The Greatest Story in the World, Period 1 by Horace G. Hutchinson

The Persians are a people that up to this point come into the story / hardly at all. Suddenly, out of the East, they come right into its / very centre and are the principal actors in it for a century or two.

After the break-up of the Assyrian power, the strongest nation in the / alliance that had done that breaking was the nation of the Medes. / The Medes and Persians were of the same race, different altogether / from the Semitic. They were of that great race called Aryan, or / Indo-European, that came from the high lands in the centre of Asia. / Probably their numbers so increased that they had to find new / country. They pressed down southward and westward, towards the sun / and the more fertile lands. They were hardy and accustomed to moving / about. It was no hardship to them to make migrations. They moved / with their wives and children, flocks and herds, and all their small / household goods. A great number pressed down into India. Another / big stream flowing towards the west came as far as the Babylonian / eastern border.

These Aryan people from the north-west were great riders. It is / thought that they introduced the horse to the Babylonians, and that / from the Babylonians it came to Egypt.

The country of Elam had been invaded, and its {111} power shattered, / by the Assyrians shortly before the break-up of their own empire, and / this shattering, together with the fighting between the Assyrians and / the alliance formed against them, gave the Persians (who inhabited a / country to the east called Iran, and especially the part of that / country called Persis) the chance of getting possession of Elam. / This they did, and established themselves in Susa, the old capital / city of the Elamites. Persia was actually the vassal of Media, until / Cyrus, who was the Persian king at Susa, led a revolt against them. / Within three years he had conquered and taken their capital, and / Media was now a subject state to its own late subject, Persia.

Thus they were, then, established in their power along the Eastern / boundary of Babylonia, which had now become the master empire by the / defeat of Assyria. Nevertheless Cyrus, at the head of the Persian / army, took this mighty Babylon without a battle! But he had to fight / some hard battles first. It seems that the Medes had made treaties / with their allies of Babylon and Egypt which the Persians did not / feel disposed to pay attention to. This aroused such opposition to / the Persians that an alliance of Babylonians and Egyptians with / Crœsus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, and with the Spartans, was / formed against them.

[Sidenote: Spartan mercenaries]

Notice particularly those Spartans. Sparta was the southern state of / Greece, and this is the first appearance of Greece in our story. It / is very notable. These great nations of the East already thought so / well of the fighting qualities of the Greek soldiers, and especially / of the Spartan soldiers, that it was worth their while to bring them / over and pay them to fight for them. There seems to be little doubt / that they were mercenaries, that is to say, soldiers who were {112} / paid to fight and who fought for pay. But the alliance was of no / avail. Within the space of a few months, in the summer of 546 B. C., / the whole of Asia Minor was in the Persian hands, right away to the / Mediterranean shore. It was not until six years later that Cyrus had / leisure to attend to Babylon itself; but when he did attend to it the / resistance was not great. The Babylonian king's allies had been / broken. Cyrus took Syria and Palestine also in his own reign, and / after his death his son Cambyses pressed on down into Egypt and / conquered that ancient land likewise. The victorious career of the / Persians was only checked when they came against the Ethiopians and / Nubians in farther Africa.

[Sidenote: The Persian conquest]

Even the shore of the Mediterranean did not stay their progress. / They won many of the Greek islands, including Cyprus and Samos. The / empires of Egypt and of Babylonia had been great, but this was / greater than both of them together. And those two had been rivals. / This of Persia seemed to be without a rival. It is little wonder / that the Persian ruler assumed the title of King of Kings. He ruled / right away into India. He ruled all that seemed to matter or to / count for anything; and it had all been accomplished in not much more / than twenty years from the time of the first revolt of Cyrus against / the lordship of the Medes. How was it done?

That is a question which must be answered in different ways. No one / answer is enough. There were several causes which worked together / for this astounding success of the Persians. But one of the chief / causes, if not the chief of all, was Cyrus. We cannot doubt that. / Throughout the whole of this greatest of great stories which I am / trying to tell you we shall {113} not meet with an actor bigger and / more glorious than this Cyrus. I doubt whether we meet with another / quite as big. For not only were the extent of country and the power / of the nations that he conquered extraordinarily great, but he made a / very extraordinary use of his conquests. He must have been a great / leader of men, a man whom others were ready to obey and follow; and / he must have been a great general, according to the ideas of what / generalship and the manœuvring of armies meant at that time; but / besides all that he must have been a very wise man and a very good / man. There can be little doubt that he was far more merciful to the / people that he conquered than any other conqueror that has come into / our story yet. He treated them with far greater kindness. That is / proof of his goodness.