Sanscrit Writing and Language. 141 



beginning and ending of their accounts of Cyrus ; and that too, upon points on 

 which it is impossible that writers, with their dispositions and advantages, could 

 have differed, if Persia had in ancient times possessed records that were perma- 

 nently legible. Herodotus makes this extraordinary personage the son of a man 

 of low condition, who commenced his public life with rebellion and usurpation ; 

 Xenophon represents him as the son of a king, who succeeded to the thrones of 

 Media and Persia by regular inheritance, after the most exemplary loyalty and 

 obedience to his predecessors. According to the earlier historian he came to a 

 disastrous end in a foreign land, and having engaged in a war of unjust aggression 

 against the Scythians, lost his life in battle, overcome by savages, and over- 

 reached by a woman ; according to the later one, he never once was defeated, 

 but after a long and uninterrupted career of victory and conquest, spent the close 

 of his reign in peace and tranquillity at home. These differences as to the com- 

 mencement and termination of so public and important a life, are wholly 

 incompatible with the supposition of accounts having been written while the 

 events in question were recent, and of the records thus formed having continued 

 legible up to the times of our two historians ; but they are precisely the sort of 

 changes which national vanity, in the absence of such documents, would prompt 

 the Persians to make in the history of their favourite hero ; and they appear to 

 have arisen in the very way in which misrepresentations of the kind may be con- 

 ceived most naturally to have been produced. Herodotus read his celebrated 

 historic work at the Olympic games not more than seventy years after the time 

 of Cyrus,* yet he in it alludes to reports already propagated different from the 



* I have here placed the recital of Herodotus a little earlier than it is usually fixed. The time 

 of this occurrence is not, I believe, directly specified by any ancient author ; but it can be collected 

 from the age of Thucydides, combined with an anecdote told of him by Suidas, that he was then 

 only a boy, and wept with emotion at hearing what was read out by the father of history. 

 9ouKu8i8i)e . . . • ouroe riKOvaEv, tri irate Tvyxavuiv, 'HpoSoTOu £7ri rfjg OXvuTriag rac 

 iOToptac avTOV Siepxojutvou, ag avvijpaxparo' koi KivriOtig viro rjvoc ivBvaiaiTfiov, 7rX/;p»}c 

 SaKpuwv lyiviTO. Thucydides was, according to Aulus Gellius (Noct. Att. 1. xv, c. 23), forty years 

 old at the commencement of the Peloponnesian war ; and that war broke out (see Beverege's Chronol. 

 p. 147) in the second year of the Lxxxvii'" Olympiad. He, therefore, was born in the second year 

 of the Lxxvii'" Olympiad ; and, consequently, was ten years old at the Lxxx'" celebration of the 

 games, and fourteen at the Lxxxi". The following one cannot be taken into account, as he was 

 then passed the age assigned to boyhood among the ancient Greeks. Of the two ages of Thucydides 



