interfered with the gratification of his desires.  Though we should do wrong to accept as true all the crimes laid to his charge by the Egyptians, who detested his memory, we cannot doubt the fact of his incestuous marriage with his sister, Atossa, which was wholly repugnant to the religious feelings of his nation.  Nor can we well imagine that there was no foundation at all for the stories of the escape of Croesus, the murder of the son of Prexaspes, and the execution in Egypt on a trivial charge of twelve noble Persians.  His own people called Cambyses a “despot” or “master,” in contrast with Cyrus, whom they regarded as a “father,” because, as Herodotus says, he was “harsh and reckless,” whereas his father was mild and beneficent.  Further, there was the religious aspect of the revolution, which had taken place, in the background.  Cambyses may have known that in the ranks of his army there was much sympathy with Magism, and may have doubted whether, if the whole conspiracy were laid bare, he could count on anything like a general adhesion of his troops to the Zoroastrian cause.  These various grounds, taken together, go far towards accounting for a suicide which at first sight strikes us as extraordinary, and is indeed almost unparalleled.

Of the general character of Cambyses little more need be said.  He was brave, active, and energetic, like his father:  but he lacked his father’s strategic genius, his prudence, and his fertility in resources.  Born in the purple, he was proud and haughty, careless of the feelings of others, and impatient of admonition or remonstrance.  His pride made him obstinate in error; and his contempt of others led on naturally to harshness, and perhaps even to cruelty.  He is accused of “habitual drunkenness,” and was probably not free from the intemperance which was a common Persian failing; but there is not sufficient ground for believing that his indulgence was excessive, much less that it proceeded to the extent of affecting his reason.  The “madness of Cambyses,” reported to and believed in by Herodotus, was a fiction of the Egyptian priests, who wished it to be thought that their gods had in this way punished his impiety.  The Persians had no such tradition, but merely regarded him as unduly severe and selfish.  A dispassionate consideration of all the evidence on the subject leads to the conclusion that Cambyses lived and died in the possession of his reason, having neither destroyed it through inebriety nor lost it by the judgment of Heaven.

The death of Cambyses (B.C. 522) left the conspirators, who had possession of the capital, at liberty to develop their projects, and to take such steps as they thought best for the consolidation and perpetuation of their power.  The position which they occupied was one of peculiar delicacy.  On the one hand, the impostor had to guard against acting in any way which would throw suspicion on his being really Smerdis, the son of Cyrus.  On the other, he had to satisfy the