g down to us from the very earliest times of
three several kingdoms situated in the heart of Asia-Assyria, Media,
and Persia, the two latter of which, at the period when they first
emerge indistinctly into view, were more or less connected with and
dependent upon the former. Astyages was the King of Media; Cambyses
was the name of the ruling prince or magistrate of Persia. Cambyses
married Mandane, the daughter of Astyages, and Cyrus was their son. In
recounting the circumstances of his birth, Herodotus relates, with all
seriousness, the following very extraordinary story:

While Mandane was a maiden, living at her father's palace and home in
Media, Astyages awoke one morning terrified by a dream. He had dreamed
of a great inundation, which overwhelmed and destroyed his capital,
and submerged a large part of his kingdom. The great rivers of that
country were liable to very destructive floods, and there would have
been nothing extraordinary or alarming in the king's imagination being
haunted, during his sleep, by the image of such a calamity, were
it not that, in this case, the deluge of water which produced such
disastrous results seemed to be, in some mysterious way, connected
with his daughter, so that the dream appeared to portend some great
calamity which was to originate in her. He thought it perhaps
indicated that after her marriage she should have a son who would
rebel against him and seize the supreme power, thus overwhelming his
kingdom as the inundation had done which he had seen in his dream.

To guard against this imagined danger, Astyages determined that his
daughter should not be married in Media, but that she should be
provided with a husband in some foreign land, so as to be taken away
from Media altogether. He finally selected Cambyses, the king of
Persia, for her husband. Persia was at that time a comparatively small
and circumscribed dominion, and Cambyses, though he seems to have been
the supreme ruler of it, was very far beneath Astyages in rank and
power. The distance between the two countries was considerable, and
the institutions and customs of the people of Persia were simple and
rude, little likely to awaken or encourage in the minds of their
princes any treasonable or ambitious designs. Astyages thought,
therefore, that in sending Mandane there to be the wife of the king,
he had taken effectual precautions to guard against the danger
portended by his dream.

Mandane was accordingly married,