—and still do even today—make a donation every other year of two choenixes of unrefined gold, two hundred logs of ebony wood, five Ethiopian boys, and twenty huge elephant tusks. Then there are the Colchians and the other tribes living between Colchis and the Caucasian mountain range, which forms the limit of Persian influence, since north of the Caucasus no one is the slightest bit concerned about the Persians. They were assigned to make a donation every fourth year, as they still do today, of a hundred boys and a hundred girls. Then there are the Arabians, who contributed a thousand talents of frankincense every year. So in addition to tribute, these peoples used to provide the Persian king with these donations as well.
[98] The gold-dust that the Indians bring the Persian king has already been mentioned; here is how they come by such a huge quantity of gold. The Indians live further east in Asia than anyone else—further east than any other known people about whom there is reliable information—because beyond them the eastern part of India is sandy and therefore uninhabitable. There is a large number of Indian tribes, and they do not all speak the same language. Some, but not all, are nomadic; some live in marshes formed by the river and eat raw fish which they catch from cane boats they set out in—each boat being made out of a single piece of cane! These marsh Indians wear clothes made out of rushes; first they cut the plant down and gather it from the river, and then they weave it as one would a basket and wear it like a breastplate.
[99] Another tribe of Indians, called the Padaei, who live to the east of these marsh Indians, are nomadic and eat raw meat. They are said to have the following customs. If any of their compatriots—a man or a woman—is ill, his closest male friends (assuming that it is a man who is ill) kill him, on the grounds that if he wasted away in illness his flesh would become spoiled. He denies that he is ill, but they take no notice, kill him, and have a feast. Exactly the same procedure is followed by a woman’s closest female friends when it is a woman who is ill. They sacrifice and eat anyone who reaches old age, but it is unusual for anyone to do so, because they kill everyone who falls ill before reaching old age.
[100] There is another Indian tribe, however, with different habits: they do not kill any living thing or grow crops, nor is it their practice to have houses. They eat vegetables, and there is a seed, about the size of a millet-seed, which grows by itself in a pod without being cultivated and which they collect, cook—pod and all—and eat. If any of them falls ill, he goes and lies down in some remote spot, and no one cares whether he is dead or ill.
[101] All the Indian tribes I have described have sexual intercourse in public, as herd animals do. Also, they are almost as black in colour as Ethiopians. The semen they ejaculate into their women is as black as their skin, not white like that of other men; the same goes for the semen Ethiopians ejaculate too. These Indians live a very long way south, far from Persia, and they were never ruled by King Darius.
[102] Other Indians live at the border of the town of Caspatyrus and Pactyican territory, to the north of the rest of the Indians. Their way of life closely resembles what one finds in Bactria. They are the most warlike Indians, and it is they who mount expeditions to search for the gold; the region in question is too sandy for human habitation. Now, in the sand of this desert there are ants which are bigger than foxes, although they never reach the size of dogs; there are also some of these ants in the Persian king’s palace, which were caught in the desert and taken there. Anyway, these ants make their nests underground, and in so doing they bring sand up to the surface in exactly the same way that ants in Greece do (they are also very similar to Greek ants in shape), and the sand which is brought up to the surface has gold in it. It is this sand that the Indians search for on their expeditions into the desert. Each of them harnesses three camels together—two males, which carry the traces, and a female in the middle, on which the Indian rides, because their female camels can run as fast as horses, as well as being far more capable of carrying loads. The Indian makes sure that the female camel in the team is one with a very recent litter, from which he has had to tear her away.
[103] I will not describe the shape of a camel, because the Greeks already know what one looks like. I will, however, mention what is not widely known about it: it has two thighs and two knees on each of its hind legs, and its genitals turn back through its hind legs towards its tail.
[104] So that is the system the Indians use for the team with which they ride out in search of the gold. They time their trip so that the actual taking of the gold will coincide with the hottest part of the day, because the heat drives the ants away underground. Whereas the sun is hottest at noon elsewhere, for these people it is hottest in the morning, from dawn until the forenoon. It is so much more hot then than it is at noon in Greece that the Indians are said to soak themselves with water at this time. At midday the heat is more or less the same for the Indians as for other people, and then during the afternoon it is as warm there as it is elsewhere in the morning. As the afternoon wears on, it gets more and more cold, until by the time the sun goes down it is really very cold indeed.
[105] The Indians reach their destination, fill the bags they brought with sand, and make their way back home as quickly as possible, because—as the Persians say—the ants’ sense of smell lets them know what is going on and then they give chase. They say that there is no faster creature on earth than these ants, and so the Indians have to get a head start while the ants are gathering, or none of them would survive. Male camels are slower runners than females, so the two males are cut loose when they begin to fall behind, but not both at once. Meanwhile, the females remember their offspring back home and show no sign of weakness. That, according to the Persians, is how the Indians get most of their gold, although a small quantity is also dug out of the ground in their country.
[106] For some reason, the outer reaches of the inhabited world were allotted the most attractive features, just as Greece has gained by far the most temperate climate. India, for example, is the most easterly part of the inhabited world, as I remarked a short while ago, and it contains, in the first place, living creatures, both animals and birds, which are far larger than those to be found in other countries (the only exception being that their horses are inferior to the breed in Media known as Nesaean horses), and in the second place there is also an unlimited quantity of gold there, which is either dug out of the ground, or washed down from the hills by rivers, or taken from the ants in the way I have described. There are also wild trees there which produce a kind of wool which is more attractive and of a better quality than sheep’s wool, and which is used by the Indians for their clothing.
[107] Then again, Arabia is the most southerly inhabited land, and it is the only place in the world which produces frankincense, myrrh, cassia, cinnamon, and rock-rose resin. None of these are easy for the Arabians to get, except myrrh. They collect frankincense by burning storax resin, which Phoenicians export to Greece. Gathering frankincense requires the burning of storax because every single frankincense-producing tree is guarded by large numbers of tiny, dappled, winged snakes (these are the snakes which invade Egypt), and only the smoke of burning storax resin drives them away from the trees.
