No doubt the Persian epos had to explain the contrast in which the reign of Cambyses stood to that of Cyrus; no doubt it was a fact that the race of Cyrus came to an end in the male line owing to his guilt. It was due to him that his reign was followed by that of an usurper; that rebellion broke out in all quarters, the kingdom became completely disintegrated, and the establishment of Cyrus seemed ruined. The songs of the Persians gave a reason for the sudden change in the manner indicated, by the murder of the brother and its results. But they would not have charged Cambyses with madness or with any other offences than this combination required. They would not have forgotten his services to Persia; the establishment of the Persian power in the Mediterranean, the victory over Egypt, over the Ethiopians of Napata, and the negroes. It was not these poems which branded his campaign to the south as a mad undertaking, and represented it as a failure; they could not have opposed Croesus as a wise adviser to Cambyses, or allowed Cambyses to speak of the miserable end of Cyrus in the land of the Massagetae. If these elements in the narratives of Herodotus have not come down from Greek-Egyptian tradition, if the warning of Croesus, in the form in which we have it, was not attached by him to his account of the death of Cambyses, we should have to assume that in this case also the Persian poems came to Herodotus in their Median counterparts--a hypothesis which is excluded by the distinctly ante-Median and Persian traits in the dying speech of Cambyses.