received command of an expedition against the Cadusians.

* The tradition reproduced by Dinon narrated that Cyrus had
begun by serving among the Kavasses, the three hundred
staff-bearers who accompanied the sovereign when he appeared
in public, and that he passed next into the royal body-
guard, and that once having attained this rank, he passed
rapidly through all the superior grades of the military
profession.

On the march he fell in with a Persian groom named OEbaras,* who
had been cruelly scourged for some misdeed, and was occupied in the
transportation of manure in a boat: in obedience to an oracle the two
united their fortunes, and together devised a vast scheme for liberating
their compatriots from the Median yoke.

* This OEbaras whom Ctesias makes the accomplice of Cyrus,
seems to be an antedated forestallment of theoebaras whom
the tradition followed by Herodotus knows as master of the
horse under Darius, and to whom that king owed his elevation
to the throne.

How Atradates secretly prepared the revolt of the Mardians; how Cyrus
left his camp to return to the court at Ecbatana, and obtained from
Astyages permission to repair to his native country under pretext of
offering sacrifices, but in reality to place himself at the head of the
conspirators; how, finally, the indiscretion of a woman revealed the
whole plot to a eunuch of the harem, and how he warned Astyages in the
middle of his evening banquet by means of a musician or singing-girl,
was frequently narrated by the Median bards in their epic poems, and