quered when he passed away.

His wife Kassandane, a daughter of Pharnaspes, and an Achaemenian like
himself, had borne him five children; two sons, Cambyses* and Smerdis,**
and three daughters, Atossa, Roxana, and Artystone.***

* The Persian form of the name rendered Kambyses by the
Greeks was Kabuziya or Kambuziya. Herodotus calls him the
son of Kassandane, and the tradition which he has preserved
is certainly authentic. Ctesias has erroneously stated that
his mother was Amytis, the daughter of Astyages, and Dinon,
also erroneously, the Egyptian women Nitetis; Diodorus
Siculus and Strabo make him the son of Meroe.

** The original form was Bardiya or Barziya, "the laudable,"
and the first Greek transcript known, in AEschylus, is
Mardos, or, in the scholiasts on the passage, Merdias, which
has been corrupted into Marphios by Hellanikos and into
Merges by Pompeius Trogus. The form Smerdis in Herodotus,
and in the historians who follow him, is the result of a
mistaken assimilation of the Persian name with the purely
Greek one of Smerdis or Smerdies.

*** Herodotus says that Atossa was the daughter of
Kassandane, and the position which she held during three
reigns shows that she must have been so; Justi, however,
calls her the daughter of Amytis. A second daughter is
mentioned by Herodotus, the one whom Cambyses killed in
Egypt by a kick; he gives her no name, but she is probably
the same as the Roxana who according to Ctesias bore a
headless child. The youngest, Artystone, was the favourite
wife of Darius. Josephus speaks of a fourth daughter of
Cyrus called Meroe, but without saying who was the mother of
this princess.

Cambyses was probably born about 558, soon after his father's accession,
and he was his legitimate successor, according to the Persian custom
which assigned the crown to the eldest of the sons born in the purple.
He had been associated, as we have seen, in the Babylonian regal power
immediately after the victory over Nabonidus, and on the eve of his
departure for the fatal campaign against the Massagetse his father,
again in accordance with the Persian law, had appointed him regent. A
later tradition, preserved by Ctesias, relates that on this occasion the
territory had been divided between the two sons: Smerdis, here called
Tanyoxarkes, having received as his share Bac