offered any acceptable gifts, now to stand by, and deliver him from the present evil. And as he called upon the god in tears, suddenly clouds collected in the serene sky, and the storm broke down, and a torrent of rain fell, and extinguished the fire. Cyrus, therefore, being by these means instructed that Crœsus was a good man, and beloved by the gods, inquired of him, when he was come down from the pile, ‘Crœsus, who persuaded you to invade my kingdom, and thus become an enemy instead of a friend?’ And he said, ‘O king, I have done thus to further your good, and my own evil fate: but the god of the Grecians, who puffed me up to war, has been the author of these events. For no man is so witless as to choose war instead of peace, when, in the one, fathers bury their sons, and in the other, sons their fathers. But it was the pleasure of the gods that these things should turn out thus.’ “Thus spoke Crœsus, and Cyrus released him, and kept him near his person, and thenceforth treated him with much respect.”[96] The evident intermixture of fable with this tale is calculated to throw doubt upon the whole of it, and indeed it seems at variance with the character of Cyrus. That Xenophon omits all mention of the circumstances related would be a strong argument in disproof of them, if they were calculated to advance his hero’s reputation; but in the present case his silence is of little weight. The close resemblance, however, between the preservation of Crœsus, and the miraculous deliverance of the Jewish youths condemned by Nebuchadnezzar to the furnace, might warrant us in suspecting that some account of so impressive a display of Divine power had reached the western coast of Asia, and that the careless or unfaithful annalists of those early times transferred the scene from Babylon to Lydia, and substituted the names best known in their own history for the barbarian appellations of the Assyrian monarch and his prisoners. This idea may be supported by the expression of Herodotus, that Cyrus condemned Crœsus to be burnt “because of his piety, that he might know whether any god would deliver him from being burnt alive.” Cyrus was neither cruel nor a scoffer, so that we cannot suppose it to have been an impious jest, and can as little imagine that it was a serious experiment on the part of the Persian to try the power of the Grecian deities. It is not very likely, therefore, that such a reason was invented to account for the action; but the recorded preservation of the Jews, and the decree of Nebuchadnezzar “that there is no other god that can deliver after this sort,” may well enough have led to the inference that the monarch’s object was to prove the power which in the end he was obliged to confess.