and Fravartish of Media, two of the claimants for the throne
who rose against Darius, are represented as tracing their
descent from Huvakshatara.

His achievements prove him to have been one of those perfect rulers of
men, such as Asia produces every now and then, who knew how to govern as
well as how to win battles--a born general and lawgiver, who could carry
his people with him, and shone no less in peace than in war.*

* G. Rawlinson takes a somewhat different view of Cyaxares'
character; he admits that Cyaxares knew how to win
victories, but refuses to credit him with the capacity for
organisation required in order to reap the full benefits of
conquest, giving as his reason for this view the brief
duration of the Medic empire. The test applied by him does
not seem to me a conclusive one, for the existence of the
second Chaldaean empire was almost as short, and yet it would
be decidedly unfair to draw similar inferences touching the
character of Nabopolassar or Nebuchadrezzar from this fact.

[Illustration: 297.jpg MEDIC AND PERSIAN FOOT-SOLDIERS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after Coste and Flandin. The first
and third figures are Medes, the second and fourth Persians.

The armies at the disposal of his predecessors had been little more than
heterogeneous assemblies of feudal militia; each clan furnished its own
contingent of cavalry, archers, and pikemen, but instead of all these
being combined into a common whole, with kindred elements contributed
by the other tribes, each one acted separately, thus forming a number of
small independent armies within the larger one. Cyaxares saw that defeat
was certain so long as he had nothing but these ill-assorted masses to
match against the regular forces of Assyria: he therefore broke up the
tribal contingents and rearranged the units of which they were composed
according to their natural affinities, grouping horsemen with horsemen,
archers with archers, and pikemen with pikemen, taking the Assyrian
cavalry and infantry as his models.*

* Herodotus tells us that Cyaxares was "the first to divide the Asiatics
into different regiments, separating the pikemen from the archers and
horsemen; before his time, these troops were all mixed up haphazard
together." I have interpreted his evidence in the sense which seems
most in harmony with what we know of Assyrian military tactics. It
seems incredible that