[52] Thirteen years.
[53] This was not, as my readers may fancy, an anticipation of Peter the Great’s sojourn at Deptford, for the purpose of learning the art of shipbuilding. Abdalonymus (Abd-Elomin, “servant of the gods”), whom Hephaestion, acting for Alexander, had made King of Sidon, though of royal descent, was a working man (“on account of his poverty he cultivated a garden near the city for a humble remuneration,” says Curtius), and his son may well have gone to work for his livelihood in the dockyards of Tyre.
[54] When Tyre was taken the crews of the Sidonian galleys did actually rescue a number of the inhabitants, who would otherwise have been slain or sold into captivity.
[55] Herodotus says it was of emerald, but Sir J. G. Wilkinson (in Prof. Rawlinson’s “Herodotus”) notes that it was doubtless of green glass, glass having been manufactured in Egypt even thousands of years before the time of Herodotus.
[56] Nearly two hundred miles.
[57] Democedes was a physician of Crotona, whose services were engaged by the cities of Ægina and Athens and by Polycrates, Tyrant of Samos, in succession, at increasing salaries (£344, £406, £487 10s.). He was taken prisoner in company with Polycrates and sent up to Susa. Here he remained for a time unnoticed among the king’s slaves. Darius chanced to sprain his ankle, in leaping from his horse, and the Egyptian physicians who were called in failed to effect a cure. Some courtier had chanced to hear that Polycrates had had a famous physician in attendance on him, and suggested that his advice should be asked. He was brought as he was, “clothed in rags and clanking his chains,” into the king’s presence. It was only under threat of torture that he confessed his knowledge of medicine. But he treated the injury with success, and was amply rewarded, the king giving him two pairs of golden chains, and each of the royal wives dipping a saucer into a chest of gold coins and pouring the contents into his hands so bountifully that the slave who followed him was enriched by the stray pieces. He afterwards healed Atossa, Darius’s principal queen, of a dangerous carbuncle. By a stratagem which I have not space here to describe he got back to his native city, where he married the daughter of the great athlete Milo, and finally settled.
[58] About £1,220.
[59] Between two and three in the morning.
[60] “Its name,” says Curtius, “is given to it from its rapidity, for in the Persian tongue Tigris is the word for an arrow” (iv. 9, 16). The Biblical word Chiddekel or Hiddekel (Genesis ii. 14) is said to be compounded of two forms Chid or Hid, “river,” and dekel an arrow.
[61] Now Erbil, a station on the caravan-route between Erzeroum and Baghdad.