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Updated: June 10, 2025
There are instances among the ancients with which you must be more familiar than I. Look at Herodotus, or Ctesias of Cnidus; or, to go further back, take the poets Homer himself: here are men of world-wide celebrity, perpetuating their mendacity in black and white; not content with deceiving their hearers, they must send their lies down to posterity, under the protection of the most admirable verse.
Ctesias, who lived there for a time, thus describes the palace on the right bank of the Euphrates: "In the interior of the first line of circumvallation Semiramis constructed another on a circular plan, upon which there are all kinds of animals stamped on the bricks while still unburnt; nature is imitated in these figures by the employment of colours .... The third wall, that in the middle, was twenty stades round ... on its towers and their curtain-walls every sort of animal might be seen imitated according to all the rules of art, both as to their form and colour.
According to Herodotus, a sudden desire seized Cyrus to attack the Massagetae, who bordered his Empire to the north-east. According to Ctesias, the people against whom he made his expedition were the Derbices, a nation bordering upon India, Assisted by Indian allies, who lent them a number of elephants, this people engaged Cyrus, and defeated him in a battle, wherein he received a mortal wound.
It is remarkable that the time of this first contact of Media with Assyria a contact taking place when Assyria was in her prime, and Media was only just emerging from a long period of weakness and obscurity is almost exactly that which Ctesias selects as a day of the great revolution whereby the Empire of the East passed from the hands of the Shemites into those of the Arians.
Upon a third you may recognize the trunk of a palm-tree and on a fourth the sinuous lines that edge a drapery. M. de Longperier calculated from the dimensions of this latter fragment that the figure to which it belonged must have been four cubits high, exactly the height assigned by Ctesias to the figures in the groups seen by him when he visited the palace of the ancient kings.
He rose, shook off the dust, and returned to the mound, with a graceful gesture to the cheer that greeted him; but wise heads knew the contest was just beginning. Ctesias and Amyntas leaped beyond the Thasian’s mark, short of the Athenian’s. Lycon was fifth. His admirers’ hopes were high. He did not blast them. Huge was his bulk, yet his strength matched it. A cloud of dust hid him from view.
Even in the very narrative of Ctesias, Ninus has but one wife, Semiramis; and Sardanapalus, notwithstanding his many concubines, has but five children, three sons and two daughters. It is not intended to press these arguments to an extreme, or to assume, on the strength of them, that the Assyrian monarchs were really faithful to one woman.
The character of Asshur-bani-pal stands really in the strongest contrast to the description be it a portrait, or be it a mere sketch from fancy which Ctesias gives of his Sardanapalus. Asshur-bani-pal, was beyond a doubt one of Assyria's greatest kings.
It may be argued that he possessed even better opportunities than the earlier writer for becoming acquainted with the views which the Orientals entertained of their own past. Herodotus probably devoted but a few months, or at most a year or two, to his Oriental travels; Ctesias passed seventeen years at the Court of Persia.
Ctesias affirms, that Parysatis, cutting a bird of this kind into two pieces with a knife, one side of which had been smeared with the drug, the other side being clear of it, ate the untouched and wholesome part herself, and gave Statira that which was thus infected; but Dinon will not have it to be Parysatis, but Melantas, that cut up the bird and presented the envenomed part of it to Statira; who, dying with dreadful agonies and convulsions, was herself sensible of what had happened to her, and aroused in the king's mind suspicion of his mother, whose savage and implacable temper he knew.
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