[108] The Arabians also claim that the whole world would be overrun by these snakes, if they were not liable to something similar to what I know happens to vipers too. Divine providence is wise, as one would expect, and it looks as though it has arranged things so that all timid and edible creatures produce young in large quantities, because otherwise they might be eaten into extinction, while all fierce and dangerous creatures produce young in small quantities. Hares, for instance, are hunted by all wild animals and birds of prey, and by man too, and so they are very prolific. Hares are the only creatures that conceive while pregnant. A hare can be carrying foetuses in her womb at various stages of development—some with fur, some still bald, some in the process of taking shape, and some being conceived. That is what happens in this sort of case, but on the other hand a particularly strong and brave creature like a lioness gives birth only once a lifetime to a single cub, because she expels her womb along with the cub. The reason for this is that while the cub is in the womb it begins to move around, and since its claws are far sharper than those of any other animal it scratches the womb, and eventually, as the cub grows, it rips it to shreds, until by the time it is due to be born the womb has been completely destroyed.
[109] The same goes for vipers and winged Arabian snakes: if they fulfilled their natural potential, so many would be born that they would make human life impossible. As things are, however, when they are mating in couples and the male is in the middle of emission, the female gets a grip on his neck while he is ejaculating and hangs on relentlessly until she has bitten right through it. So the male snake dies in the way I have just described, but the female pays for what she has done to the male, because while their offspring are still in the womb, they avenge their father by eating their way through their mother’s belly, which is how they make their entry into the world. By contrast, other snakes are not a threat to human life, so they hatch their young out of eggs in large quantities. In any case, there are not as many winged snakes as there appear to be: it is just that they are concentrated in Arabia and nowhere else, whereas vipers, for instance, can be found in every country in the world.
[110] Anyway, that is how the Arabians get frankincense. Next, cassia. They wrap their whole bodies and faces, except for their eyes, in oxhide and other leathers, and then go out after cassia. The cassia grows in a shallow lake in and around which roost winged creatures, which most closely resemble bats. These creatures emit a dreadful shriek and are very aggressive. The Arabians have to protect their eyes against them while they gather the cassia.
[111] The way they get cinnamon is even more extraordinary. They cannot even say where it comes from and where in the world it grows (except that some of them use an argument from probability to claim that it grows in those parts where Dionysus was brought up). But they say that the sticks which the Phoenicians have taught us to call ‘cinnamon’ are carried by large birds to their nests, which are built of mud plastered on to crags on sheer mountainsides, where no man can climb. Under these circumstances, the Arabians have come up with the following clever procedure. They cut up the bodies of dead yoke-animals such as oxen and donkeys into very large pieces and take them there; then they dump the joints near the nests and withdraw a safe distance. The birds fly down and carry the pieces of meat back up to their nests—but the joints are too heavy for the nests. The nests break and fall to the ground, where the Arabians come and get what they came for. That is how cinnamon is collected in that part of Arabia, and from there it is sent all over the world.
[112] The way rock-rose resin (or ladanon in Arabic) occurs is even more remarkable. Nothing could smell sweeter than the resin, yet nothing could smell fouler than the place where it is found—in the beards of he-goats, where it has stuck like gum from a tree. It is used in many kinds of perfume, and is the most common incense burnt by the Arabians.
[113] So much for aromatic spices; Arabia gives off a wonderfully pleasant smell. There are also two amazing kinds of sheep which are found nowhere else. First, there are sheep whose tails are so long—three cubits or more—that they would get sore from being dragged along the ground, if the sheep were allowed to trail them behind them. In fact, though, every shepherd knows enough woodwork to make little carts on to which they fasten the sheeps’ tails, one for the tail of each animal. The second kind of sheep have broad tails which are as much as a cubit across.
[114] The most remote country stretching to the south-west of the inhabited parts of the world is Ethiopia, which produces gold galore, elephants in abundance, all kinds of wild trees, ebony, and the tallest, best-looking, and longest-lived men in the world.
[115] These are the most remote countries in Asia and Libya. However, I have no reliable information to pass on about the western margins of Europe, because I at any rate do not accept that there is a river which the natives there call the Eridanus (said to issue into the northern sea and to be the source of amber), and I am not certain that the Cassiterides exist, which are supposed to be the source of our tin. In the first place, the very name ‘Eridanus’ tells against its existence, because it is not a foreign word, but Greek, made up by some poet. In the second place, despite my efforts, I have been unable to find anyone who has personally seen a sea on the other side of Europe and can tell me about it. Nevertheless, it is true that our tin and our amber come from the outermost reaches of the world.
[116] It seems clear that there is gold in exceedingly large quantities to be found in the north of Europe, but again I have no reliable information to pass on about how it is obtained. It is said that one-eyed people called the Arimaspians steal it from griffins, but another thing I am not convinced about is that there is a race of one-eyed men who are in other respects identical in nature to the rest of mankind. In any case, it is likely that the outermost reaches of the world, which encompass and enclose all the rest, contain things which strike us as particularly attractive and unusual.
[117] There is in Asia a plateau surrounded on all sides by a solid wall of mountains, broken only by five gorges. This plateau used to form part of the territory of the Chorasmians, and formed the boundary between them and the Hyrcanians, Parthians, Sarangae, and Thamanaeans; however, now that the Persians are in power, it belongs to the Persian king. Now, a sizeable river called the Aces rises in the mountains which surround this plateau. This river used to divide into five sub-rivers, each of which passed through one of the gorges and provided water for the land of one of the tribes just mentioned. But now that the Persians are in control of the plateau, the rivers have been treated as follows: the Persian king dammed up the gorges through the mountains and built sluice-gates in each gorge to prevent the water escaping; with no way for the river to get out of the plateau once it has flowed in, the mountain-locked plateau has become a sea. This has caused a great deal of suffering among the tribes, because they used to rely on this water, and now they cannot use it. It is all right in the winter, when the god sends rain on to their land as he does everywhere else, but in the summer when they are planting their millet and sesame, they need water. Since they receive no supply of water, they make the journey to Persia, taking their wives with them, and there they stand at the entrance to the king’s palace and bellow loudly and bitterly. The king then gives orders that the sluice-gates blocking the river which flows into the territory of the tribe which pleads most forcefully are to be opened, and when their land has soaked up enough water to become saturated, these gates are closed, and he gives the order for the next loudest pleaders to have their sluicegates opened. My information is that he opens the gates only after he has exacted from them a great deal of money, over and above their regular tribute. Anyway, so much for that.
[118] It so happened that one of the seven who had rebelled against the Magus died shortly after their uprising; this was Intaphrenes, and he died because he committed an act of violence. He wanted to enter the palace to do some business with the king; and indeed the rule stated that the conspirators could go in to see the king unannounced, unless he happened to be having sex with a woman. So Intaphrenes thought it his right not to be announced, but because he was one of the seven to go right in as he wanted. But the gatekeeper and the message-bearer would not let him in, on the grounds that the king was having sex with a woman. Intaphrenes thought they were lying, however. He drew his akinakes, cut off their ears and noses, and threaded them on to his horse’s bridle. Then he tied the bridle around their necks and sent them away.
[119] The men showed themselves to the king and explained why they had been treated this way. Darius was afraid that the six might have jointly had a hand in the act, so he sent for them one by one and questioned them to find out whether they approved of what had happened. When he was certain that they had not been involved, he arrested not just Intaphrenes himself, but also his sons and all his male relatives, since he was sure that Intaphrenes and his relations were plotting to overthrow him. Once he had them all in custody, he put them in prison to await death.
Intaphrenes’ wife took to coming to the doors of the palace and breaking down in tears and grief. This behaviour of hers eventually moved Darius to pity, and he sent a messenger out to her. ‘Woman,’ he said, ‘King Darius permits you to choose one member of your imprisoned family to save.’
She thought about it and replied, ‘If, thanks to the king, I have to choose the life of one person, out of all of them I choose my brother.’
When Darius heard what her reply had been, he was surprised and sent another message to her, as follows: ‘Woman, the king would like to know what your reason was for abandoning your husband and children and deciding to save your brother’s life, when he is not as near to you as your children or as dear to you as your husband.’
‘My lord,’ she replied, ‘God willing, I may get another husband and more children, if I lose the ones I have at the moment. But my parents are dead, so there’s no way I can get another brother. That was why I said what I said.’
Darius liked the woman’s thinking and showed his pleasure by releasing not only her brother, as she had requested, but also her oldest son. However, he had all the others executed. So that is how one of the seven died so soon after the coup.
[120] Here is something that happened round about the time that Cambyses became ill. A Persian called Oroetes, who had been appointed governor of Sardis by Cyrus, conceived a desire to commit a terrible crime. Although he had never had anything bad said or done to him by Polycrates of Samos—although in fact he had never laid eyes on him—he wanted to capture him and kill him. Most people say that his reason for wanting to do this was as follows. Oroetes and another Persian called Mitrobates, who was the governor of the province at Dascylium, were sitting by the entrance to the king’s palace talking to each other. Their talk degenerated into a quarrel, however, and they began to compare their achievements. In the course of the argument Mitrobates said cuttingly to Oroetes, ‘You call yourself a man? The island of Samos is right next to your province, but you haven’t gained it for the king. Look how easy it is to conquer Samos! Its present tyrant gained control after he and fifteen hoplites started a rebellion.’ Some say that Oroetes was stung by this taunt, but rather than making Mitrobates pay for voicing it, he decided to exterminate Polycrates for causing him to be insulted.
[121] An alternative version, though less common, is that Oroetes sent a messenger to Samos with some request or other (precisely what is not mentioned). As it happened, the messenger found Polycrates laid up on a couch in the dining-room, in the company of Anacreon of Teos. Now, it may have been deliberate or it may have been accidental, but Polycrates treated the matter Oroetes was asking him about with contempt, because he happened to be facing the wall, and when Oroetes’ messenger approached and began talking to him, he did not turn around or answer him.
[122] These are the two reasons mentioned for Polycrates’ death; anyone can choose which of them to believe. In any case, Oroetes, who was based in the city of Magnesia on the Meander River, sent a Lydian called Myrsus the son of Gyges to Samos with a message. He did so because he had found out about Polycrates’ plan to rule the sea—a plan which Polycrates was the first Greek to have conceived, as far as we know. I discount Minos of Cnossus and anyone earlier than Minos who gained control of the sea; it remains the case that Polycrates was the first member of what we recognize as the human race to do so, and he fully expected to gain control of Ionia and the Aegean islands. Oroetes found out about this idea of his and sent the following message: ‘Oroetes to Polycrates: I am aware of your grand designs, but I also know that you do not have the resources to match your plans. However, there is something you can do to ensure that you are successful—and to protect me too. I say this because I have reliable information that King Cambyses is intending to have me killed. So if you come and rescue me and my money, I will share my fortune with you. Thanks to this money, you will be the master of all Greece. You may doubt what I am saying about the money, but if so, send your most trusted man, and I will show it to him.’
[123] Polycrates was very happy to receive this message. He was eager to comply, because he was, as it happened, very much in need of money. He first sent his secretary, a fellow Samian called Maeandrius the son of Maeandrius, to inspect Oroetes’ financial situation (this was the same Maeandrius who a little later dedicated in the sanctuary of Hera all the furniture from Polycrates’ dining-room, which is well worth seeing). When Oroetes heard that someone was due to arrive to make an inspection, he filled eight chests with stones almost up to the very top and put a layer of gold on top of the stones. Then he locked the chests up and kept them ready. Maeandrius came and made his inspection, and reported back to Polycrates.
