he chose to construe as disrespect, and when he executed Orontes for
contemplated desertion, secretly and silently, so that no one knew
his fate, when transported with jealous rage he rushed madly upon his
brother, exposing to hazard the success of all his carefully formed
plans, and in fact ruining his cause, the acquired habits of the
Phil-Hellene gave way, and the native ferocity of the Asiatic came
to the surface. We see Cyrus under favorable circumstances, while
conciliation, tact, and self-restraint were necessities of his position,
without which he could not possibly gain his ends--we do not know what
effect success and the possession of supreme power might have had upon
his temper and conduct; but from the acts above-mentioned we may at any
rate suspect that the result would have been very injurious.

Again, intellectually, Cyrus is only great for an Asiatic. He has more
method, more foresight, more power of combination, more breadth of mind
than the other Asiatics of his day, or than the vast mass of Asiatics of
any day. But he is not entitled to the praise of a great administrator
or of a great general. His three years' administration of Asia Minor
was chiefly marked by a barbarous severity towards criminals, and by a
lavish expenditure of the resources of his government, which left him in
actual want at the moment when he was about to commence his expedition.
His generalship failed signally at the battle of Cunaxa, for the loss of
which he is far more to be blamed than Clearchus. As he well knew that
Artaxerxes was sure to occupy the centre of his line of battle, he
should have placed his Greeks in the middle of his own line, not at
one extremity. When he saw how much his adversary outflanked him on the
left--a contingency which was so probable that it ought to have occurred
to him beforehand--he should have deployed his line in that direction,
instead of ordering such a movement as Clearchus, not unwisely, declined
to execute. He might have trusted the Greeks to fight in line, as they
had fought at Marathon; and by expanding their ranks, and moving off
his Asiatics to the left, he might, have avoided the danger of being
outflanked and surrounded. But his capital error was the wildness
and abandon of his charge with the Six Hundred--a charge which it was
probably right to make under the circumstances, but which required a
combination of coolness and courage that the Persian prince evidently
did not possess whe