duced no literature of any account, and of science they
were completely ignorant. They made few improvements even in military
weapons, the chief of which, as among all the nations of antiquity, were
the bow, the spear, and the sword. They were skilful horsemen, and made
use of chariots of war. Their great occupation, aside from agriculture,
was hunting, in which they were trained by exposure for war. They were
born to conquer and rule, like the Romans, and cared for little except
the warlike virtues.

Such were the Persians and the rugged country in which they lived, with
their courage and fortitude, their love of freedom, their patriotism,
their abhorrence of lies, their self-respect allied with pride, their
temperance and frugality, forming a noble material for empire and
dominion when the time came for the old monarchies to fall into their
hands,--the last and greatest of all the races that had ruled the
Oriental world, and kindred in their remote ancestry with those European
conquerors who laid the foundation of modern civilization.

Of these Persians Cyrus was the type-man, combining in himself all that
was admirable in his countrymen, and making so strong an impression on
the Greeks that he is presented by their historians as an ideal prince,
invested with all those virtues which the mediaeval romance-writers have
ascribed to the knights of chivalry.

The Persians were ruled by independent chieftains, or petty kings, who
acknowledged fealty to Media; so that Persia was really a province of
Media, as Burgundy was of France in the Middle Ages, and as Babylonia at
one period was of Assyria. The most prominent of these chieftains or
princes was Achaemenes, who is regarded as the founder of the Persian
monarchy. To this royal family of the Achaemenidae Cyrus belonged. His
father Cambyses, called by some a satrap and by others a king, married,
according to Herodotus, a daughter of Astyages, the last of the
Median monarchs.

The youth and education of Cyrus are invested with poetic interest by
both Herodotus and Xenophon, but their narratives have no historical
authority in the eyes of critics, any more than Livy's painting of
Romulus and Remus: they belong to the realm of romance rather than
authentic history. Nevertheless the legend of Cyrus is beautiful, and
has been repeated by all succeeding historians.

According to this legend, Astyages--a luxurious and superstitious
monarch, without the warlike virtues of hi