Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/239

CONSPIRACY AGAINST EAHBYSES. ^ cessor was at last found, the demonstrations of joy in Memphis were extravagant and universal. At the moment when Kam- byses returned to Memphis from his Ethiopian expedition, full of humiliation for the result, it so happened that a new Apis was just discovered ; and as the population of the city gave vent to their usual festival pomp and delight, he construed it into an intentional insult towards his own recent misfortunes. In vain did the priests and magistrates explain to him the real cause of these popular manifestations ; he persisted in his belief, punished some of them with death and others with stripes, and com manded every man seen in holiday attire to be slain. Further- more, to carry his outrage against Egyptian feeling to the uttermost pitch, he sent for the newly-discovered Apis, and plunged his dagger into the side of the animal, who shortly after wards died of the wound. 1 After this brutal deed, calculated to efface in the minds of the Egyptian priests the enormities of Cheops and Chephren, and doubtless unparalleled in all the twenty-four thousand years of their anterior history, Kambyses lost every spark of reason which yet remained to him, and the Egyptians found in this visi- tation a new proof of the avenging interference of their gods. Not only did he commit every variety of studied outrage against the conquered people among whom he was tarrying, as well as their temples and their sepulchres, but he also dealt his blows against his Persian friends and even his nearest blood-relations. Among these revolting atrocities, one of the greatest deserves peculiar notice, because the fate of the empire was afterwards materially affected by it. His younger brother Smerdis had accompanied him into Egypt, but had been sent back to Susa, because the king became jealous of the admiration which his personal strength and qualities called forth. 2 That jealousy was aggra- vated into alarm and hatred by a dream, portending dominion and conquest to Smerdis ; so that the frantic Kambyses sent to 1 Herodot. iii, 29. f Ktesias calls the brother Tanyoxarkes, and says that Cyras had left him uatrap, without tribute, of Baktria and the neighboring regions (Persica, c. 8). Xenophon, in the Cyropsedia, also calls him Tanyoxarkes, but givef turn a different satrapy (Cyropse<7. viii, 7, 11).