Cambyses's profligate conduct.--He marries his own sisters.--Consultation of the Persian judges.--Their opinion.--Smerdis.--Jealousy of Cambyses.--The two magi.--Cambyses suspicious.--He plans an invasion of Ethiopia.--Island of Elephantine.--The Icthyophagi.--Classes of savage nations.--Embassadors sent to Ethiopia.--The presents.--The Ethiopian king detects the imposture.--The Ethiopian king's opinion of Cambyses's presents.--The Ethiopian bow.--Return of the Icthyophagi.--Jealousy of Cambyses.--He orders Smerdis to be murdered.--Cambyses grows more cruel.--Twelve noblemen buried alive.--Cambyses's cruelty to his sister.--Her death.--The venerable Croesus.--His advice to Cambyses.--Cambyses's rage at Croesus.--He attempts to kill him.--The declaration of the oracle.--Ecbatane, Susa, and Babylon.--Cambyses returns northward.--He enters Syria.--A herald proclaims Smerdis.--The herald seized.--Probable explanation.--Rage of Cambyses.--Cambyses mortally wounded.--His remorse and despair.--Cambyses calls his nobles about him.--His dying declaration.--Death of Cambyses.--His dying declaration discredited. Among the other acts of profligate wickedness which have blackened indelibly and forever Cambyses's name, he married two of his own sisters, and brought one of them with him to Egypt as his wife. The natural instincts of all men, except those whose early life has been given up to the most shameless and dissolute habits of vice, are sufficient to preserve them from such crimes as these. Cambyses himself felt, it seems, some misgivings when contemplating the first of these marriages; and he sent to a certain council of judges, whose province it was to interpret the laws, asking them their opinion of the rightfulness of such a marriage. Kings ask the opinion of their legal advisers in such cases, not because they really wish to know whether the act in question is right or wrong, but because, having themselves determined upon the performance of it, they wish their counselors to give it a sort of legal sanction, in order to justify the deed, and diminish the popular odium which it might otherwise incur.