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from two sources, Herodotus, and Ctesias in Diodorus Siculus, once 

 considered of very disputable authority, but whom minute investi- 

 gation and recent discoveries have demonstrated, as far back as they 

 go, to be very deserving, if not of implicit confidence, at least of a 

 very considerable degree of credit. The former of these historians 

 flourished in the fifth century before Christ, is entitled by Cicero 

 the Father of History, a title of which the experience of twenty- 

 two centuries has fully confirmed the justice, and wrote, in the 

 Ionic dialect, the history of the Persian wars from Cyrus to Xerxes, 

 in whose reign he flourished. The latter, whose accounts have been 

 adopted by Diodorus Siculus, was a native of Cnidos, by profession 

 a physician, and in that character resided seventeen years at the 

 court of Artaxerxes the Second, or Mnemon, as the Greeks called 

 him, in the succeeding century. He professes to have taken his ac- 

 counts, and, from the striking similarity of many parts of his narra- 

 tion to the Indian historic details, inserted by Mr. Wilford, from 

 the Puranas, in the third volume of Asiatic Researches, in all proba- 

 bility he did take them, IK ruv @a.<rt\muv SicpQeguv*, from the royal 

 records. The principal objection urged against these historians is 

 the romantic nature of many of the facts recorded by them, and 

 the great mixture of Eastern legends and fables with what is asserted 

 for historic truth. These, however, are in the true spirit of all Asiatic 

 history, and confirm, rather than invalidate, their pretensions to be 

 genuine abstracts of Oriental annals, which are all strongly tinctured 

 with the marvellous. There is, indeed, another celebrated Greek 

 writer, who flourished about the same period, and who has treated 

 of the affairs of the Persians, to whom no such objection can be 

 made ; but it will be remembered, that the Cyropaedia of Xenophon 

 is not properly an historical, but a political and moral, treatise, 







* Diod. Sic. lib. ii. p. 14O. 

 Vol. III. S 



