hesitated in procuring what he wished for by all sorts of means, the most honest of which had been secret theft.  When made king, he had several times given way to intoxication to such an extent as to be incapable of attending to public business; his ministers were then obliged to relate moral tales to him to bring him to a state of reason.  Many persons having taunted him with his low extraction, he had caused a statue of a divinity to be made out of a gold basin in which he was accustomed to wash his feet, and he had exposed it to the adoration of the faithful.  When it had been worshipped by them for some time, he revealed the origin of the idol, and added “that it had been with himself as with the foot-pan....  If he were a private person formerly, yet now he had come to be their king, and so he bade them honour and reverence him.”  Towards the middle and end of his reign he was as much detested as he had been beloved at the outset.

He had, notwithstanding, so effectively armed Egypt that the Persians had not ventured to risk a collision with her immediately after their conquest of Babylon.  Cyrus had spent ten years in compassing the downfall of Nabonidus, and, calculating that that of Amasis would require no less a period of time, he set methodically to work on the organisation of his recently acquired territory; the cities of Phoenicia acknowledged him as their suzerain, and furnished him with what had hitherto been a coveted acquisition, a fleet.  These preliminaries had apparently been already accomplished, when the movements of the barbarians suddenly made his presence in the far East imperative.  He hurried thither, and was mysteriously lost to sight (529).  Tradition accounts for his death in several ways.  If Xenophon is to be credited, he died peaceably on his bed, surrounded by his children, and edifying those present by his wisdom and his almost superhuman resignation.*

* A similar legend, but later in date, told how Cyrus, when a hundred years old, asked one day to see his friends.  He was told that his son had had them all put to death:  his grief at the cruelty of Cambyses caused his death in a few days.

Berosus tells us that he was killed in a campaign against the Daliae; Ctesias states that, living been wounded in a skirmish with the AEerbikes, one of the savage tribes of Bactriana, he succumbed to his injuries three days after the engagement.  According to the worthy Herodotus, he asked the hand of Tomyris, Queen of the Massagetse, in marriage, and was refused with disdain.  He declared war against her to avenge his wounded vanity, set out to fight with her beyond the Araxes, in the steppes of Turkestan, defeated the advance-guard of cavalry, and took prisoner the heir to the crown, Spargapises, who thereupon ran himself through with his sword.  “Then Tomyris collected all the forces of her kingdom, and gave him (Cyrus) battle.”  Of all the combats in which barbarians have engaged among themselves,