THE MEDIAN AND THE CYROPAEDIA OF XENOPHON. 7 



It will be seen, then, that a knowledge on the one hand, or 

 ignorance on the other, that Cyrus was the son of a king, con- 

 stitutes one of the " acid tests " — as they may be called — which 

 by means of the Cuneiform Inscriptions are to be applied to the 

 classical narrators of the life of Cyrus. Under this test the 

 story which has come down from Ctesias, and all later accounts 

 which reiterate his fable, are shown to be absolutely untrue. 



Then there is the account which has come down from Herodotus 

 — that incorrigible raconteur of fantastic and sometimes repulsive 

 tales — who seems never to have thought an incident which he 

 related as serious history to be quite satisfactory if it did not 

 include some very good story. Unfortunately, however, these 

 good stories were too often accepted by the ancient world au grand 

 serieiix and became in time firmly embedded in a nation's history. 

 In this case his story is that the mother of Cyrus was — not 

 Argoste, a goat-herd, but — Mandane, the daughter of Astyages, 

 King of Media. Astyages, having learned from the interpretation 

 of a dream that a son who should be born from his daughter 

 would overthrow all Asia, sought to avoid the danger, and defeat 

 the prophecy, by giving his daughter to a Persian named 

 Cambyses, a man of good family. Being afterwards terrified by 

 another dream, he sent for his daughter from Persia, and as soon 

 as Cyrus was born he commanded Harpagus, one of his most 

 trusted ministers of state, to take the child to his own house and 

 kill it. Harpagus, however, instead of killing the child himself, 

 sent for one of the herdsmen of Astyages, and told him that it 

 was the King's command that he should lay the child in the 

 most desolate place in the mountains where it might perish in 

 the shortest time. The herdsman, whose name was Mitradates — 

 a name suspiciously like the Atradates of Ctesias — brought the 

 child, who was dressed in royal splendour, to his humble home, 

 and then, at the suggestion of his wife, who had given birth 

 to a dead child, the dead infant was dressed in the royal robes 

 of Cyrus, and brought to Harpagus in proof that the King's 

 command had been performed. But the herdsman and his 

 wife brought up Cyrus as their own son. When he was ten years 

 old, however, circumstances occurred which caused him to be 

 recognised by Astyages as his daughter's son. The King was 

 greatly incensed with Harpagus for not having killed the child, 

 but concealing his anger, he invited him to a banquet, and 

 revenged himself upon him in a most revolting fashion, by 



