Historical Lectures and Essays. Charles Kingsley

      He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just.  He had been chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit.  The boy whom he had chastised was one of those who chose him.  All the rest obeyed: but he would not, till at last he got his due reward.  “If I deserve punishment for that,” says the boy, “I am ready to submit.”

      The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose features seem somewhat like his own.  Likely enough in those days, when an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman.  A suspicion crosses him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the trembling herdsman.

      To the poor wretch’s rapture the old king lets him go unharmed.  He has a more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who likewise confessed the truth.  The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle words.  It is best as it is.  He has been very sorry himself for the child, and Mandane’s reproaches had gone to his heart.  “Let Harpagus go home and send his son to be a companion to the new-found prince.  To-night there will be great sacrifices in honour of the child’s safety, and Harpagus is to be a guest at the banquet.”

      Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the king’s meat?  He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put before him, out of which he is to take—in Median fashion—what he likes.  He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son.  Like a true Eastern he shows no signs of horror.  The king asks him if he knew what flesh he had been eating.  He answers that he knew perfectly.  That whatever the king did pleased him.

      Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive, and bided his time.  The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus—as we must now call the foundling prince—had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let to go back to his father and his hardy Persian life.  But Harpagus does not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts.  He has wrongs to avenge on his grandfather.  And it seems not altogether impossible to the young mountaineer.

      He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge in it.  He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.

      He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to avenge.  And the two little armies of foot-soldiers—the Persians had no cavalry—defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.

      And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly anything, save the fact that they were made.  The young mountaineer and his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been.  They gather to them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe whom they overcome.  They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and affection by that righteousness—that truthfulness and justice—for which Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book of his—the “Cyropædia.”  The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus—Asia Minor as we call it now—goes down before them.  Babylon itself goes down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar’s feast; and when Cyrus died—still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say—he left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Hindostan.

      So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational enough.  It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.  They are inclined to “relegate it into the region of myth;” in plain English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe.  What means those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years of Cyrus, I for myself cannot discover.  And I say this without the least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons.  For there are—and more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this earth—a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic.  They know the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the consciences, the very bodies of men and women.  They dread so much from experience the abuse of that formula, that “a thing is so beautiful it must be true,” that they are inclined to reply: “Rather let us say boldly, it is so beautiful that it cannot be true.  Let us mistrust, or even refuse to believe à priori, and at first sight, all startling, sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is not as dull as the ledger of a dry-goods’ store.”  But I think that experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water philosophy.  The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms.  The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics, startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial crime and folly.  Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take care not to tell, because we shall not be believed?  Let the ditch-water philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many a landslip.  It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most common-place motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences be what they may.

      How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades?  Were they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other?  Certainly not for lightening an overburdened population.  Nay, is not the history of your own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most startling instances which the world has seen for several centuries, of the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man?  Believe me, man’s passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled down to freezing point, are the normal causes of all great human movement.  And a truer law of social science than any that political economists are wont to lay down, is that old Dov’ é la donna