Kambysês summoned the forces of his empire for this new enterprise, and among them both the Phenicians and the Asiatic Greeks, Æolic as well as Ionic,[390] insular as well as continental,—nearly all the maritime force and skill of the Ægean sea. He was apprized by a Greek deserter from the mercenaries in Egypt, named Phanês, of the difficulties of the march, and the best method of surmounting them; especially the three days of sandy desert, altogether without water, which lay between Egypt and Judæa. By the aid of the neighboring Arabians,—with whom he concluded a treaty, and who were requited for this service with the title of equal allies, free from all tribute,—he was enabled to surmount this serious difficulty, and to reach Pelusium at the eastern mouth of the Nile, where the Ionian and Karian troops in the Egyptian service, as well as the Egyptian military, were assembled to oppose him.[391]
Fortunately for himself, the Egyptian king Amasis had died during the interval of the Persian preparations, a few months before the expedition took place,—after forty-four years of unabated prosperity. His death, at this critical moment, was probably the main cause of the easy conquest which followed; his son Psammenitus succeeding to his crown, but neither to his abilities nor his influence. The result of the invasion was foreshadowed, as usual, by a menacing prodigy,—rain falling at Thebes in Upper Egypt; and was brought about by a single victory, though bravely disputed, at Pelusium,—followed by the capture of Memphis, with the person of king Psammenitus, after a siege of some duration. Kambysês had sent forward a Mitylenæan ship to Memphis, with heralds to summon the city; but the Egyptians, in a paroxysm of fury, rushed out of the walls, destroyed the vessel, and tore the crew into pieces,—a savage proceeding, which drew upon them severe retribution after the capture. Psammenitus, after being at first treated with harshness and insult, was at length released, and even allowed to retain his regal dignity as a dependent of Persia. But being soon detected, or at least believed to be concerned, in raising revolt against the conquerors, he was put to death, and Egypt was placed under a satrap.[392]
There yet lay beyond Egypt territories for Kambysês to conquer,—though Kyrênê and Barka, the Greek colonies near the coast of Libya, placed themselves at once out of the reach of danger by sending to him tribute and submission at Memphis. He projected three new enterprises: one against Carthage, by sea; the other two, by land, against the Ethiopians, far to the southward up the course of the Nile, and against the oracle and oasis of Zeus Ammon, amidst the deserts of Libya. Towards Ethiopia he himself conducted his troops, but was compelled to bring them back without reaching it, since they were on the point of perishing with famine; while the division which he sent against the temple of Ammon is said to have been overwhelmed by a sand-storm in the desert. The expedition against Carthage was given up, for a reason which well deserves to be commemorated. The Phenicians, who formed the most efficient part of his navy, refused to serve against their kinsmen and colonists, pleading the sanctity of mutual oaths as well as the ties both of relationship and traffic.[393] Even the frantic Kambysês was compelled to accept, and perhaps to respect, this honorable refusal, which was not imitated by the Ionic Greeks when Darius and Xerxês demanded the aid of their ships against Athens,—we must add, however, that they were then in a situation much more exposed and helpless than that in which the Phenicians stood before Kambysês.
Among the sacred animals so numerous and so different throughout the various nomes of Egypt, the most venerated of all was the bull Apis. Yet such peculiar conditions were required by the Egyptian religion as to the birth, the age, and the marks of this animal, that, when he died, it was difficult to find a new calf properly qualified to succeed him. Much time was sometimes spent in the search, and when an unexceptionable successor was at last found, the demonstrations of joy in Memphis were extravagant and universal. At the moment when Kambysês returned to Memphis from his Ethiopian expedition, full of humiliation for the result, it so happened that a new Apis was just discovered; and as the population of the city gave vent to their usual festival pomp and delight, he construed it into an intentional insult towards his own recent misfortunes. In vain did the priests and magistrates explain to him the real cause of these popular manifestations; he persisted in his belief, punished some of them with death and others with stripes, and commanded every man seen in holiday attire to be slain. Furthermore,—to carry his outrage against Egyptian feeling to the uttermost pitch,—he sent for the newly-discovered Apis, and plunged his dagger into the side of the animal, who shortly afterwards died of the wound.[394]
After this brutal deed,—calculated to efface in the minds of the Egyptian priests the enormities of Cheops and Chephrên, and doubtless unparalleled in all the twenty-four thousand years of their anterior history,—Kambysês lost every spark of reason which yet remained to him, and the Egyptians found in this visitation a new proof of the avenging interference of their gods. Not only did he commit every variety of studied outrage against the conquered people among whom he was tarrying, as well as their temples and their sepulchres,—but he also dealt his blows against his Persian friends and even his nearest blood-relations. Among these revolting atrocities, one of the greatest deserves peculiar notice, because the fate of the empire was afterwards materially affected by it. His younger brother Smerdis had accompanied him into Egypt, but had been sent back to Susa, because the king became jealous of the admiration which his personal strength and qualities called forth.[395] That jealousy was aggravated into alarm and hatred by a dream, portending dominion and conquest to Smerdis; so that the frantic Kambysês sent to Susa secretly a confidential Persian, Prexaspês, with express orders to get rid of his brother. Prexaspês fulfilled his commission effectively, burying the slain prince with his own hands,[396] and keeping the deed concealed from all except a few of the chiefs at the regal residence.
