had masked his preparations so skilfully, that no intimation was conveyed to Susa until the march was about to commence. It was only then that Tissaphernes, seeing the siege of Miletus relinquished, and the vast force mustering at Sardis, divined that something more was meant than the mere conquest of Pisidian freebooters, and went up in person to warn the king; who began his preparations forthwith.[1] That which Tissaphernes had divined was yet a secret to every man in the army, to Proxenus as well as the rest,—when Cyrus, having confided the provisional management of his satrapy to some Persian kinsmen, and to his admiral the Egyptian Tamos, commenced his march in a south-easterly direction from Sardis, through Lydia and Phrygia.[2] Three days' march, a distance stated at twenty-two parasangs,[3] brought him to
- ↑ Xen. Anab. i, 2, 4; ii, 3, 19.Diodorus (xiv, 11) citing from Ephorus affirms that the first revelation to Artaxerxes was made by Pharnabazus, who had learnt it from the acuteness of the Athenian exile Alkibiades. That the latter should have had any concern in it, appears improbable. But Diodorus on more than one occasion, confounds Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes.
- ↑ Diodor. xiv, 19.
- ↑ The parasang was a Persian measurement of length, but according to Strabo, not of uniform value in all parts of Asia; in some parts, held equivalent to thirty stadia, in others to forty, in others to sixty (Strabo, xi, p. 518; Forbiger, Handbuch der Alten Geograph. vol. i, p. 555). This variability of meaning is no way extraordinary, when we recollect the difference between English, Irish, and German miles, etc. Herodotus tells us distinctly what he meant by a parasang, and what the Persian government of his day recognized as such in their measurement of the great road from Sardis to Susa, as well as in their measurements of territory for purposes of tribute (Herod, v, 53; vi, 43). It was thirty Greek stadia = nearly three and a half English miles, or nearly three geographical miles. The distance between every two successive stations, on the road from Sardis to Susa, (which was " all inhabited and all secure," {{greek missing), would seem to have been measured and marked in parasangs and fractions of a parasang. It seems probable, from the account which Herodotus gives of the march of Xerxes (vii, 26), that this road passed from Kappadokia and across the river Halys, through Kelasnae and Kolossae to Sardis; and therefore that the road which Cyrus took for his march, from Sardis at least as far as Kelaenae, must have been so measured and marked.Xenophon also in his summing up of the route, (ii, 2, 6; vii, 8, 26) implies the parasang as equivalent to thirty stadia, while he gives for the most part, each day's journey measured in parasangs. Now even as the
