In this life the poems found a motive for the plots of her sons, from which she was at first rescued by the fidelity of a Mede,--a trait which again reveals the origin of the poem. As Semiramis was a heroine merely, and not a goddess, to the minstrels, they could represent her overthrow, her defeat and wounds, on the Indus, which afterwards was the limit of the conquests of the Medians and Persians. At the end of her life the higher style reappears, the supernatural origin comes in once more. She flies out of the palace with the doves of Bilit, which protected her childhood. In Ctesias the goddess of Ascalon is Derceto,[25] and therefore later writers could maintain that the kings of Assyria, the descendants or successors of Semiramis, were named Dercetadæ.[26] FOOTNOTES: [1] Strabo, pp. 736, 737. Arrian, "Anab." 3, 7, 7. The same form of the name, Athura, is given in the inscriptions of Darius. [2] Plin. "Hist. Nat." 6, 27; 5, 12: Adiabene Assyria ante dicta. Ptolemæus (6, 1) puts Adiabene and Arbelitis side by side. Diodorus, 18, 39. Arrian, Epit. 35: [Greek: tên men mesên tôn potamôn gên sai tên Arbêlitin eneime Amphimachô.] [3] Polyb. 5, 54. The border line between the original country of Assyria and Elam cannot be ascertained with certainty. According to Herodotus (5, 52) Susa lay 42 parasangs, _i.e._ about 150 miles, to the south of the northern border of Susiana. Hence we may perhaps take the Diala as the border between the later Assyria and Elam. The use of the name Assyria for Mesopotamia and Babylonia, as well as Assyria proper, in Herodotus (_e.g._ 1, 178) and other Greeks,--the name Syria, which is only an abbreviation of Assyria (Herod. 7, 63),--arises from the period of the supremacy of Assyria in the epoch 750-650 B.C. Cf. Strabo, pp. 736, 737, and Nöldeke, [Greek: ASSYRIOS], Hermes, 1871 (5), 443 ff. [4] The Euphrates, which Diodorus mentions 2, 3 and also 2, 27, is not to be put down to a mistake of Ctesias, since Nicolaus (Frag. 9, ed. Müller) describes Nineveh as situated on the Tigris in a passage undoubtedly borrowed from Ctesias. The error belongs, as Carl Jacoby ("Rhein. Museum," 30, 575 ff.) has proved, to the historians of the time of Alexander and the earliest Diadochi, who had in their thoughts the city of Mabog (Hierapolis), on the Euphrates, which was also called Nineveh. The mistake has passed from Clitarchus to the narrative of Diodorus. [5] Steph. Byzant. [Greek: Chauôn, chôra tês Mêdias, Ktêsias en prôtô Pertikôn. Ê de Semiramis enteuthen exelaunei, k. t. l.] [6] Diod. 1, 56. [7] Frag. 7, ed. Müller. [8] Frag. 1, 2, ed. Müller; cf. Justin. 1, 1. [9] Anonym. tract. "De Mulier." c. 1. [10] Diod. 2, 21. [11] Nicol. Frag. 8, ed. Müller. [12] 1, 184. [13] Strabo, pp. 80, 529, 737; Lucian, "de Syria dea," c. 14. [14] Herod. 1, 102. [15] Xenoph. "Anab." 3, 4, 6-10.