Among these few chiefs, however, there was one, the Median Patizeithês, belonging to the order of the Magi, who saw in it a convenient stepping-stone for his own personal ambition, and made use of it as a means of covertly supplanting the dynasty of the great Cyrus. Enjoying the full confidence of Kambysês, he had been left by that prince, on departing for Egypt, in the entire management of the palace and treasures, with extensive authority.[397] Moreover, he happened to have a brother extremely resembling in person the deceased Smerdis; and as the open and dangerous madness of Kambysês contributed to alienate from him the minds of the Persians, he resolved to proclaim this brother king in his room, as if it were the younger son of Cyrus succeeding to the disqualified elder. On one important point, the false Smerdis differed from the true. He had lost his ears, which Cyrus himself had caused to be cut off for an offence; but the personal resemblance, after all, was of little importance, since he was seldom or never allowed to show himself to the people.[398] Kambysês, having heard of this revolt in Syria on his return from Egypt, was mounting his horse in haste for the purpose of going to suppress it, when an accident from his sword put an end to his life. Herodotus tells us that, before his death, he summoned the Persians around him, confessed that he had been guilty of putting his brother to death, and apprized them that the reigning Smerdis was only a Median pretender,—conjuring them at the same time not to submit to the disgrace of being ruled by any other than a Persian and an Achæmenid. But if it be true that he ever made known the facts, no one believed him. For Prexaspês, on his part, was compelled by regard to his own safety, to deny that he had imbrued his hands in the blood of a son of Cyrus;[399] and thus the opportune death of Kambysês placed the false Smerdis without opposition at the head of the Persians, who all, or for the most part, believed themselves to be ruled by a genuine son of Cyrus. Kambysês had reigned for seven years and five months.
For seven months did Smerdis reign without opposition, seconded by his brother Patizeithês; and if he manifested his distrust of the haughty Persians around him, by neither inviting them into his palace nor showing himself out of it, he at the same time studiously conciliated the favor of the subject provinces, by remission of tribute and of military service for three years.[400] Such a departure from the Persian principle of government was in itself sufficient to disgust the warlike and rapacious Achæmenids at Susa. But it seems that their suspicions as to his genuine character had never been entirely set at rest, and in the eighth month those suspicions were converted into certainty. According to what seems to have been the Persian usage, he had taken to himself the entire harem of his predecessor, among whose wives was numbered Phædymê, daughter of a distinguished Persian, named Otanês. At the instance of her father, Phædymê undertook the dangerous task of feeling the head of Smerdis while he slept, and thus detected the absence of ears.[401] Otanês, possessed of the decisive information, lost no time in concerting, with five other noble Achæmenids, means for ridding themselves of a king who was at once a Mede, a Magian, and a man without ears;[402] Darius, son of Hystaspês, the satrap of Persis proper, arriving just in time to join the conspiracy as the seventh. How these seven noblemen slew Smerdis in his palace at Susa,—how they subsequently debated among themselves whether they should establish in Persia a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a democracy,—how, after the first of the three had been resolved upon, it was determined that the future king, whichever he might be, should be bound to take his wives only from the families of the seven conspirators,—how Darius became king, from the circumstance of his horse being the first to neigh among those of the conspirators at a given spot, by the stratagem of the groom Œbarês,—how Otanês, standing aside beforehand from this lottery for the throne, reserved for himself as well as for his descendants perfect freedom and exemption from the rule of the future king, whichsoever might draw the prize,—all these incidents may be found recounted by Herodotus with his usual vivacity, but with no small addition of Hellenic ideas as well as of dramatic ornament.
