Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
His dying declaration discredited. Among the other acts of profligate wickedness which have blackened indelibly and forever Cambyses's name, he married two of his own sisters, and brought one of them with him to Egypt as his wife.
Besides, Prexaspes, as soon as Cambyses was dead, considered it safer for him to deny than to confess having murdered the prince. He therefore declared that Cambyses's story was false, and that he had no doubt that Smerdis, the monarch in whose name the government was administered at Susa, was the son of Cyrus, the true and rightful heir to the throne.
Let us not act like Cambyses's judges, who, when their approbation was demanded by the prince to some illegal measure, said, that 'Though there was a written law, the Persian kings might follow their own will and pleasure. This was base flattery, fitter for our reproof than our imitation; and as fear, so flattery, taketh away the judgment.
Smerdis, the brother of Cambyses, would have been Cambyses's successor if he had survived him; but he had been privately assassinated by Cambyses's orders, though his death had been kept profoundly secret by those who had perpetrated the deed.
His advice to Cambyses. Cambyses's rage at Croesus. He attempts to kill him. The declaration of the oracle. Ecbatane, Susa, and Babylon. Cambyses returns northward. He enters Syria. A herald proclaims Smerdis. The herald seized. Probable explanation. Rage of Cambyses. Cambyses mortally wounded. His remorse and despair. Cambyses calls his nobles about him. His dying declaration. Death of Cambyses.
As soon as Cyrus became somewhat settled in his new home, his parents began to make arrangements for giving him as complete an education as the means and opportunities of those days afforded. Xenophon, in his narrative of the early life of Cyrus, gives a minute, and, in some respects, quite an extraordinary account of the mode of life led in Cambyses's court.
Dissimulation of Astyages. He proposes an entertainment. Astyages invites Harpagus to a grand entertainment. Horrible revenge. Action of Harpagus. Astyages becomes uneasy. The magi again consulted. Advice of the magi. Astyages adopts it. Cyrus sets out for Persia. His parents' joy. Life at Cambyses's court. Instruction of the young men. Cyrus a judge. His decision in that capacity. Cyrus punished.
It is astonishing that there can be institutions and arrangements in the social state which will give one man such an ascendency over others that such commands can be obeyed. On another occasion, Cambyses's sister and wife, who had mourned the death of her brother Smerdis, ventured a reproach to Cambyses for having destroyed him.
It happened, also, that Darius himself, who was then a young noble in the Persian court, and yet of no particular distinction, as there was then no reason to imagine that he would ever be elevated to the throne, was also in Cambyses's army, and the two young men became acquainted with one another there.
It will interest those of our readers who have perused our history of Cyrus to know that Croesus, the captive king of Lydia, whom they will recollect to have been committed to Cambyses's charge by his father, just before the close of his life, when he was setting forth on his last fatal expedition, and who accompanied Cambyses on this invasion of Egypt, was present on this occasion, and was one of the most earnest interceders in Psammenitus's favor.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking