the palace at Ecbatana.  His daughter Amytis and his son-in-law Spitamas concealed him so successfully on the top of the palace, that he escaped discovery up to the moment when Cyrus was on the point of torturing his grandchildren to force them to reveal his hiding-place:  thereupon he gave himself up to his enemies, but was at length, after being subjected to harsh treatment for a time, set at liberty and entrusted with the government of a mountain tribe dwelling to the south-east of the Caspian Sea, that of the Barcanians.  Later on he perished through the treachery of OEbaras, and his corpse was left unburied in the desert, but by divine interposition relays of lions were sent to guard it from the attacks of beasts of prey:  Cyrus, acquainted with this miraculous circumstance, went in search of the body and gave it a magnificent burial.* Another legend asserted, on the contrary, that Cyrus was closely connected with the royal line of Cyaxares; this tradition was originally circulated among the great Median families who attached themselves to the Achaemenian dynasty.**

* The passage in Herodotus leads Marquart to believe that the murder of Astyages formed part of the primitive legend, but was possibly attributed to Cambysos, son of Cyrus, rather than to OEbaras, the companion of the conqueror’s early years.

** This is the legend as told to Herodotus in Asia Minor, probably by the members of the family of Harpagus, which the Greek historian tried to render credible by interpreting the miraculous incidents in a rationalising manner.

[Illustration:  042.jpg REMAINS OF THE PALACE OF ECBATANA]

     Drawn by Boudier, from Coste and Flandin.

According to this legend Astyages had no male heirs, and the sceptre would have naturally descended from him to his daughter Mandane and her sons.  Astyages was much alarmed by a certain dream concerning his daughter:  he dreamt that water gushed forth so copiously from her womb as to flood not only Ecbatana, but the whole of Asia, and the interpreters, as much terrified as himself, counselled him not to give Mandane in marriage to a Persian noble of the race of the Achaemenids, named Cambyses; but a second dream soon troubled the security into which this union had lulled him:  he saw issuing from his daughter’s womb a vine whose branches overshadowed Asia, and the interpreters, being once more consulted, predicted that a grandson was about to be born to him whose ambition would cost him his crown.  He therefore bade a certain nobleman of his court, named Harpagus—­he whose descendants preserved this version of the story of Cyrus—­to seize the infant and put it to death as soon as its mother should give it birth; but the man, touched with pity, caused the child to be exposed in the woods by one of the royal shepherds.  A bitch gave suck to the tiny creature, who, however, would soon have succumbed to the inclemency of the weather, had not