United States or Bangladesh ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At Issus, on the rectangular bay facing Cyprus, he had inflicted a crushing defeat on the great King of Persia, Darius Codomannus, who with the united forces of his kingdom had come to meet him. At Damascus he captured all the Persian war funds, and afterwards took the famous commercial towns of the Phoenicians, Tyre and Sidon. Palestine fell, and Jerusalem with the holy places.
The rhetoricians of after ages have loved to describe Darius Codomannus as a second Xerxes in ostentation and imbecility; but a fair examination of his generalship in this his last campaign, shows that he was worthy of bearing the same name as his great predecessor, the royal son of Hystaspes.
He was convinced that Asia could be won by the land force which he had been permitted to disembark on its shores, and probably anticipated the transfer of naval supremacy which almost immediately followed on the victory of Issus. The complete defeat of the great army of Codomannus, and its retirement on the Euphrates, left the entire seaboard of Syria and Phoenicia open to him.
Bands of Persians advanced up the Nile valley to the very confines of Ethiopia, and established the authority of Chosroes over the whole country a country in which no Persian had set foot since it was wrested by Alexander of Macedon from Darius Codomannus.
As soon as the Macedonian prince had shown by his campaigns in Thrace, Illyria, and Boeotia that he was a person to be dreaded, Darius Codomannus renewed the preparations which he had discontinued, and pushed them forward with all the speed that was possible.
So the Franks explained the name of the town Daras, in Mesopotamia, by the story that the Emperor Justinian once addressed the chief magistrate with the exclamation, daras, "thou shalt give": the Greek chronicler, Malalas, who spells the name Doras, informs us with equal complacency that it was the place where Alexander overcame Codomannus with dorn, "the spear."
What Cyrus had conquered, what the Persian kings had held from that time until the defeat of Codomannus by Alexander, was his by indefeasible right, and he was about to take possession of it. Nor were these brave words a mere brutum fulmen.
Darius Codomannus had thus ample warning of what he had to expect, and abundant opportunity to make the fullest preparations for defence. During the years B.C. 338 and 337, while Philip was still alive, he did do something towards organising defensive measures, collected troops and ships, and tried to foment discontent and encourage anti-Macedonian movements in Greece.
In lieu of Europe being fused with Asia, Asia itself was split up. For nearly a thousand years, from the formation of the great Assyrian empire to the death of Darius Codomannus, Western Asia, from the Mediterranean to Affghanistan, or even to India, had been united tinder one head, had acknowledged one sovereign.
And, please, backwards: playing as it were the crab in time; and not content till the whole pralaya is skipped, and you stand on the far shore, in the sunset of an elder day: looking now forward, into futurity, from 390, perhaps 394 B.C.; over first a half-cycle of Persian decline, long melancholy sands and shingle, to there on the edge of the great wan water, that July in 330 when mean Satrap Bessus killed his king, Codomannus, last of the Achaemenidae, then in flight from Alexander; and the House of Cyrus and Darius came to an end.
Word Of The Day