[The same immense trains of followers of course accompanied the kings on their hunting expeditions, as on their journeys.  As the Persian nobility were very fond of hunting, their boys were taught this sport at an early age.  According to Strabo, kings themselves boasted of having been mighty hunters in the inscriptions on their tombs.  A relief has been found m the ruins of Persepolis, on which the king is strangling a lion with his right arm, but this is supposed to have a historical, not a symbolical meaning.  Similar representations occur on Assyrian monuments.  Izdubar strangling a lion and fighting with a lion (relief at Khorsabad) is admirably copied in Delitzsch’s edition of G. Smith’s Chaldean Genesis.  Layard discovered some representations of hunting-scenes during his excavations; as, for instance, stags and wild boars among the reeds; and the Greeks often mention the immense troops of followers on horse and foot who attended the kings of Persia when they went hunting.  According to Xenophon, Cyrop.  I. 2.  II. 4. every hunter was obliged to be armed with a bow and arrows, two lances, sword and shield.  In Firdusi’s Book of Kings we read that the lasso was also a favorite weapon.  Hawking was well known to the Persians more than 900 years ago.  Book of Kabus XVIII. p. 495.  The boomerang was used in catching birds as well by the Persians as by the ancient Egyptians and the present savage tribes of New Holland.]

CHAPTER II.

The hunt was over.  Waggons full of game, amongst which were several enormous wild boars killed by the king’s own hand, were driven home behind the sports men.  At the palace-gates the latter dispersed to their several abodes, in order to exchange the simple Persian leather hunting-costume for the splendid Median court-dress.

In the course of the day’s sport Cambyses had (with difficulty restraining his agitation) given his brother the seemingly kind order to start the next day for Egypt in order to fetch Sappho and accompany her to Persia.  At the same time he assigned him the revenues of Bactra, Rhagae and Sinope for the maintenance of his new household, and to his young wife, all the duties levied from her native town Phocaea, as pin-money.

Bartja thanked his generous brother with undisguised warmth, but Cambyses remained cold as ice, uttered a few farewell words, and then, riding off in pursuit of a wild ass, turned his back upon him.

On the way home from the chase the prince invited his bosom-friends Croesus, Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges to drink a parting-cup with him.

Croesus promised to join them later, as he had promised to visit the blue lily at the rising of the Tistarstar.

He had been to the hanging-gardens that morning early to visit Nitetis, but had been refused entrance by the guards, and the blue lily seemed now to offer him another chance of seeing and speaking to his beloved pupil.  He wished for this very much, as he could not thoroughly understand her behavior the day before, and was uneasy at the strict watch set over her.