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Updated: June 22, 2025
After awhile, the nations whom they had overrun, whose armies they had defeated, and whose cities they had given to the flames, began to recover themselves. Cyaxares, it is probable, commenced an aggressive war against such of the invaders as had remained within the limits of his dominions, and soon drove them beyond his borders. Other kings may have followed his example.
The Lydian monarch, on his side, did not scruple to challenge a contest. The long strife which his father had waged with the great Cyaxares had terminated in a close alliance, cemented by a marriage, which made Croesus and Astyages brothers.
With the assistance of Nabopolassar, a Babylonian general who had also revolted against the Assyrian monarch, Cyaxares succeeded, after repeated failures, in taking Nineveh and destroying the great Assyrian Empire which had ruled the Eastern world for several centuries.
It was not really left for Cyaxares the Mede to be the first to organize an Asiatic army to divide the troops into companies and form distinct bodies of the spearmen, the archers, and the cavalry.
This being the state of the case, Astyages consented that Cyrus should go out with his son Cyaxares into the forests to hunt at the next opportunity. The party set out, when the time arrived, on horseback, the hearts of Cyrus and his companions bounding, when they mounted their steeds, with feelings of elation and pride.
The Cyaxares who about the year B.C. 632 led an invading host of Medes against Nineveh, was so well known to the Arian tribes of the north-east that, when in the reign of Darius Hystaspis a Sagartian raised the standard of revolt in that region he stated the ground of his claim to the Sagartian throne to be descent from Cyaxares.
To this new-built and wide-spread empire succeeded Astyages, son of the fortunate Cyaxares.
The Assyrian armies, which committed so great devastations, did not occupy the country they chastised, as the Romans and Greeks did. Their conquests were like those of Tamerlane. As the monarchs became effeminated, new powers sprung up, especially Media, which ultimately completed the ruin of Assyria, under Cyaxares. The last of the monarchs was probably the Sardanapalus of the Greeks.
When Cyaxares reached the frontiers, he concluded, instead of contenting himself and his party with hunting wild beasts, to make an incursion for plunder into the Assyrian territory, that being, as Zenophon expresses it, a more noble enterprise than the other.
The rise of Persia is next described. Assyria, whose capital was Nineveh, was destroyed by Cyaxares of Media, whose capital was Ecbatana. His son Astyages in consequence of a dream married his daughter Mandane to a Persian named Cambyses. A second dream made him resolve to destroy her child Cyrus who, like Oedipus, was saved from exposure by a herdsman.
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