298 HISTORY OF GREECE. Besides this great town of Babylon itself, there were through out the neighborhood, between the canals which united the Eu- than Herodotus, but the few fragments remaining are hardly at all descriptive (see Berosi Fragm. pp. 64-67, ed. Richter). The magnitude of the works described by Herodotus naturally provokes suspicions of exaggeration ; but there are good grounds for trusting him, in ny judgment, on all points which fell under his own vision and means of verification, as distinguished from past facts, on which he could do no more than give what he heard. He had bestowed much attention on Assyria and its phenomena, as is evident from the fact that he had written (or prepared to write, if the suspicion be admissible that the work was never completed, Fabricius, Biblioth. Graec. ii, 20, 5) a special Assyrian history, which has not reached us ('Aaavpioiai hoyoiai, i, 106-184). He is very precise in the measures of which he speaks ; thus having described the dimensions of the walls in " royal cubits," he goes on immediately to tell us how much that measure differs from an ordinary cubit. He designedly suppresses a part of what he had heard respecting the produce of the Babylonian soil, from the mere apprehension of not being believed. To these reasons for placing faith in Herodotus we may add another, not less deserving of attention. That which seems incredible in the construc- tions which he describes, arises simply from their enormous bulk, and the frightful quantity of human labor which must have been employed to execute them. He does not tell us, like Berosus (Fragm. p. 6G), that these wonder- ful fortifications were completed in fifteen days, nor like Quintus Curtius, that the length of one stadium was completed on each successive day of the year (v, 1, 26). To bring to pass all that Herodotus has described, is a mere question of time, patience, number of laborers, and cost of maintaining them, for the materials were both close at hand and inexhaustible. Now what would be the limit imposed upon the power and will of the old kings of Babylonia on these points ? We can hardly assign that limit with so much confidence as to venture to pronounce a statement of Herodotus incredible, when he tells us something which he has seen, or verified from eye-witnesses. The Pyramids and other works in Egypt are quite sufficient to make us mistrustful of our own means of appreciation ; and the great wall of China (extending for twelve hundred English miles along what was once the whole northern frontier of the Chinese empire, from twenty to twenty-five feet high, wide enough for six horses to run abreast, and furnished with a suitable number of gates and bastions) contains more material than all the buildings of the British empire put together, according to Barrow's estimate (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. i, p. 7, t. v.; <md Jdeler, TJeber die Zeitrechnung der Chincscn, in the Abhandlungen of <he Berlin Academy for 1837, ch. 3, p. 291). Ktesias gave the circuit of the walls of Babylon as three hundred and sixty stadia; Kleitarchus, three hundred and sixty-five stadia; Quintui Curtius, three hundred and sixlv-eight stadia ; and Strabo, three hundred
