Opportunity of a brilliant exploit

Set out this banquet for them in our camp, leave the refuse of the army there, and retreat with the body of your troops upon the river. If I am not mistaken, the Scythians will address themselves to all this good cheer, as soon as they fall in with it, and then we shall have the opportunity of a brilliant exploit”. I need not pursue the history further than to state the issue. In spite of the immediate success of his ruse de guerre, Cyrus was eventually defeated, and lost both his army and his life.

The Scythian Queen, Tomyris, in revenge for the lives which he had sacrificed to his ambition, is related to have cut off his head, and plunged it into a vessel filled with blood, saying, “ Cyrus, drink your fill”. Such is the account given us by Herodotus; and, even if it is to be rejected, it serves to illustrate the difficulties of an invasion of Scythia; for legends must be framed according to the circumstances of the case, and grow out of probabilities, if they are to gain credit, and if they have actually succeeded in gaining it.

Our knowledge of the expedition of Darius in the next generation, is more certain. This fortunate monarch, after many successes, even on the European side of the Bosphorus, impelled by that ambition, which holy Daniel had already seen in prophecy, to threaten West and North as well as South, towards the end of his life, directed his arms against the Scythians who inhabited the country now called the Ukraine. His pretext for this expedition was an incursion which the same barbarians had made into Asia, shortly before the time of Cyrus.

They had crossed the Don, just above the sea of Azoff, had entered the country now called Circassia, had threaded the defiles of the Caucasus, and had defeated the Median King Cyaxares, the grand-father of Cyrus. Then they overran Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and part of Lydia, that is, a great portion of Anatolia or Asia Minor; and managed to establish themselves in the country for twenty-eight years, living by plunder and exaction. In the course of this period, they descended into Syria, as far as to the very borders of Egypt.