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Updated: June 11, 2025
"Take off your hat," said the chief. The boy obeyed. The chief tore out the lining and found the gold hidden beneath it. "Why did you tell us where to find it?" he asked. "No one would have thought that a child like you had gold about him." "If I had answered your questions differently, I should have told a lie," said Otanes; "and none but cowards tell lies"
How deeply rooted must have been the faithlessness of this clever hypocrite, if the mere news that his brother loved some one else could not only destroy all her powers of dissimulation, but actually deprive her of consciousness! When Nitetis left the hall, Otanes, the father of Phaedime had called out: "The Egyptian women seem to take great interest in the love-affairs of their brothers-in-law.
They went but slowly, for the sun was hot and the way was rough. Suddenly, towards evening, a band of robbers swooped down upon them. The merchants were not fighting men. They could do nothing but give up all their goods and money. "Well, boy, what have you got?" asked one of the robbers, as he pulled Otanes from his horse. "Forty pieces of gold" answered the lad. The robber laughed.
The populace in all countries are easily excited by such denunciations and appeals as these. The Persians armed themselves, and ran to and fro every where in pursuit of the unhappy magians, and before night vast numbers of them were slain. Confusion at Susa. No heir to the throne. Five days' interregnum. Provisional government. Consultation of the confederates. Otanes in favor of a republic.
He concurred fully, he said, in all that Otanes had advanced in respect to the evils of a monarchy, and to the oppression and tyranny to which a people were exposed whose liberties and lives were subject to the despotic control of a single human will. But in order to avoid one extreme, it was not necessary to run into the evils of the other.
At the end of it, it appeared that four out of the seven agreed with Darius in preferring a monarchy. This was a majority, and thus the question seemed to be settled. Otanes said that he would make no opposition to any measures which they might adopt to carry their decision into effect, but that he would not himself be subject to the monarchy which they might establish.
The names are: Otanes, Intaphernes, Gobryas, Megabyzus, Aspatines, Hydarnes and Darius Hystaspis. Before the messenger returned, the greater part of the army had dispersed, the soldiers seizing this favorable opportunity to return to their homes and families, after so many years of absence.
"I know of a remedy for the king though," exclaimed Otanes when he heard these words. "We must persuade him to send for the women, or at least for my daughter Phaedime, back from Susa. Love is good for dispersing melancholy, and makes the blood flow faster." We acknowledged that he was right, and advised him to remind the king of his banished wives.
And there rose up one among the Magi who pretended to be Smerdis, and was proclaimed king. But this false Smerdis was one whose ears had been cut off, and he was thus found out by one of his wives, the daughter of a Persian nobleman, Otanes.
Phaedime, the daughter of Otanes, and niece of his own mother Kassandane, had been Cambyses' favorite wife hitherto, or at least the only one of whom it could be said that she was more to him than a purchased slave would have been. But even she, in his present sated and disgusted state of feeling, seemed vulgar and contemptible, especially when he thought of Nitetis.
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