n accident
informs Artamene that Philidaspes is really Prince of Assyria, sure to
become King when his mother, Nitocris, dies or abdicates, and that,
being as he is, and as Artamene knows already, desperately in love with
Mandane, he has formed a plot for carrying her off. The difficulties in
the way of preventing this are great, because, though the hero is
already aware that he is Cyrus, it is for many reasons undesirable to
inform Cyaxares of the fact; and at last Philidaspes, helped by the
traitor Aribee (_v. sup._), succeeds in the abduction, after an
interlude in which a fresh Rival, with a still larger R, the King of
Pontus himself, turns up; and an immense episode, in which Thomyris,
Queen of Scythia, appears, not yet in her more or less historical part
of victress of Cyrus. She is here only a young sovereign, widowed in her
earliest youth, extremely beautiful (see a portrait of her _inf._), who
has never yet loved, but who falls instantly in love with Cyrus himself
(when he is sent to her court), and is rather a formidable person to
deal with, inasmuch as, besides having great wealth and power, she has
established a diplomatic system of intrigue in other countries, which
the newest German or other empire might envy. By the end of this volume,
however, the Artamene-Cyrus confusion is partly cleared up (though
Cyaxares is not yet made aware of the facts), and the hero is sent after
Mandane, to be disappointed at Sinope, in the fashion recounted some
thousand or two pages before.

[Sidenote: The oracle to Philidaspes.]

With the beginning of vol. iv. (that is to say, part ii. vol. ii.) we
return, though still in retrospect, to the direct fate of Mandane.
Nitocris is dead, Philidaspes has succeeded to the crown of Assyria, and
has carried Mandane off to his own dominions. The situation with so
robustious a person as this prince may seem awkward, and indeed, as is
observed in a later part of the book, the heroine's repeated sojourns
(there are three if not four of them in all[167]) in the complete power
of one of the Rivals, with a large R, are very trying to Cyrus. However,
such a shocking thing as violence is hardly hinted at, and the Princess
always succeeds, as the Creole lady in _Newton Forster_ said she did
with the pirates, in "temporising," while her abductors confine
themselves for the most part to the finest "Phebus." Even the fiery
Philidaspes, though he breaks out sometimes, conveys his wish that
Mandan