nce is that it
brings in a certain Mereonte, who, like his quasi-assonant Meliante, is
to be useful later, and that the tame conclusion is excused by a Sapphic
theory--certainly not to be found in her too fragmentary works--that
"possession ruins love," a doctrine remembered and better put by Dryden
in a speech of that very agreeable Doralice, whose name, though not
originally connected with this part of it, he also, as has been noted,
borrowed from the _Grand Cyrus_.

The actual finale begins (so to speak) antithetically with the last
misfortune of the unlucky Spithridates. His ill-starred likeness to
Cyrus, assisted by a suit of armour which Cyrus has given to him, make
the enemy certain that he is Cyrus himself, and he is furiously
assaulted in an off-action, surrounded, and killed. His head is taken
to Thomyris, who, herself deceived, executes upon it the famous
"blood-bath" of history or legend.[187] Unfortunately it is not only in
the Scythian army that the error spreads. Cyrus's troops are terrified
and give way, so that he is overpowered by numbers and captured.
Fortunately he falls into the hands, not of Thomyris's own people or of
her savage allies, the Geloni (it is a Gelonian captain who has acted as
executioner in Spithridates's case), but of the supposed Assyrian leader
Meliante, who is an independent person, admires Cyrus, and, further
persuaded by his friend Mereonte (_v. sup._), resolves to let him
escape. The difficulties, however, are great, and the really safest,
though apparently the most dangerous way, seems to lie through the
"Royal Tents" (the nomad capital of Thomyris) themselves. Meanwhile,
Aryante is making interest against his sister; some of Cyrus's special
friends, disguised as Massagetae, are trying to discover and rescue him,
and the Sauromatae are ready to desert the Scythian Queen. One of her
transports of rage brings on the catastrophe. She orders the Gelonian
bravo to poniard Mandane, and he actually stabs by mistake her
maid-of-honour Hesionide--the least interesting one, luckily. Cyrus
himself, after escaping notice for a time, is identified, attacked, and
nearly slain, when the whole finishes in a general chaos of rebellion,
arrival of friends, flight of Thomyris, and a hairbreadth escape of
Cyrus himself, which unluckily partakes more of the possible-improbable
than of the impossible-probable. The murders being done, the marriages
would appear to have nothing to delay them; but an