nner.

[Illustration: 042.jpg REMAINS OF THE PALACE OF ECBATANA]

Drawn by Boudier, from Coste and Flandin.

According to this legend Astyages had no male heirs, and the sceptre
would have naturally descended from him to his daughter Mandane and
her sons. Astyages was much alarmed by a certain dream concerning his
daughter: he dreamt that water gushed forth so copiously from her
womb as to flood not only Ecbatana, but the whole of Asia, and the
interpreters, as much terrified as himself, counselled him not to give
Mandane in marriage to a Persian noble of the race of the Achaemenids,
named Cambyses; but a second dream soon troubled the security into which
this union had lulled him: he saw issuing from his daughter's womb a
vine whose branches overshadowed Asia, and the interpreters, being once
more consulted, predicted that a grandson was about to be born to him
whose ambition would cost him his crown. He therefore bade a certain
nobleman of his court, named Harpagus--he whose descendants preserved
this version of the story of Cyrus--to seize the infant and put it to
death as soon as its mother should give it birth; but the man, touched
with pity, caused the child to be exposed in the woods by one of the
royal shepherds. A bitch gave suck to the tiny creature, who, however,
would soon have succumbed to the inclemency of the weather, had not the
shepherd's wife, being lately delivered of a still-born son, persuaded
her husband to rescue the infant, whom she nursed with the same
tenderness as if he had been her own child. The dog was, as we know, a
sacred animal among the Iranians: the incident of the bitch seems, then,
to have been regarded by them as an indication of divine intervention,
but the Greeks were shocked by the idea, and invented an explanation
consonant with their own customs. They supposed that the woman had borne
the name of Spako: Spako signifying _bitch_ in the language of Media.*

* Herodotus asserts that the child's foster-mother was
called in Greek _Kyno_, in Median _Spalco_, which comes to
the same thing, for _spaha_ means _bitch_ in Median. Further
on he asserts that the parents of the child heard of the
name of his nurse with joy, as being of good augury; "and,
in order that the Persians might think that Cyrus had been
preserved alive by divine agency, _they spread abroad the
report that Cyrus had been suckled by a bitch_. And thus
arose the fab