virtuoso. He made sport of the pigmy images of Pthah, or Vulcan, whose ludicrous ugliness must have presented the grim humorist with an irresistible temptation,[1] and other sacred idols he burnt. Herodotus expresses himself much shocked at all this; but he might have known that the Persians were in general iconoclasts. It is possible that Cambyses was inspired with the same destructive zeal which induced the more modern Puritans to clear away the saints from the niches of our cathedrals. But as a Greek, our author would sympathise with the Egyptians. It is hard for us to judge how far some of the cruelties reported of Cambyses may have been the invention of the outraged priests. He has recorded, in another part of his work, an anecdote which illustrates at once the character of Cambyses and the general incorruptibility of the royal judges of Persia. One of these, named Sisamnes, was found to have accepted bribes. Cambyses, with the facetious cruelty so common to tyrants of his type, had him flayed, and his skin stretched over the seat which he had occupied while administering the law. He then appointed his son to the vacant post, charging him at the same time never to forget "on what kind of cushion he was sitting."
The modern reader will agree with Herodotus that it is at least right to treat with delicacy the peculiar usages of others. Aristotle quotes one of his anecdotes to illustrate the opinion of those who held that all right and wrong were conventional. King Darius Hystaspes called certain Greeks into his presence, and asked them what they would take to eat their dead fathers? They said that they would do it for
- ↑ See the woodcuts and note, Rawlinson, ii. 434.