[124] Polycrates now made ready to go there in person, despite the fact that he had often been advised not to by both oracles and friends. Moreover, his daughter had seen her father in a dream high up in the air being washed by Zeus and anointed by the sun. After this dream she tried everything to stop Polycrates travelling to Oroetes; she even went as far as speaking words of ill-omen when he was on his way to the penteconter. When he threatened to make her stay unmarried for a long time if he came back alive, she prayed that it would come to pass, saying that she would prefer to be single for a long time than to lose a father.
[125] Ignoring all this advice, Polycrates set sail for Oroetes. Included among his sizeable entourage was Democedes the son of Calliphon, a Crotonian by birth, who was the best doctor of his day. Polycrates arrived at Magnesia and there died a horrible death, one which neither he nor his grand plans deserved. After all, leaving aside the Syracusan tyrants, there is no Greek tyrant who bears comparison, for his magnificence, to Polycrates. Once he had killed him—in a way which does not bear mentioning—Oroetes crucified the corpse. He let all the Samians in Polycrates’ entourage go, and told them to be grateful to him for their freedom, but he kept all the non-Samians and slaves of those who had come with Polycrates as his own slaves. With Polycrates’ crucifixion, his daughter’s dream came true in all respects: he was washed by Zeus when it rained and he was anointed by the sun as it drew out the moisture from his body. So for all his good fortune, Polycrates died as King Amasis of Egypt had said he would.†
[126] A short while later, however, retribution for Polycrates’ death caught up with Oroetes. After Cambyses’ death, during the reign of the Magi, Oroetes remained in Sardis without lifting a finger to help the Persians regain the power stolen by the Medes. He also used the chaos of the times as a cover to murder not only Mitrobates, the governor in Dascylium who had taunted him about the Polycrates affair, but also Mitrobates’ son Cranaspes, both of whom were distinguished Persians. He demonstrated his brutality in all sorts of other ways as well. In one instance, he killed an angaros who had come from Darius simply because the message he brought displeased him. What he did was arrange for men to ambush the angaros when he was on his way back home, and make sure that his dead body and his horse were never found again.
[127] When Darius came to power, he wanted to punish Oroetes for all his crimes, and especially for the deaths of Mitrobates and his son. He did not think it would be a good idea to make open war on him for several reasons: matters were still unstable, he had just come to power, and he found out that Oroetes was very strong, not just because he had a personal guard of a thousand Persians, but also because the provinces of Phrygia, Lydia, and Ionia were all under his control. So the plan Darius adopted under these circumstances was to summon all the most eminent Persians to a meeting and address them as follows: ‘Men of Persia, I am calling for a volunteer for a job which will take cunning rather than brute force or numerical superiority. After all, in a situation that needs cunning, brute force is useless. So which of you will either capture or kill Oroetes for me? He has not lifted a finger to help the Persians, and he has done a great deal of harm besides. In the first place, he has murdered two of us, Mitrobates and his son, and in the second place he kills anyone I send to summon him to a meeting. This is obviously intolerable violence. He must be killed before he does the Persians worse harm.’
[128] In response to Darius’ question, thirty men volunteered as agents to carry out the mission. Darius had to stop them squabbling by ordering them to let a lottery decide. They held a lottery and the lot fell on Bagaeus the son of Artontes. Now that the mission was his, Bagaeus had a number of letters written, on various matters, and sealed them with Darius’ seal. Then he took these letters with him to Sardis. When he got there and came into Oroetes’ presence he opened the letters and gave them one by one to the royal secretary (all the provincial governors of the Persian empire have these secretaries). Bagaeus gave the secretary the letters to read so that he could see whether the members of Oroetes’ personal guard might possibly be receptive to the idea of rising up against Oroetes. It was clear that they respected the letters and still more the message they contained, so he gave another letter to the secretary. This time the content of the letter was as follows: ‘Men of Persia, King Darius forbids you to serve as Oroetes’ personal guard.’
When the soldiers heard these words, they let their spears fall to the ground, and Bagaeus could see that they were obeying the letters’ commands so far. This encouraged him, and he gave the secretary the last of his letters, which read: ‘King Darius orders the Persians in Sardis to kill Oroetes.’ At these words the guardsmen drew their akinakeis and killed him on the spot. And that is how retribution for the death of Polycrates of Samos caught up with Oroetes of Persia.
[129] Oroetes’ belongings were sent back to Susa, and not long after they arrived King Darius happened to sprain his ankle dismounting from his horse while out hunting. In fact, it was such a bad sprain that the ankle-bone was dislocated from its joint. Previously, it had always been Darius’ practice to have at hand Egyptian doctors whose reputation as healers was unsurpassed. He consulted them, but their forceful wrenching of his foot only made it much worse. For seven days and seven nights the pain was so severe that Darius could not sleep, and then on the eighth day, when he was in a bad way, someone who had been in Sardis and had heard about the skill of Democedes of Croton told Darius about him. Darius told his men to bring Democedes to him straight away. They found him consigned to oblivion among Oroetes’ slaves and they took him in to the king, still dragging his chains and dressed in rags.
