target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_9dcc1485-ba3f-577b-aa85-cdf693b78dc4">[8] Semiramis is regarded by modern antiquarians as a fabulous personage. By some of them she has been identified with the goddess Astarte.
[9] Antiquarians have great doubts as to the identity of this queen. By some she is thought to have been the wife of Nebuchadnezzar, who began to reign in 604 b.c., and the mother or grandmother of Belshazzar, the last of the kings of Babylon.
[10] That is, from the sea which encircled Greece.
[11] Herodotus means by this the King of Persia.
[12] Susa was the capital of Susiana, a country lying at the head of the Persian Gulf.
[13] Here again for Red Sea we must read Persian Gulf.
III
THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS[14]
Till the death of Rhampsinitus, the priests said, Egypt was excellently governed, and flourished greatly; but after him Cheops succeeded to the throne, and plunged into all manner of wickedness. He closed the temples and forbade the Egyptians to offer sacrifice, compelling them instead to labor, one and all, in his service. Some were required to drag blocks of stone down to the Nile from the quarries in the Arabian range of hills; others received the blocks after they had been conveyed in boats across the river, and drew them to the range of hills called the Libyan. A hundred thousand men labored constantly, and were relieved every three months by a fresh lot. It took ten years' oppression of the people to make the causeway for the conveyance of the stones, a work not much inferior, in my judgment, to the pyramid itself. This causeway is five furlongs in length, ten fathoms wide, and in height, at the highest part, eight fathoms. It is built of polished stone, and is covered with carvings of animals. To make it took ten years, as I said—or rather to make the causeway, the works on the mound where the pyramid stands, and the underground chambers, which Cheops intended as vaults for his own use; these last were built on a sort of island, surrounded by water introduced from the Nile by a canal. The pyramid itself was twenty years in building. It is a square, eight hundred feet each way, and the height the game, built entirely of polished stone, fitted together with the utmost care. The stones of which it is composed are none of them less than thirty feet in length.
The pyramid was built in steps, battlement-wise, as it is called, or, according to others, altar-wise. After laying the stones for the base, they raised the remaining stones to their places by means of machines formed of short wooden planks. The first machine raised them from the ground to the top of the first step. On this there was another machine, which received the stone upon its arrival, and conveyed it to the second step, whence a third machine advanced it still higher. Either they had as many machines as there were steps in the pyramid or possibly they had but a single machine, which, being easily moved, was transferred from tier to tier as the stone rose—both accounts are given, and therefore I mention both. The upper portion of the pyramid was finished first, then the middle, and finally the part which was lowest and nearest the ground. There is an inscription in Egyptian characters on the pyramid which records the quantity of radishes, onions, and garlic consumed by the laborers who constructed it; and I perfectly well remember that the interpreter who read the writing to me said that the money expended in this way was 1,600 talents of silver. If this then is a true record, what a vast sum must have been spent on the iron tools used in the work, and on the feeding and clothing of the laborers, considering the length of time the work lasted, which has already been stated, and the additional time—no small space, I imagine—which must have been occupied by the quarrying of the stones, their conveyance, and the formation of the underground apartments!
FOOTNOTES:
[14] From Book II of the "History." Translated by George Rawlinson. The Pyramid of Cheops was built about 3,500 b.c. Cheops, according to Herodotus, reigned fifty years.
IV
THE STORY OF PERIANDER'S SON[15]
After Periander had put to death his wife Melissa, it chanced that on his first affliction a second followed of a different kind. His wife had borne him two sons, and one of them had now reached the age of seventeen, the other of eighteen years, when their mother's father, Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus,[16] asked them to his court. They went, and Procles treated them with much kindness, as was natural, considering they were his own daughter's children. At length, when the time for parting came, Procles as he was sending them on their way said, "Know you now, my children, who it was that caused your mother's death?" The elder son took no account of this speech, but the younger, whose name was Lycophron, was sorely troubled at it—so much so that when he got back to Corinth, looking upon his father as his mother's murderer, he would neither speak to him nor answer when spoken to nor utter a word in reply to all his father's questionings. So Periander, at last growing furious at such behavior, banished his son from his house.
The younger son gone, he turned to the elder and asked him what it was that their grandfather had said to them. Then the son related in how kind and friendly a fashion the grandfather had received them; but, not having taken any notice of the speech which Procles had uttered at parting, he quite forgot to mention it. Periander insisted that it was not possible this should be all—their grandfather must have given them some hint or other—and he went on pressing his son till at last he remembered the parting speech and told it. Periander, after he had turned the whole matter over in his thoughts and felt unwilling to give way at all, sent a messenger to the persons who had opened their houses to his outcast son and forbade them to harbor him. Then the boy, when he had been driven from one friend, sought refuge with another, but was forced from shelter to shelter by the threats of his father, who menaced all those that took him in, and commanded them to shut their doors against him. Still, as fast as he was forced to leave one house he went to another, and was received by the inmates; for his acquaintances, altho in no small alarm, yet gave him shelter, as he was Periander's son.
At last Periander made proclamation that whoever harbored his son, or even spoke to him, should forfeit a certain sum of money to Apollo. On hearing this no one any longer liked to take him in, or even to hold converse with him, and he himself did not think it right to seek to do what was forbidden; so, abiding by his resolve, he made his lodging in the public porticoes. When four days had passed in this way, Periander, seeing how wretched his son was, that he neither washed nor took any food, felt moved with compassion toward him; wherefore, foregoing his anger, he approached the lad, and said, "Which is better, oh, my son, to fare as now thou farest or to receive my crown and all the good things that I possess, on the one condition of submitting thyself to thy father? See, now, tho my own child, and lord of this wealthy Corinth, thou hast brought thyself to a beggar's life, because thou must resist and treat with anger him whom it least behooves thee to oppose. If there has been a calamity, and thou bearest me ill will on that account, bethink thee that I too feel it, and am the greater sufferer, inasmuch as it was by me that the deed was done.