The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 02

by Unknown

But he was not, like the latter, opposed to a huge and crumbling monarchy, already in the death agony, an easy prey to any leader of mercenaries, and proved to be so by Agesilaus in Asia Minor, and by Amyntas in Egypt; he was not, like Alexander, victorious over a small, dominant nation, which, in recompense for its narrow-minded policy, stood alone in the last decisive struggle, while he himself had an army of better morale and greater skill, with better weapons and superior numbers—a really overwhelming force. On the contrary, he led a handful of Persians against four nations, the largest and most powerful of their time; against the two powers which had overcome the greatest of all military states, the powers which had destroyed Asshur. The two rising kingdoms of Media and Lydia were in the full vigour of their youth, and had hurried from victory to victory, from conquest to conquest; the power and prosperity of the two ancient civilised peoples of the Nile and Euphrates dated from the very beginning of history and had risen anew and more formidable from every defeat; but he flung them all in the dust forever.

He was great, too, if it be great to fight and even to fall for the sake of justice. He is no proconsul, to turn, like a matricide, against the republic the sword with which she had entrusted him; no Albanian chief, Frankish king, or Mongolian khan to fall on foreign countries for the purpose of satisfying the greed for prey and lust of war proper to his race; but a king who, attacked by Media, attacked by the coalition of Lydia with Babylon and Egypt, only draws the sword in defence of the double crown of his ancestors—the most legitimate of all conquerors.

More than this, he was the most humane. His shield is stained by no horrible deeds of blood, of frightful revenge and cruelty, such as disgrace the son of Olympias. He spared, and made gifts to conquered enemies. Even after the second subjugation of the treacherous Lydians, he would not permit them to be destroyed by thousands, as Alexander did in the case of the heroes of Tyre, of the Pasargadæ who were faithful even unto death, of the nobility of Persia, or of the Sogdianians in revenge for their victory, as even the great Roman slaughtered his enemies at Thapsus and the betrayed Usipetii, and as the Franks slew the Saxons at the massacre on the Aller. He did not, like the Macedonian at Persepolis, burn and destroy hostile capitals; he did not mutilate captive kings and leaders, nor drag them round the walls as the latter did Bessus and the lion of Gaza; nor send them to the scaffold as the Roman sent the chivalrous king of the Arvernians; he did not basely murder his own countrymen as the “crazy god,” Alexander, murdered the Branchidæ, Clitus, and the grey-haired Parmenio. Oriental as he was, and belonging to a savage people and a far earlier period, he is still always far more humane.

Thus he was the greatest, far beyond the spirit of his nation and his age, anticipating the remotest future both as man and statesman. Because no wide stream of blood separated him from the vanquished, he found the only possible basis for his giant structure in the raising of conquerors and conquered to equal privileges. With the certainty of victory, the daring trust which belongs to the greatest, he could see and spare the subject in the enemy, raise the conquered at once to the rank of citizen, entrust his army to Mazares the Mede, and to Harpagus the Median grandee, prince, and general; in the newly conquered Lydia he could venture to invest the Lydian dynasts, with the civil power, and to set up as rulers in Ionia the native aristocracy, in Judea the descendant of the ancient kings and high priests.

It was in accordance with his teachings that his son marched in the festive procession of the people in newly conquered Babylon, and after the conquest of Egypt entrusted the civil administration, with the capital Saïs, to an Egyptian, Psamthek’s admiral, Uzahorsem, the son of the high priest of Saïs, who held it as “the king’s cousin,” i.e., viceroy, and on whose withdrawal the Egyptian prince Aahmes was associated with the Persian Aryandes.

Thus Cyrus divided the civil and military administration, a new departure amongst orientals, and long uncomprehended and unimitated. The military power he reserved to his faithful Medes and Persians; the civil he bestowed on native princes, and so arranged an automatic system which created the best bulwark against the loss of the border provinces, a bulwark which all the mistakes and crimes and all the cowardice of his successors destroyed only after the expiration of two hundred years—a result different indeed from the ephemeral creation which Alexander cemented with the blood of whole nations.

But gentleness and mercy constituted also the best policy. For defeating opponents without a battle they were the sharpest of weapons, carried by a commanding personality who not only compelled the admiration of his own people, but also brought his enemies to their knees, and showed his victory in the light of an inevitable decree of fate, thus infusing dejection and treachery into the ranks of the enemy. Who is there that approaches him? He is not only beloved by his own people as a father incomparable in every way, not only does all the splendour of story play round him as round Alexander and Charlemagne, but legends also have clustered about him, and the poetry of Xenophon and Antisthenes glorifies and idealises him. The Median prince and the Egyptian admiral, the nobility and priesthood of Babylon, as well as the Greek captains of the kings of the Lydians and Egyptians, with Eurybates of Ephesus and Phanes of Halicarnassus, throw themselves at his feet voluntarily, and to the betrayal of their own rulers; without a struggle the greatest empires, the two conquerors of Nineveh, surrender to him both themselves and their own kings in chains, as had been done to none other; even Tyre, that proud and mighty city, unconquered and unconquerable, with whose lion courage his predecessor and his successor, Nebuchadrezzar and Alexander alike, wrestled so fiercely and so long, did homage to him of her own free will, as did the sea-king of Samos, which was as far beyond reach as Tyre herself. Above all, the little people of the Jews hailed him at the waters of Babylon as they have done no mortal before or since, as the victor and rescuer, the liberator and saviour, the favoured of God and lord of the earth.

He rewarded them for it and so purchased for himself the most exalted, the most undying greatness: amongst all the rulers of the East whom we see conquering, destroying, murdering, and deporting, he is the only one who raised a downtrodden people from the dust, snatched it from its brethren’s fate of annihilation, restored it to its existence as a nation under princes of its own race, to its own peculiar development and its mission in the history of the world. He saved it, as he did his own people, which owed to him its consecration to eternal youth in history; so that, in spite of all the storms which have raged over it, it has escaped the fate of the thousand tribes which traversed the wide country of Iran before and after it, and are now vanished and forgotten.

Thus the consequences of his achievements are lasting, though in the course of thousands of years these achievements themselves have vanished, like all earthly things. He was not the product and child of his age, like the son of Philip, the nephew of Marius, the son of Pepin, or the offspring of the Revolution: but he was its creator and father, solitary and unique in the world’s history; he took firmer grip of the wheel of time than any other mortal; in the term of his life he brought an epoch to its close, snatched the lordship of the earth from the Semites and Egyptians, and won it for the Aryans for all time.[f]