[130] So there he stood in front of Darius. The king asked him whether he was a professional doctor, but he said no, because he was afraid that if he was found out he would never get back to Greece. It was obvious to Darius, however, that he was a professional doctor, and he told the men who had brought Democedes to fetch up whips and spikes. At this, Democedes confessed, explaining that his knowledge was not precise, but that he had spent some time with a doctor and had a rudimentary grasp of the subject. Darius then put himself in Democedes’ hands. By using Greek medical techniques and by applying gentle rather than harsh remedies, Democedes enabled Darius to get some sleep. Before long, contrary to Darius’ expectations of never fully recovering the use of his foot, he was completely better. Darius then presented Democedes with two pairs of golden shackles, and Democedes asked him if this was his reward for healing him—deliberately to double the punishment! Darius was pleased with this remark and sent Democedes off to the royal wives. The eunuchs took him there and introduced him as the man who had saved the king’s life, whereupon each of the king’s wives dipped a cup into a chest full of gold and gave the cup to Democedes. The gift was on such a generous scale that the house-slave who had come with Democedes, whose name was Sciton, made himself a considerable fortune just from picking up the staters that fell from the cups!
[131] Here is how Democedes came to leave Croton and live in Polycrates’ court. In Croton he was not getting on with his father, who had a terrible temper, and eventually he could stand it no longer, so he left and went to Aegina. He settled there and within a year, despite the fact that he had no equipment or medical instruments, he proved himself better than all their other doctors. In his second year there the Aeginetans took him on as their state physician at a salary of one talent; the year after that the Athenians hired his services for a hundred minas, and the year after that Polycrates hired him for two talents. So that was how he came to Samos. It was chiefly because of him that Crotoniate doctors became famous.
[132] Now, at the time in question, once Democedes had cured Darius at Susa, he became the owner of a very grand house and started to hobnob with the king; in fact he had everything—except for passage back to Greece. On one occasion, the Egyptian doctors who had formerly tended the king were about to be impaled for letting a Greek doctor get the better of them, but Democedes implored the king to have mercy and saved their lives. Then again, there was an Elean diviner who had been part of Polycrates’ entourage and had been consigned to oblivion among the slaves, and Democedes rescued him too. In short, Democedes was extremely important to the king.
[133] A short while later, something else happened. Atossa, the daughter of Cyrus and wife of Darius, developed a growth on her breast which subsequently burst and then spread further. While it was small, she hid it and did not tell anyone about it, out of shame, but later, when she was in pain, she sent for Democedes and showed it to him. He told her that he would make her better, but made her swear that in return she would do him any favour he asked of her, and he added that he would not ask her to do anything which would cause her shame.
[134] Later, after he had made her better, Atossa and Darius were in bed together and, acting on Democedes’ instructions, she put the following proposal to Darius: ‘My lord, you have so much power, but you do nothing with it. You aren’t trying to gain further territory or increase the Persian empire. One would expect a man with youth and vast material resources at his disposal to make the Persians realize that they are being ruled by a real man, by conspicuously accomplishing some significant achievement. In fact, there are two reasons why it’s to your advantage to do this—not just to make the Persians understand that their ruler is a real man, but also to keep them ground down by warfare and too busy to conspire against you. And now is the time for you to act and make your mark, while you are young, because while the body is growing, the mind is growing along with it, but as the body ages, the mind ages too and goes into a general decline.’
That is what she said, following her instructions. ‘Wife,’ Darius replied, ‘your words echo my plans. I’ve decided to build a bridge from our continent to the next and to invade Scythia. This will be done soon.’
‘Wait a moment, though,’ Atossa said. ‘I don’t think you should bother to attack Scythia first. They’ll be there whenever you want them. I’d rather you invaded Greece. I’ve heard people talk about what good servants Laconian, Argive, Attic, and Corinthian girls make, and I’d love to have some. And you already have available the best possible person to explain Greece to you in detail and to be your guide—I mean the man who healed your foot.’
‘Since you want us to attack Greece first, wife,’ Darius replied, ‘I think we should send some Persians to Greece, along with the man you mention, to reconnoitre. They will bring me back a thorough report about everything they see and discover there, and then I’ll have reliable information for the invasion.’ That is what Darius said, and he put the plan into effect immediately.
[135] At daybreak the next day, he summoned fifteen eminent Persians and told them to go with Democedes and thoroughly explore the coastline of Greece; he added that they were to bring Democedes back at all costs, without letting him escape. After he had given these men their instructions, he summoned the man himself, Democedes, and asked him to give the Persians a thorough tour and description of Greece and then to return. He also suggested that he take, as gifts for his father and brothers, all his personal effects, on the understanding that he, Darius, would replace them many times over with other such items; and he said that he would contribute a cargo ship filled with a variety of valuable goods to go with him on his voyage. Now, in my opinion, these offers by Darius were not meant as a trap, but Democedes was afraid that Darius was testing him, so he did not impetuously accept everything that was on offer, but said that he would leave his property behind, so that it would be there for him on his return, while accepting the cargo ship which Darius was offering to transport the gifts to his brothers. Then Darius gave Democedes the same instructions he had given the Persians and sent them on their way down to the sea.
[136] They went down to the coast of Phoenicia. There, as soon as they reached the city of Sidon, they manned two triremes and also a huge merchant ship, which they filled with all kinds of valuables. When everything was ready, they set sail for Greece. Sailing close to the Greek coastline they made their observations and wrote them up, until they had reconnoitred most of the coastline, and certainly the most notable places, at which point they went to Tarentum in Italy. There, as a favour to Democedes, Aristophilides the king of Tarentum first removed the rudders from the Persian ships, and then imprisoned the Persians themselves, on the pretext that they were spies. While the Persians were caught up in all this, Democedes went to Croton. Once he was safely back in his native country, Aristophilides released the Persians and gave them back the gear he had taken from their ships.
[137] The Persians left Tarentum and followed Democedes to Croton, where they found him walking around and tried to seize him. The Crotonians were divided: some were willing to let them take Democedes, because they were afraid of Persian power, but others grappled with the Persians and hit them with their sticks. The Persians put up an argument. ‘Men of Croton,’ they said, ‘don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re robbing the king of Persia of one of his runaway slaves. Do you think King Darius will be happy with this offensive behaviour? Do you expect things to go well for you if you take him from us? Which community in this part of the world will we attack before yours, do you suppose? Which will be the first place we will try to reduce to slavery?’
