veneration among the Persians.  Of his real exploits we know little or nothing, but in what we read respecting him there seems, though amid constant fighting, very little cruelty.  Xenophon has selected his life as the subject of a moral romance which for a long time was cited as authentic history, and which even now serves as an authority, express or implied, for disputable and even incorrect conclusions.  His extraordinary activity and conquests admit of no doubt.  He left the Persian empire extending from Sogdiana and the rivers Jaxartes and Indus eastward, to the Hellespont and the Syrian coast westward, and his successors made no permanent addition to it except that of Egypt.  Phenicia and Judaea were dependencies of Babylon, at the time when he conquered it, with their princes and grandees in Babylonian captivity.  As they seem to have yielded to him, and became his tributaries without difficulty; so the restoration of their captives was conceded to them.  It was from Cyrus that the habits of the Persian kings took commencement, to dwell at Susa in the winter, and Ekbatana during the summer; the primitive territory of Persis, with its two towns of Persepolis and Pasargadae, being reserved for the burial-place of the kings and the religious sanctuary of the empire.  How or when the conquest of Susiana was made, we are not informed.  It lay eastward of the Tigris, between Babylonia and Persis proper, and its people, the Kissians, as far as we can discern, were of Assyrian and not of Aryan race.  The river Choaspes near Susa was supposed to furnish the only water fit for the palate of the great king, and it is said to have been carried about with him wherever he went.

While the conquests of Cyrus contributed to assimilate the distinct types of civilization in Western Asia—­not by elevating the worse, but by degrading the better—­upon the native Persians themselves they operated as an extraordinary stimulus, provoking alike their pride, ambition, cupidity, and warlike propensities.  Not only did the territory of Persis proper pay no tribute to Susa or Ekbatana—­being the only district so exempted between the Jaxartes and the Mediterranean—­but the vast tributes received from the remaining empire were distributed to a great degree among its inhabitants.  Empire to them meant—­for the great men, lucrative satrapies or pachalics, with powers altogether unlimited, pomp inferior only to that of the great king, and standing armies which they employed at their own discretion sometimes against each other—­for the common soldiers, drawn from their fields or flocks, constant plunder, abundant maintenance, and an unrestrained license, either in the suite of one of the satraps, or in the large permanent troops which moved from Susa to Ekbatana with the Great King.  And if the entire population of Persis proper did not migrate from their abodes to occupy some of those more inviting spots which the immensity of the imperial dominion furnished—­a dominion extending (to use the