It was thus that the upright tiara, the privileged head-dress of the Persian kings,[403] passed away from the lineage of Cyrus, yet without departing from the great phratry of the Achæmenidæ,—to which Darius and his father Hystaspês, as well as Cyrus, belonged. That important fact is unquestionable, and probably the acts ascribed to the seven conspirators are in the main true, apart from their discussions and intentions. But on this as well as on other occasions, we must guard ourselves against an illusion which the historical manner of Herodotus is apt to create. He presents to us with so much descriptive force the personal narrative,—individual action and speech, with all its accompanying hopes, fears, doubts, and passions,—that our attention is distracted from the political bearing of what is going on; which we are compelled often to gather up from hints in the speeches of performers, or from consequences afterwards indirectly noticed. When we put together all the incidental notices which he lets drop, it will be found that the change of sceptre from Smerdis to Darius was a far larger political event than his direct narrative would seem to announce. Smerdis represents preponderance to the Medes over the Persians, and comparative degradation to the latter; who, by the installation of Darius, are again placed in the ascendent. The Medes and the Magians are in this case identical; for the Magians, though indispensable in the capacity of priests to the Persians, were essentially one of the seven Median tribes.[404] It thus appears that though Smerdis ruled as a son of the great Cyrus, yet he ruled by means of Medes and Magians, depriving the Persians of that supreme privilege and predominance to which they had become accustomed.[405] We see this by what followed immediately after the assassination of Smerdis and his brother in the palace. The seven conspirators, exhibiting the bloody heads of both these victims as an evidence of their deed, instigated the Persians in Susa to a general massacre of the Magians, many of whom were actually slain, and the rest only escaped by flight, concealment, or the hour of night. And the anniversary of this day was celebrated afterwards among the Persians by a solemnity and festival, called the Magophonia; no Magian being ever allowed on that day to appear in public.[406] The descendants of the Seven maintained a privileged name and rank,[407] even down to the extinction of the monarchy by Alexander the Great.
Furthermore, it appears that the authority of Darius was not readily acknowledged throughout the empire, and that an interval of confusion ensued before it became so.[408] The Medes actually revolted, and tried to maintain themselves by force against Darius, who however found means to subdue them: though, when he convoked his troops from the various provinces, he did not receive from the satraps universal obedience. The powerful Orœtês, especially, who had been appointed by Cyrus satrap of Lydia and Ionia, not only sent no troops to the aid of Darius against the Medes,[409] but even took advantage of the disturbed state of the government to put to death his private enemy Mitrobatês satrap of Phrygia, and appropriate that satrapy in addition to his own. Aryandês also, the satrap nominated by Kambysês in Egypt, comported himself as the equal of Darius rather than as his subject.[410] The subject provinces generally, to whom Smerdis had granted remission of tribute and military service for the space of three years, were grateful and attached to his memory, and noway pleased with the new dynasty; moreover, the revolt of the Babylonians, conceived a year or two before it was executed, took its rise from the feelings of this time.[411] But the renewal of the old conflict between the two principal sections of the empire, Medes and Persians, is doubtless the most important feature in this political revolution. The false Smerdis with his brother, both of them Medes and Magians, had revived the Median nationality to a state of supremacy over the Persian, recalling the memory of what it had been under Astyagês; while Darius,—a pure Persian, and not (like the mule Cyrus) half Mede and half Persian,—replaced the Persian nationality in its ascendent condition, though not without the necessity of suppressing by force a rebellion of the Medes.[412]
It has already been observed that the subjugation of the recusant Medes was not the only embarrassment of the first years of Darius. Orœtês, satrap of Phrygia, Lydia, and Ionia, ruling seemingly the entire western coast of Asia Minor,—possessing a large military force and revenue, and surrounded by a body-guard of one thousand native Persians,—maintained a haughty independence. He secretly made away with couriers sent to summon him to Susa, and even wreaked his vengeance upon some of the principal Persians who had privately offended him. Darius, not thinking it prudent to attack him by open force, proposed to the chief Persians at Susa, the dangerous problem of destroying him by stratagem. Thirty among them volunteered to undertake it, and Bagæus, son of Artontês, to whom on drawing lots the task devolved, accomplished it by a manœuvre which might serve as a lesson to the Ottoman government, in its embarrassments with contumacious Pashas. Having proceeded to Sardis, furnished with many different royal ordinances, formally set forth and bearing the seal of Darius,—he was presented to Orœtês in audience, with the public secretary of the satrapy close at hand, and the Persian guards standing around. He presented his ordinances to be read aloud by the secretary, choosing first those which related to matters of no great importance; but when he saw that the guards listened with profound reverence, and that the king’s name and seal imposed upon them irresistibly, he ventured upon the real purport of his perilous mission. An ordinance was handed to the secretary, and read by him aloud, as follows: “Persians, king Darius forbids you to serve any longer as guards to Orœtês.” The obedient guards at once delivered up their spears, when Bagæus caused the final warrant to be read to them: “King Darius commands the Persians in Sardis to kill Orœtês.” The guards drew their swords and killed him on the spot: his large treasure was conveyed to Susa: Darius became undisputed master, and probably Bagæus satrap.[413]