Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the heliogravure of Dieulafoy.
They opened the coffin, broke the couch and the table, and finding them too heavy to carry away easily, they contented themselves with stealing the drinking-vessels and jewels. Alexander on his return visited the place, and caused the entrance to be closed with a slight wall of masonry; he intended to restore the monument to its former splendour, but he himself perished shortly after, and what remained of the contents probably soon disappeared. After the death of Cyrus, popular imagination, drawing on the inexhaustible materials furnished by his adventurous career, seemed to delight in making him the ideal of all a monarch should be; they attributed to him every virtue—gentleness, bravery, moderation, justice, and wisdom. There is no reason to doubt that he possessed the qualities of a good general—activity, energy, and courage, together with the astuteness and the duplicity so necessary to success in Asiatic conquest—but he does not appear to have possessed in the same degree the gifts of a great administrator. He made no changes in the system of government which from the time of Tiglath-pileser III. onwards had obtained among all Oriental sovereigns; he placed satraps over the towns and countries of recent acquisition, at Sardes and Babylon, in Syria and Palestine, but without clearly defining their functions or subjecting them to a supervision sufficiently strict to ensure the faithful performance of their duties. He believed that he was destined to found a single empire in which all the ancient empires were to be merged, and he all but carried his task to a successful close: Egypt alone remained to be conquered when he passed away.
His wife Kassandanê, a daughter of Pharnaspes, and an Achæmenian like himself, had borne him five children; two sons, Cambyses* and Smerdis,** and three daughters, Atossa, Roxana, and Artystonê.***
* The Persian form of the name rendered Kambyses by the
Greeks was Kâbuzîyâ or Kambuzîya. Herodotus calls him the
son of Kassandanê, and the tradition which he has preserved
is certainly authentic. Ctesias has erroneously stated that
his mother was Amytis, the daughter of Astyages, and Dinon,
also erroneously, the Egyptian women Nitêtis; Diodorus
Siculus and Strabo make him the son of Meroê.
** The original form was Bardiya or Barzîya, “the laudable,”
and the first Greek transcript known, in Æschylus, is
Mardos, or, in the scholiasts on the passage, Merdias, which
has been corrupted into Marphios by Hellanikos and into
Merges by Pompeius Trogus. The form Smerdis in Herodotus,
and in the historians who follow him, is the result of a
mistaken assimilation of the Persian name with the purely
Greek one of Smerdis or Smerdies.
*** Herodotus says that Atossa was the daughter of
Kassandanê, and the position which she held during three
reigns shows that she must have been so; Justi, however,
calls her the daughter of Amytis. A second daughter is
mentioned by Herodotus, the one whom Cambyses killed in
Egypt by a kick; he gives her no name, but she is probably
the same as the Roxana who according to Ctesias bore a
headless child. The youngest, Artystonê, was the favourite
wife of Darius. Josephus speaks of a fourth daughter of
Cyrus called Meroê, but without saying who was the mother of
this princess.
Cambyses was probably born about 558, soon after his father’s accession, and he was his legitimate successor, according to the Persian custom which assigned the crown to the eldest of the sons born in the purple. He had been associated, as we have seen, in the Babylonian regal power immediately after the victory over Nabonidus, and on the eve of his departure for the fatal campaign against the Massagetse his father, again in accordance with the Persian law, had appointed him regent. A later tradition, preserved by Ctesias, relates that on this occasion the territory had been divided between the two sons: Smerdis, here called Tanyoxarkes, having received as his share Bactriana, the Khoramnians, the Parthians, and the Carmanians, under the suzerainty of his brother. Cambyses, it is clear, inherited the whole empire, but intrigues gathered round Smerdis, and revolts broke out in the provinces, incited, so it was said, whether rightly or wrongly, by his partisans.* The new king was possessed of a violent, merciless temper, and the Persians subsequently emphasised the fact by saying that Cyrus had been a father to them, Cambyses a master. The rebellions were repressed with a vigorous hand, and finally Smerdis disappeared by royal order, and the secret of his fate was so well kept, that it was believed, even by his mother and sisters, that he was merely imprisoned in some obscure Median fortress.**
* Herodotus speaks of peoples subdued by Cambyses in Asia,
and this allusion can only refer to a revolt occurring after
the death of Cyrus, before the Egyptian expedition; these
troubles are explicitly recorded in Xenophon.
** The inscription of Behistun says distinctly that Cambyses
had his brother Bardîya put to death before the Egyptian
expedition; on the other hand, Herodotus makes the murder
occur during the Egyptian expedition and Ctesias after this
expedition. Ctesias’ version of the affair adds that
Cambyses, the better to dissimulate his crime, ordered the
murderer Sphendadates to pass himself off as Tanyoxarkes, as
there was a great resemblance between the two: Sphendadates
—the historian goes on to say—was exiled to Bactriana,
and it was not until five years afterwards that the mother
of the two princes heard of the murder and of the
substitution. These additions to the story are subsequent
developments suggested by the traditional account of the
Pseudo-Smerdis. In recent times several authorities have
expressed the opinion that all that is told us of the murder
of Smerdis and about the Pseudo-Smerdis is merely a legend,
invented by Darius or those about him in order to justify
his usurpation in the eyes of the people: the Pseudo-Smerdis
would be Smerdis himself, who revolted against Cambyses, and
was then, after he had reigned a few months, assassinated by
Darius. Winckler acknowledges “that certainty is impossible
in such a case;” and, in reality, all ancient tradition is
against his hypothesis, and it is best to accept Herodotus’
account, with all its contradictions, until contemporaneous
documents enable us to decide what to accept and what to
reject in it.
The ground being cleared of his rival, and affairs on the Scythian frontier reduced to order, Cambyses took up the projects against Egypt at the exact point at which his predecessor had left them. Amasis, who for ten years had been expecting an attack, had taken every precaution in his power against it, and had once more patiently begun to make overtures of alliance with the Hellenic cities; those on the European continent did not feel themselves so seriously menaced as to consider it to their interest to furnish him with any assistance, but the Greeks of the independent islands, with their chief, Poly crates, tyrant of Samos, received his advances with alacrity. Polycrates had at his disposal a considerable fleet, the finest hitherto seen in the waters of the Ægean, and this, combined with the Egyptian navy, was not any too large a force to protect the coasts of the Delta, now that the Persians had at their disposition not only the vessels of the Æolian and Ionian cities, but those of Phoenicia and Cyprus. A treaty was concluded, bringing about an exchange of presents and amenities between the two princes which lasted as long as peace prevailed, but was ruptured at the critical moment by the action of Polycrates, though not actually through his own fault. The aristocratic party, whose chiefs were always secretly plotting his overthrow, had given their adherence to the Persians, and their conduct became so threatening about the time of the death of Cyras, that Polycrates had to break his engagements with Egypt in order to avert a catastrophe.*
* Herodotus laid the blame for the breach of the treaty to
the King of Egypt, and attributed to his fear of the
constant good fortune of Polycrates. The lattor’s accession
to power is fixed at about the year 540 by some, by others
in the year 537, or in the year 533-2; his negotiations with
Amasis must be placed somewhere during the last fifteen
years of the Pharaoh.