disaffected priests of Bel-Marduk. The famous Herodotean tale of Cyrus'
secret penetration down the dried bed of Euphrates seems to be a
mistaken memory of a later recapture of the city after a revolt from
Darius, of which more hereafter. Thus once more it was given to Cyrus to
close a long chapter of Eastern history--the history of imperial
Babylon. Neither did he make it his capital, nor would any other lord of
the East so favour it. If Alexander perhaps intended to revive its
imperial position, his successor, Seleucus, so soon as he was assured of
his inheritance, abandoned the Euphratean city for the banks of the
Tigris and Orontes, leaving it to crumble to the heap which it is
to-day.

The Syrian fiefs of the Babylonian kings passed _de jure_ to the
conqueror; but probably Cyrus himself never had leisure or opportunity
to secure them _de facto_. The last decade of his life seems to have
been spent in Persia and the north-east, largely in attempts to reduce
the Scythian element, which threatened the peace of Media; and at the
last, having brought the enemy to bay beyond the Araxes, he met there
defeat and death. But Cambyses not only completed his father's work in
Syria, but fulfilled what is said to have been his further project by
capturing Egypt and establishing there a foreign domination which was to
last, with some intervals, nearly two hundred years. By the end of the
sixth century one territorial empire was spread over the whole East for
the first time in history; and it was with a colossus, bestriding the
lands from the Araxes to the Upper Nile and from the Oxus to the Aegean
Sea, that the Greeks stood face to face in the gate of the West.

Before, however, we become absorbed in contemplation of a struggle which
will take us into a wider history, let us pause a moment to consider the
nature of the new power come out of the East, and the condition of such