These words of theirs made no impression on the Crotonians, however, so the Persians set out on their return voyage to Asia without Democedes and also without the merchant ship they had brought with them. They gave up trying to learn any more about Greece, which is what they had come for, since they had lost their guide. However, Democedes did ask them, just as they were putting to sea, to do something for him—to tell Darius that Democedes was engaged to marry the daughter of Milo. He did this because the name of Milo the wrestler counted for a lot at the Persian court. Now, Democedes paid out a lot of money to arrange this marriage contract, and I imagine that the reason he was anxious to have the wedding take place was to make Darius see that he was an important person in his own country as well.
[138] During their voyage from Croton the Persians were shipwrecked at Iapygia. There they were enslaved, but a man from Tarentum called Gillus, an exile from his place of birth, rescued them and brought them back to King Darius, who asked him to name his reward. Gillus said that he wanted to be returned to Tarentum (he had already explained his unfortunate situation). However, he wanted to avoid plunging Greece into turmoil by launching a massive naval expedition against Italy, so he told Darius that the Cnidians alone would be enough to restore him to Tarentum; his idea was that because the Cnidians were on good terms with the Tarentines this would guarantee his return from exile. Darius gave his word and got busy; he ordered the Cnidians, through a messenger, to return Gillus to Tarentum. The Cnidians tried to carry out Darius’ command, but could not persuade the people of Tarentum to take Gillus back, and were unable to force them to do so. So much for these events: these were the first Persians to come to Greece from Asia, and they came as spies under the circumstances just described.
[139] After this King Darius captured Samos. He would go on to capture plenty of places, both Greek and non-Greek, but Samos was the first. This is how it came about. During the Egyptian campaign of Cambyses the son of Cyrus, large numbers of Greeks came to Egypt for various reasons—to do business, naturally, to take part in the fighting, or just to see the country. One of those who came as a sightseer was Syloson the son of Aeaces, who was Polycrates’ brother and had been exiled from Samos. Syloson had a very lucky break in Egypt. He picked up a red cloak of his and went for a walk, wearing the cloak, in the streets of Memphis, where Darius, who was at the time a member of Cambyses’ personal guard and not yet a person of any particular importance, caught sight of him. Darius wanted the cloak, so he went over to Syloson and offered to buy it off him. Syloson could see that Darius was very anxious to have the cloak, and in a moment of inspiration he said, ‘I wouldn’t sell this cloak for any amount of money, but I’ll give it to you for free, if it really has to be yours.’ Darius thanked him and took the cloak, and Syloson was sure that he had been stupid to lose it.
[140] In due course of time Cambyses died, the seven rebelled against the Magus, and Darius emerged from the seven to gain the kingdom. Syloson heard that the kingdom had gone to the man whose request for his cloak he had once satisfied in Egypt, so he went to Susa. He sat in the porch of the king’s palace and claimed to be a benefactor of Darius. The gatekeeper reported his claim to the king, but Darius replied in surprise, ‘Who is this Greek? How can I be under an obligation to any Greek, when I have only just become king? Hardly any of them have yet come to Susa, and I’m fairly certain that I don’t owe anything to any Greek man. Still, you’d better show him in, so that I can find out what he means by this claim of his.’
So the gatekeeper brought Syloson and stood him in front of the king. The translators asked him who he was and on what grounds he was claiming to be one of the king’s benefactors. In reply, Syloson told the whole story of the cloak and explained that it was he who had given it to Darius. Darius then said to him, ‘Such generosity! When I still had no power, you were the one who gave me something—and even though it was not much, I still feel as grateful for it† as if I had just now somehow been given a magnificent gift. In exchange for your gift, I will give you limitless gold and silver, so that you will never have cause to regret having done Darius the son of Hystaspes a favour.’
‘My lord,’ Syloson replied, ‘instead of giving me gold or silver, give me back Samos, my homeland. Ever since Oroetes killed my brother Polycrates, it has been in the hands of one of our slaves. Give me Samos, but without bloodshed or enslavement.’
[141] Darius’ response to Syloson’s request was to dispatch an expeditionary force. He put Otanes, who had been one of the seven, in charge of the army and gave him instructions to do whatever Syloson asked him to do. Otanes went down to the coast and got the army ready.
[142] On Samos Maeandrius the son of Maeandrius was in power; he had been left in charge by Polycrates. He was a man who had been thwarted in his desire to be a paragon of virtue. This is what happened. The first thing he did when news of Polycrates’ death reached him was to build an altar to Zeus the Liberator and mark off a precinct around it, which is still there, on the edge of the town. Having done that, he next convened an assembly of the whole citizen body and addressed them as follows: ‘As you know, Polycrates’ sceptre and power have been entrusted to me, and I can now rule over you. However, in so far as I am able, I will avoid doing the things I criticize others for doing. I did not like the way Polycrates was the master of people who were, after all, no different from himself, and I would not condone such behaviour from anyone else either. Anyway, Polycrates has met his fate. For my part, I put power in the hands of all in common and proclaim a state of equality before the law. The only privileges I claim for myself are that six talents from Polycrates’ fortune be set aside for me, and I would also like to reserve for myself and my descendants the priesthood of Zeus the Liberator, for whom I have of my own accord built a shrine and am now conferring freedom on you.’
This was Maeandrius’ speech to the Samians, but one of them stood up and said: ‘But you don’t even deserve to be our ruler, since you’re a low-born good-for-nothing. In fact, you had better give us an account of the money you have handled.’
