Читать книгу The Best of the World's Classics (All 10 Volumes) - Henry Cabot Lodge - Страница 9

[5] From Book I of the "History." Translated by Isaac Taylor. Cyrus, after capturing Babylon, did not destroy it; it was Darius Hystaspes who razed its walls and towers. Darius Hystaspes was the father of that Darius who succeeded to the Persian throne after the failure of male heirs to Cyrus. Xerxes carried further the work of destruction at Babylon. Its permanent decay was accelerated still more by the founding, in its neighborhood, of Seleucia in 300 b.c. In the time of Pliny it had become a dismal and silent place.

[6] Equivalents in English feet for these measurements have been estimated as eighty-five feet for the width and three hundred and thirty-five feet for the height.

[7] Now called the Persian Gulf.

[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.