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Updated: June 10, 2025
According to the notions which the Greeks derived from Ctesias, and passed on to the Romans, and through them to the moderns generally, the greatest defect in the Assyrian character the besetting sin of their leading men was luxuriousness of living and sensuality.
The circumstances under which the Parthians became subjects of the Persian empire may readily be conjectured, but cannot be laid down positively. According to Diodorus, who probably followed Ctesias, they passed from the dominion of the Assyrians to that of the Medes, and from dependence upon the Medes to a similar position under the Persians. But the balance of evidence is against these views.
The reading of cuneiform inscriptions, and the decipherment of hieroglyphics are events so important in their results, they reveal to us so vast a number of facts hitherto unknown, or distorted in the more or less marvellous narratives of the ancient historians Diodorus, Ctesias, and Herodotus, that it is impossible to pass over scientific discoveries of such value in silence.
The Medes everywhere took arms, and, turning upon their conquerors, assailed them with a fury the more terrible because it had been for years repressed. A war followed, the duration and circumstances of which are unknown; for the stories with which Ctesias enlivened this portion of his history can scarcely be accepted as having any foundation in fact.
The list of Median kings in Ctesias, so far as it differs from the list in Herodotus, seems to be a pure forgery an extension of the period of the monarchy by the conscious use of a system of duplication. Each king, or period, in Herodotus occurs in the list of Ctesias twice a transparent device, clumsily cloaked by the cheap expedient of a liberal invention of names.
After Herodotus we must pass over a century and a half, and only note, in passing, the Physician Ctesias, a contemporary of Xenophon, who published the account of a voyage to India that he really never made; and we shall come in chronological order to Pytheas, who was at once a traveller, geographer, and historian, one of the most celebrated men of his time.
Ctesias, however, declares that the king, of his own accord, deputed him to this service.
PLACE, Ninive, vol. iii. plates 24 and 31. "The painting," says M. OPPERT, "was applied to a kind of roughly blocked-out relief." De Longperier, Musée Napoléon III., plate iv. This palace was then inhabited for a part of the year by the Achemenid princes, of whom Ctesias was both the guest and physician. OPPERT, Expédition scientifique, vol. i. pp. 143, 144.
For Xenophon knew well enough that Ctesias was resident at court; for he makes mention of him, and had evidently met with his writings. And, therefore, had he come, and been deputed the interpreter of such momentous words, Xenophon surely would not have struck his name out of the embassy to mention only Phalinus.
From Ninyas to Sardanapalus from the commencement to the close of the Empire a line of voluptuaries, according to Ctesias and his followers, held possession of the throne; and the principle was established from the first, that happiness consisted in freedom from all cares or troubles, and unchecked indulgence in every species of sensual pleasure.
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