[143] The man who said this was called Telesarchus, a person of some standing in Samos. Maeandrius realized that if he relinquished power, someone else would set himself up as tyrant, so he stopped thinking about giving it up. He withdrew to the acropolis and sent for people one by one, as if he was going to give them an account of the money, but when they came he arrested them and threw them in prison. While they were in prison, Maeandrius became ill. A brother of his, whose name was Lycaretus, thought he was going to die, and to make it easier for him to take over the reins of government in Samos, he killed all the prisoners. Apparently, they did not want to be free.
[144] So when the Persians involved in restoring Syloson landed on Samos, no one raised a hand to stop them. Maeandrius and his supporters declared themselves ready to leave the island under a truce, and Otanes agreed to the terms and arranged a truce. During the truce-making process, the most important Persians were sitting in their official seats facing the acropolis.
[145] Maeandrius the tyrant had a brother called Charilaus who was half-insane and who had been imprisoned in a dungeon for some offence or other. Now, on the occasion in question he heard the activity, and he leaned out of his dungeon to see what was going on. When he caught sight of the Persians peacably sitting there, he yelled out that he wanted to have a word with Maeandrius. Maeandrius heard his cries and gave instructions for him to be released and brought to him. As soon as Charilaus was brought in, he laid into his brother and called him names, in an attempt to persuade him to attack the Persians. ‘You complete and utter coward!’ he said. ‘You have me, your own brother, thrown into a dungeon for some trivial misdemeanour which does not warrant imprisonment, while you let the Persians get away with expelling you from your home and country without having the guts to make them pay for it. It’s not as if it would be at all difficult to overcome them. If you’re so afraid of them, give me your mercenaries, and I will make them regret ever having come here. And I’d be happy to get you safely off the island.’ This is what he said.
[146] Maeandrius agreed to Charilaus’ suggestion. I think the reason he did so was not because he was crazy enough to imagine that he had the ability to defeat the Persian king, but rather because he resented the effortlessness of Syloson’s impending recovery of an intact town. He had no doubt that if the Persians were badly treated, they would vent their anger on Samos, so he wanted to provoke the Persians and weaken the island and its affairs as much as possible, so as to be able to hand it over in an impaired state. He also knew that he could get safely off the island whenever he wanted, because he had built a secret passage from the acropolis to the coast.
So Maeandrius himself escaped from Samos by boat, while Charilaus issued weapons to all the mercenaries, flung open the gates, and gave them access to the Persians, who were taken completely by surprise, since they were under the impression that everyone had capitulated.† The mercenaries fell on the Persians as they were being carried around in their litters—they were all very high-ranking men—and killed them. This brought the rest of the Persian expeditionary force down on them, and the mercenaries were forced back and pinned on the acropolis.
[147] When the commander, Otanes, saw the atrocity which had been committed against the Persians, he ignored the fact that Darius’ instructions for the mission had included the order not to kill or enslave any Samians, but to hand the island over to Syloson in pristine condition, and he told his men to kill anyone they found, whether adult or child. So while some of his troops were engaged in besieging the acropolis, others were busy killing everyone they came across, whether or not they were on sacred ground.
[148] Meanwhile, Maeandrius escaped from Samos and sailed to Lacedaemon. He had taken his belongings with him into exile, and one of the things he used to do in Lacedaemon was this: from time to time, he would set out his gold and silver goblets, and on these occasions he used to have his attendants polish them up while he engaged the king of Sparta, Cleomenes the son of Anaxandridas, in conversation, and tried to bring him to his house. Whenever Cleomenes saw the goblets, he was impressed by them and used to admire them, whereupon Maeandrius would tell him to take as many of them as he wanted. After he had heard this two or three times from Maeandrius, Cleomenes proved his exemplary honesty. Not only did he decide that it was dishonest to accept the gifts, but he realized that others of his countrymen would accept them and help Maeandrius, so he went to the ephors and told them that it would be better for Sparta if their visitor from Samos were to leave the Peloponnese, to prevent him corrupting either himself or some other Spartiate. The ephors followed his recommendation and ordered Maeandrius to leave the country.
[149] The Persians ‘trawled’ Samos and handed over to Syloson an uninhabited island. However, some time later Otanes was persuaded to repopulate it by a dream and by an infection of the genitals he contracted.
[150] During the course of this naval expedition against Samos, the Babylonians revolted. They were very well prepared. They had spent the whole troubled period of the Magus’ rule and the insurrection of the seven getting ready for a siege, and somehow nobody had noticed that they were doing so. Once their rebellion was out in the open, this is what they did. The Babylonian men gathered together all the women of the city—with the exception of their mothers and of a single woman chosen by each man from his own household—and strangled them. The single woman was kept on as a cook, while all the others were strangled to conserve supplies.
[151] When news of the rebellion reached Darius, he mustered his army in full strength and marched against them. Once he reached Babylon he began to besiege the city, but the inhabitants were not in the slightest bit concerned. They used to climb up to the bastions of the city wall and strut about there, taunting Darius and his army. Once one of them called out, ‘What are you doing sitting there, men of Persia? Why don’t you just go away? Babylon will fall into your hands only when mules start bearing young’—something which the speaker assumed would never happen.
[152] A year and seven months passed, and Darius and his men were getting frustrated with their inability to overcome the Babylonians. There were no inventions and devices that Darius did not use against them, but he still could not capture the city. He even tried the same method that Cyrus had used to capture the city, but it was as ineffective as the rest, because the Babylonians were meticulous in their guarding of the city. He just could not beat them.
[153] Then in the twentieth month a remarkable thing happened to Zopyrus the son of Megabyzus (the Megabyzus who had been one of the seven who had overthrown the Magus): one of his packmules gave birth. Zopyrus was told about it, but had to see it for himself before he believed it; then he ordered the people who had witnessed the event to keep it secret. He thought about what had happened and remembered what the Babylonian had said at the beginning of the siege—that the city would fall when mules gave birth. In the context of this prediction, Zopyrus came to the conclusion that Babylon could now be captured; after all, a god must have guided the man to say what he said, and his own mule to give birth.
