the private apartments, subsequently promoted to the charge of
the lamps and torches, and finally admitted to the number of the royal
cupbearers who filled the king's goblet at table.

* According to one of the historians consulted by Strabo,
Cyrus himself, and not his father, was called Atradates.

[Illustration: 039.jpg A ROYAL HUNTING-PARTY IN HUN]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the silver vase in the Museum
of the Hermitage.

When he was at length enrolled in the bodyguard,* he won distinction by
his skill in all military exercises, and having risen from rank to rank,
received command of an expedition against the Cadusians.

* The tradition reproduced by Dinon narrated that Cyrus had
begun by serving among the Kavasses, the three hundred
staff-bearers who accompanied the sovereign when he appeared
in public, and that he passed next into the royal body-
guard, and that once having attained this rank, he passed
rapidly through all the superior grades of the military
profession.

On the march he fell in with a Persian groom named OEbaras,* who
had been cruelly scourged for some misdeed, and was occupied in the
transportation of manure in a boat: in obedience to an oracle the two
united their fortunes, and together devised a vast scheme for liberating
their compatriots from the Median yoke.

* This OEbaras whom Ctesias makes the accomplice of Cyrus,
seems to be an antedated forestallment of theoebaras whom
the tradition followed by Herodotus knows as master of the
horse under Darius, and to whom that king owed his elevation
to the throne.

How Atradates secretly prepared the revolt of the Mardians; how Cyrus
left his camp to return to the court at Ecbatana, and obtained from
Astyages permission to repair to his native country under pretext of
offering sacrifices, but in reality to place himself at the head of the
conspirators; how, finally, the indiscretion of a woman revealed the
whole plot to a eunuch of the harem, and how he warned Astyages in the
middle of his evening banquet by means of a musician or singing-girl,
was frequently narrated by the Median bards in their epic poems, and
hence the story spread until it reached in later times even as far as
the Greeks.*

* According to Ctesias, it was a singing-girl who revealed
the existence of the plot to Astyages; according to Dinon,
it was the bard Angares. Windi