* 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 Bactriana, the Khoramnians, the Parthians, and the Carmanians, under the suzerainty of his brother.  Cambyses, it is clear, inherited the whole empire, but intrigues gathered round Smerdis, and revolts broke out in the provinces, incited, so it was said, whether rightly or wrongly, by his partisans.* The new king was possessed of a violent, merciless temper, and the Persians subsequently emphasised the fact by saying that Cyrus had been a father to them, Cambyses a master.  The rebellions were repressed with a vigorous hand, and finally Smerdis disappeared by royal order, and the secret of his fate was so well kept, that it was believed, even by his mother and sisters, that he was merely imprisoned in some obscure Median fortress.**