[154] Having come to the conclusion that Babylon was destined to fall now, he went to Darius and asked him how important the capture of Babylon was to him. Darius replied that it was very important to him, so Zopyrus next began to try to find a way whereby he could be the one to bring about the fall of Babylon, as his own achievement, because among the Persians a high value is placed on services to the king, and those who perform them are greatly honoured. Now, the only plan he came up with which would enable him to make the city his involved him maiming himself and defecting to the Babylonians. So he coolly gave himself crippling, permanent injuries: he cut off his own nose and ears, roughly shaved his head, and flogged himself. Then he went to Darius.
[155] Darius was very shocked at the sight of a man of Zopyrus’ standing with such terrible injuries. He jumped up from his throne with a cry and asked who it was who had disfigured him and why. Zopyrus said, ‘No one did it to me, my lord; after all, you are the only person who could. I did it to myself, because I think it’s dreadful to have Assyrians mocking Persians.’
‘No, that won’t do at all,’ Darius replied. ‘To claim that you have given yourself these permanent injuries as a way of doing something about the people we are besieging is to gloss over the utter vileness of your deed. It’s just stupid to think that your injuries might hasten our opponents’ surrender. You must be out of your mind to have disfigured yourself like this.’
‘If I’d told you what I was intending to do,’ Zopyrus said, ‘you’d have stopped me. Instead, I took it upon myself to act. And the result is that we will now capture Babylon, as long as you don’t let me down. Here is the plan. I will go as I am to the city wall as a deserter, claiming that it was you who mutilated me like this. I am confident that, once I have convinced them of the truth of my claims, they will give me a military command. What you have to do is this. Ten days after I have entered the city, post a thousand expendable men opposite the Gate of Semiramis. Then, seven days later, post another two thousand men opposite the Gate of the People of Ninus. After an interval of another twenty days, take another four thousand men and station them opposite the Gate of the Chaldeans. Neither the first two groups nor this last contingent are to have any means of defence except their daggers; that’s all you must let them have. Then, the very next day, order the rest of your men to attack the walls from all sides, but post the Persian troops opposite the Belian and Cissian Gates. I think my substantial achievements will have won me the Babylonians’ complete confidence—and in particular that they will have given me the keys of the city gates to look after. After that, it will be up to me and the Persians to do what needs doing.’
[156] After issuing these instructions, he made his way to the gates of Babylon, looking over his shoulder all the time as if he really were a genuine deserter. The look-outs posted on the towers spotted him, ran down, opened one of the gates a crack, and asked him who he was and what he had come for. He answered that he was Zopyrus and that he was deserting to their side. At this, the gatekeepers took him to the Babylonian council, where he stood forth and complained to them about his sufferings. He blamed Darius for his self-inflicted injuries, and claimed that he had received them as a punishment for advising Darius to draw off his forces, when there seemed no way to take the city. ‘Men of Babylon,’ he said, ‘my presence here will be a huge boon to you—and a huge bane to Darius and his army. He will certainly not get away with mutilating me like this. I know his plans inside out.’ That, or something like it, is what he said.
[157] The sight of one of the most distinguished Persians without his nose and ears and covered with blood and welts from being flogged inclined the Babylonians to believe that he was telling the truth and had come as their ally, and they were happy to entrust him with everything he asked of them—and he asked them for an army. Once they had given it to him, he put into action the plan he had arranged with Darius. On the tenth day he led his Babylonian forces out of the city, surrounded the thousand troops he had told Darius to deploy first, and massacred them. When the Babylonians realized that he was as good as his word, they were absolutely delighted and were willing to do anything he told them. After an interval of the agreed number of days, he again led out a select body of troops and massacred the 2,000-strong contingent of Darius’ men. Following this second achievement, praise of Zopyrus could constantly be heard throughout Babylon on everyone’s lips. Once again, after an interval of the agreed number of days, he led his men out to the pre-arranged spot, and surrounded and massacred the four thousand. This feat, on top of his earlier exploits, made Zopyrus the leading light of Babylon, and he was appointed commander-in-chief of the army and also put in charge of the defence of the city walls.
[158] At the agreed time, Darius had his men attack the city wall from all sides—and then the full extent of Zopyrus’ guile was revealed. While the Babylonians were busy defending the city from the walls against the onslaughts of Darius’ army, Zopyrus flung open the Cissian and Belian Gates and let the Persians into the city. Some of the Babylonians saw what he had done and managed to take refuge in the sanctuary of Zeus as Bel, but those who did not remained at their posts until they too realized that they had been betrayed.
[159] So that is how Babylon fell for the second time. Now that the Babylonians were in his power, Darius demolished the city wall and tore down all its gates (both of which were actions Cyrus had failed to do when he had taken Babylon earlier), and he also had about three thousand of the most prominent men impaled on stakes; however, he returned the city to the remaining Babylonians and let them live there. As was explained earlier, the Babylonians had strangled their wives to ensure that they had enough to eat; so in order to make sure that they would have enough women to have offspring, Darius ordered all the nearby peoples to send women to Babylon, and gave each a quota, which resulted in a grand total of fifty thousand women congregating there. Today’s Babylonians are descended from these women.
[160] To Darius’ mind, no Persian ever performed a greater act of service than Zopyrus—no one ever did later, and no one ever had before, except Cyrus—no Persian would ever compare himself with Cyrus. It is said that Darius often expressed the opinion that he would prefer to see Zopyrus without his injuries than gain twenty more Babylons. He valued Zopyrus a great deal. Every year he presented him with the most precious items in Persia, and among a number of other gifts, he gave him Babylon to be his own domain, free of taxes, for as long as he should live. The Megabyzus who commanded the forces against Athens and her allies in Egypt was the son of this Zopyrus; and the Zopyrus who deserted from the Persians to Athens was the son of this Megabyzus.