This passage—asserting that the Medes, some time after the deposition of Astyagês and the acquisition of Persian supremacy by Cyrus, repented of having suffered their discontent against Astyagês to place this supremacy in the hands of the Persians, revolted from Darius, and were reconquered after a contest—appears to me to have been misunderstood by chronologists. Dodwell, Larcher, and Mr. Fynes Clinton (indeed, most, if not all, of the chronologists) explain it as alluding to a revolt of the Medes against the Persian king Darius Nothus, mentioned in the Hellenica of Xenophon (i, 2, 12), and belonging to the year 408 B. C. See Larcher ad Herodot. i, 130, and his Vie d’Hérodote, prefixed to his translation (p. lxxxix); also Mr. Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, ad ann. 408 and 455, and his Appendix, c, 18, p. 316. The revolt of the Medes alluded to by Herodotus is, in my judgment, completely distinct from the revolt mentioned by Xenophon: to identify the two, as these eminent chronologists do, is an hypothesis not only having nothing to recommend it, but open to grave objection. The revolt mentioned by Herodotus was against Darius son of Hystaspês, not against Darius Nothus; and I have set forth with peculiar care the circumstances connected with the conspiracy and accession of the former, for the purpose of showing that they all decidedly imply that conflict between Median and Persian supremacy, which Herodotus directly announces in the passage now before us. 1. When Herodotus speaks of Darius, without any adjective designation, why should we imagine that he means any other than Darius the son of Hystaspês, on whom he dwells so copiously in his narrative? Once only in the course of his history (ix, 108) another Darius (the young prince, son of Xerxês the First) is mentioned; but with this exception, Darius son of Hystaspês is uniformly, throughout the work, spoken of under his simple name: Darius Nothus is never alluded to at all. 2. The deposition of Astyagês took place in 559 B. C.; the beginning of the reign of Darius occurred in 520 B. C.; now repentance on the part of the Medes, for what they had done at the former of those two epochs, might naturally prompt them to try to repair it in the latter. But between the deposition of Astyagês in 559 B. C., and the revolt mentioned by Xenophon against Darius Nothus in 408 B. C., the interval is more than one hundred and fifty years. To ascribe a revolt which took place in 408 B. C., to repentance for something which had occurred one hundred and fifty years before, is unnatural and far-fetched, if not positively inadmissible. The preceding arguments go to show that the natural construction of the passage in Herodotus points to Darius son of Hystaspês, and not to Darius Nothus; but this is not all. There are yet stronger reasons why the reference to Darius Nothus should be discarded.