[19] See Bevan's House of Seleucus, Lond., 1902.
[20] The campaigns of Trajan are very imperfectly recorded in the only extant account, that of Dion Cassius as preserved in the careless epitome of Xiphilinus; Zonaras, xi, 21. It is certain that he took the twin capitals of Parthia, Seleucia and Ctesiphon, which faced each other from opposite sides of the Euphrates, and advanced to the Persian Gulf. He marched into Arabia, but the evidence that he penetrated to the Indian Ocean, as Tillemont thinks, is insufficient.
[21] The capture of Seleucia by Avidius Cassius (165), and his brutal massacre of 300,000 of its inhabitants, mostly Greeks, is often alluded to as an irreparable blow to Western civilization in the East; Dion Cas., lxxi, 2, etc. Severus took Ctesiphon in 199; Herodian; Hist. August. In 283 Carus also took Ctesiphon; Hist. August.; Aurelius Vict. Under Diocletian, Galerius extended the Empire beyond the Tigris; Aurel. Vict.; Eutropius, ix.
[22] See Plutarch's account of the affair and his general remarks on it; Vit. Alex.
[23] In the vicinity of Shiraz; described by modern travellers as a garden of fertility.
[24] Most information as to the rise, etc., of Ardeshír (Artakhshathr on coins, that is, Artaxerxes as adapted to their language by the Greeks), will be found in Tabari with Nöldeke's commentary; op. cit.; cf. Zotenberg, op. cit., ii, 40. The great value of Nöldeke's book consists not so much in the flimsy text as in his notes and excursuses which bring together all collateral information to be found in other writers of the period. Zotenberg's version is, of course, from the Persian, the translation of a translation.
[25] The Great Salt Desert in the interior of Persia is somewhat triangular, each of the sides measuring about 400 miles.
[26] Modern Orientalists are of opinion that the pictures of Persian life given by James Morier (Hajji Baba of Ispahan, 1824, etc.) may be applied without much loss of truth even to the age of the Achaemenians. When we reflect that till 1888 Persia had no railway, and now only eight miles, the verisimilitude of the statement will be apparent.
[27] See the first Fargard of the Vendidâd where the "Kine's soul," representing mankind, bewails her hard lot before the supreme being. Generally the primitive conditions of life in Iran are well set forth by Max Duncker, Hist. of Antiquity, Lond. 1881, vol. v.
[28] His actual date is unknown, and his existence at any time not certain, but Duncker surmises this period.