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His Trinity, which is conventional, and his Under-world appear to be borrowed from Assyria, and in some degree from Egypt. One licentious legend appears in Olympus, but this belongs to the Odyssey, and to a Phoenician, not a Hellenic, circle of ideas.
These mendacious patriots found little difficulty in palming their false tale upon the simple Halicarnassian, thereby at once extending the antiquity of their empire and concealing its shame behind a halo of fictitious glory. After their subjugation by Sargon the Medes of Media Magna appear to have remained the faithful subjects of Assyria for sixty or seventy years.
Here he met Antimenidas the brother of the poet Alcarus of Lesbos, who, having been banished by Pittakus, the wise ruler of Mitylene, had gone to Babylon, and there taken service in the army of Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Assyria. Antimenidas gave him letters to the Chaldians.
The Susianians had, as already related, been strong enough in the reign of Sargon to deprive Assyria of a portion of her territory; and Kudur-Nakhunta, the Elymaean king, still held two cities, Beth-Kahiri and Raza, which were regarded by Sennacherib as a part of his paternal inheritance.
This movement, apparently, was unexpected; for when the Susianians heard of it they were so alarmed that they laid hands on the pretender and slew him. A more important rebellion followed. Three of the chief provinces of the empire, Media, Armenia, and Assyria, revolted in concert.
True, grand structures were reared in Ashur, Calah, Nineveh, and Arbela, and no important step was taken by the kings without consulting Ashur, Ishtar, or Ramman through the mediation of the priests. The great cities of Assyria also become intellectual centers.
In one respect, however, Assyria, it is to be feared, had made but little advance beyond the spirit of a comparatively barbarous time. The "lion" still "tore in pieces for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his holes with prey, and his dens with ravin."
The notion was to rehabilitate the reputation of Asurbanipal, the second-last King of Assyria, whom the Greeks called "Sardanapalus," who reigned in Nineveh six hundred years before Christ, over Ethiopia, Babylon and Egypt, and whom Lord Byron, accepting the Greek story, represented as the most effeminate and debauched monarch the world had ever known.
Assyria and Babylonia became subject provinces; and the successors of Seleucus, who came to be known as Selucids, styled themselves not kings of Babylon but of Syria. When Antigonus, who was in Phrygia on the other side of his kingdom, heard that his son Demetrius had been beaten at Gaza, he marched with all his forces to give battle to Ptolemy.
Above these in the scale are the religions of so-called primitive cults, more elaborate and formalized in the ancient beliefs of Egypt and Assyria, but still below those of advanced culture, which make up a third group. The fourth class includes the religions which tend to be coextensive with life, and which enjoin the higher harmony of practical and theoretical conceptions.
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