14 REV. AXDREW CRAIG ROBINSON, M.A., ON DARIUS 



land of Ekbatana, east of Assyria, had penetrated to Harran in 

 Mesopotamia, which lay to the north-west of Nineveh and had 

 no doubt overrun the intervening country in which these ruined 

 cities were. Three years later these Umman-man-da were 

 conquered by Cyrus, and from this conquest no doubt the 

 tradition — mistaken tradition — which Xenophon heard arose. 



But in fact the whole suggestion really cuts the other way. 

 Xenophon wrote the Anabasis some time after 380 B.C., and in that 

 work he made casual mention of this tradition, which he heard 

 as an officer in the Division of the ten thousand Greeks in the 

 army of Cyrus the Younger, when he was marching through these 

 ruined cities, and returning from that expedition, which culminated 

 in the battle of Cunaxa, and the tragic death of Cyrus the Younger 

 at the hand of Artaxerxes, when the two brothers met in the 

 midst of the battle in single combat. But when, years afterwards, 

 Xenophon set himself — as he very emphatically, in the very 

 commencement of the Cyropaedia, states that he did — to investi- 

 gate and ascertain to the best of his power all the circumstances 

 connected with the career and character of Cyrus, of whom he 

 was about to write, he would seem to have found that there was 

 no foundation for the story. And accordingly, when writing 

 the Cyropaedia twenty years afterwards (c. 361 B.C.), he absolutely 

 ignored the false tradition w^hich he had heard, seemingly as not 

 being worthy of being even mentioned or refuted. In this matter, 

 the Cyropaedia was a tacit correction of the Anabasis — not the 

 Anabasis of the Cyropaedia. 



We have seen already that the accounts given by Ctesias and 

 Herodotus of the parentage of Cyrus — both of these writers 

 being ignorant that his father was a king — are shown by the 

 Cuneiform Inscriptions to be absolutely imaginary — not to say 

 fantastic ; and now we see that the account of the revolt of the 

 Persians against the Medes and the conquest of Astyages, King 

 of the Medes, by Cyrus — contained in the story of each of these 

 historians — is also unreal — founded probably on some vague 

 tradition in which the Umman-man-da were mistaken for the 

 Mada — what happened to the Scythians, who at the time infested 

 Western Asia, was supposed to have happened to the Medes. 

 The Inscriptions show that it was Astyages, King of the 

 Scythians, whom Cyrus conquered, not Astyages, King of 

 the Medes. 



By these two crucial tests the narratives of these two historians 

 are proved to be quite unreliable — and the account which they 



