interpreted the signs to mean that he could leave no successor. His mother appeared to him in a dream and threatened him for the murder, and this made him more dejected than ever. When he came to Babylon, by way of pastime he chipped a piece of wood with a sword, and so hit the muscle of his thigh, and died on the eleventh day after, when he had reigned eighteen years. Before his death Artasyras and Bagapates had resolved that the Magian should reign; and he reigned after the death of Cambyses." The length of the reign of Cambyses is incorrect, as indeed almost all the numbers in Ctesias are wrong. It is also a mistake that in his account Cambyses and his brother are the sons of Cyrus and Amytis the daughter of Astyages. As we have said, they were the sons of Cyrus and Cassandane, who died before Cyrus (V. 384). The object of Ctesias was to prove the statements of Herodotus incorrect by opposing them with others. The elevation of Amytis to be the mother of the brothers, and the part which the account of Ctesias ascribes to this supposed mother, shows that Ctesias has here followed a Median version, in which the daughter of Astyages became, not the mother of Cyrus, it is true, but the mother of his successor, the ruler of Persia and Media,--the same version which, as we have already seen, assigns to Amytis the greatest influence on Cyrus, and in the present instance on his son Cambyses. Without doubt this version is derived from a poetical source; that is proved by a number of traits: the calumniation of the brother, the double introduction of the scourging, the three-fold summoning before the king, the conversation of Cambyses with the eunuch, the three-fold increase of the distress of Cambyses, the suicide and curse of Amytis, the signs at sacrifice and the abortion, the appearance of the dead, which fills up the measure and drives Cambyses to death. As in the previous case, in this form of the poems, it was the Median queen who punished Oebares, who incited Cyrus to revolt, for this act and for the death of her father, so here she visits the ruler of the Persians and Medes for his crime. Against this view of the account of Ctesias it may be urged that the Medes would take the side of the Magian more vigorously than that of Amytis, for the Magian was apparently a Mede. Herodotus, at any rate, once represents Gobryas as calling him a Mede.[188] Cambyses, it is true, does not call him so, but in his last speech merely urges the Persians not to let the empire revert to the Medes, which means no more than that the empire is not to go back to the Medes on the extinction of the house of Cyrus, when his kingdom is being broken up. We shall see that the usurper was not a Mede, and is only called a Mede by Herodotus because he wrongly thought that all the Magians were exclusively Medes (V. 194). But as the story of Ctesias obviously goes back to a poetical source, we are not carried any further by it in establishing the actual facts of the case.