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232 HISTORY OF GREECE. ing unbounded, they placed in his hands the care of the principal gates. At the critical moment these gates were thrown open, and the Persians became masters of the city. 1 Thus was the impregnable Babylon a second time reduced, 2 and Darius took precautions on this occasion to put it out of con- dition for resisting a third time. He caused the walls and gates to be demolished, and three thousand of the principal citizens to be crucified : the remaining inhabitants were left in the dis- mantled city, fifty thousand women being levied by assessment upon the neighboring provinces, to supply the place of the women strangled when it first revolted. 3 Zopyrus was ap 1 Herodot. iii. 154-158. 2 Ktesias represents the revolt and recapture of Babylon to have taken place, not under Darius, but under his son and successor Xerxes. He says that the Babylonians, revolting, slew their satrap Zopyrus ; that they were besieged by Xerxes, and that Megabyzus son of Zopyrus caused the city to be taken by practising that very stratagem which Herodotus ascribes to Zopyrus himself (Persica, c. 20-22). This seems inconsistent with the fact, that Megabyzus was general of the Persian army in Egypt in the war with the Athenians, about 460 B.C. (Diodor. Sic. xi, 75-77) : he would hardly have been sent on active service had he been so fearfully mutilated ; moreover, the whole story of Ktesias appears to me far less probable than that of Herodotus ; for on this, as on other occasions, to blend the two together is impossible. 3 Herodot. iii, 159, 160. "From the women thus introduced (says Herod- otus) the present Babylonians are sprung." To crucify subdued revolters by thousands is, fortunately, so little in harmony with modern European manners, that it may not be amiss to strengthen the confidence of the reader in the accuracy of Herodotus, by producing an analogous narrative of incidents far more recent. Voltaire gives, from the MS. of General Lefort, one of the principal and confiden- tial officers of Peter the Great, the following account of the suppression of the revolted Strelitzes at Moscow, in 1698: these Strelitzes were the old native militia, or Janissaries, of the Kussian Czars, opposed to all the re- forms of Peter. " Pour etouffer ces troubles, le czar part secretement de Viennc, arrive cnfin a Moscou, et surprend tout le monde par sa presence : il recompense les troupes quiont vaincu les Strelitz: les prisons etaient pleines de ces malhcureux. Si lenr crime etait grand, le chfttiment le fut aussi. Lour* chefs, plusieurs officiers. et quelques pretres, furent condamne's a la mort quelques-uns furent roues, deux femmes enterre'es vives. On pcndit autont des muraillcs de la ville ct on fit perir dans d'autres supj lices deux milli Strelitz Icurs corps restcren* deux jours expose's sur les grands chemins.