If the Persians rose against him his best support against them was the Medes; if the deception had to be dropped, the rising of the Persians would pass into a war between the Persians and Medes. From the important position which the authority of Herodotus assigns to Otanes, and the peculiar honours subsequently paid to him and his family, we may perhaps assume that it was he more than any other, who, with the fixed resolution not to endure the dominion of Gaumata, pointed out at the same time the unavoidable consequences of an armed rising of Persia. Instead of shattering the central power with their own hands, he must have advised his confederates to get it into their own power, and with this object in view he proposed the removal of the Magian, the surprise, and assassination in the citadel. There would be time for an open conflict if the assassination failed. Darius, who was then about thirty-five,[209] was younger and more hasty; he may have insisted on a sudden decision and have been more inclined to use open violence. Finally, the princes of the Persians united with Darius in the attempt to assassinate the king. It is obvious that the consultations and deliberations which led to this resolution took place among few, and in the greatest secrecy. It was necessary to avoid observation and suspicion; they must not go in a company. The son of Hystaspes might take a message from his father to the king, and the chiefs of the Persian tribes might accompany him. They were the chosen councillors of the king, and had the right of free entry to him. Ought they to despair of this because they had not been summoned to the council? If they had had confederates in the palace of Gaumata, as Ctesias suggests, it would have been the most foolish rashness to go to Media in such small numbers. That Darius accomplished the deed with six associates only, as he himself tells us, proves that they could reckon on obtaining an entrance for these seven only, and that the king dared not refuse it to them. His false assertion that he was an Achæmenid, and the king of the Persians, must have been his ruin; it compelled him to admit the seven; at any rate the guards of the palace had no orders to the contrary. The upright tiara, which the Persian kings, the descendants of Achæmenes, and the princes of the remaining six tribes wore, and which Plutarch suggests was the mark of recognition among the conspirators (Polyaenus states this for a fact[210]), pointed out Darius and his associates to the body-guard as having the right of free entrance. It was not, as the Greeks thought, a mark of distinction given to the six after the deed, but, as we have seen, a distinction which they possessed, along with others, from the time of Achæmenes, and the arrangement of the Persian constitution. The six princes of the Persians, and at their head the eldest son of the lawful successor to the throne, Hystaspes the prince of the seventh tribe, or Pasargadae, were resolved to attack the