They opened the coffin, broke the couch and the table, and finding them too heavy to carry away easily, they contented themselves with stealing the drinking-vessels and jewels. Alexander on his return visited the place, and caused the entrance to be closed with a slight wall of masonry; he intended to restore the monument to its former splendour, but he himself perished shortly after, and what remained of the contents probably soon disappeared. After the death of Cyrus, popular imagination, drawing on the inexhaustible materials furnished by his adventurous career, seemed to delight in making him the ideal of all a monarch should be; they attributed to him every virtue—gentleness, bravery, moderation, justice, and wisdom. There is no reason to doubt that he possessed the qualities of a good general—activity, energy, and courage, together with the astuteness and the duplicity so necessary to success in Asiatic conquest—but he does not appear to have possessed in the same degree the gifts of a great administrator. He made no changes in the system of government which from the time of Tiglath-pileser III. onwards had obtained among all Oriental sovereigns; he placed satraps over the towns and countries of recent acquisition, at Sardes and Babylon, in Syria and Palestine, but without clearly defining their functions or subjecting them to a supervision sufficiently strict to ensure the faithful performance of their duties. He believed that he was destined to found a single empire in which all the ancient empires were to be merged, and he all but carried his task to a successful close: Egypt alone remained to be conquered when he passed away.

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

      * The Persian form of the name rendered Kambyses by the
     Greeks was Kâbuzîyâ or Kambuzîya. Herodotus calls him the
     son of Kassandanê, 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 Nitêtis; Diodorus
     Siculus and Strabo make him the son of Meroê.
 
     ** The original form was Bardiya or Barzîya,"the laudable,"
     and the first Greek transcript known, in Æschylus, is
     Mardos, or, in the scholiasts on the passage, Merdias, which
&n