The histories of Herodotus;

HERODOTUS yii
who studies the second book aright can trace the fibres that
unite it to the rest of the structure. It has not been simply
let in. The third book tells of Cambyses's conquest of Egypt,
his plans to subjugate other peoples of Africa, and various
performances of that eccentric monarch. But Greece is not
forgotten. Greeks formed part of the army of Cambyses,
and Polycrates of Samos was an ally of Cambyses, as he had
been an ally of Amasis under the former Egyptian dynasty.
Corinth made common cause with the Lacedaemonians against
Polycrates, and this leads to the story of Periander of Corinth.
Cambyses, Polycrates, and Periander are three shining ex-
amples of the unhappiness of supreme power, of the envy of
the gods. But Samos was a digression, and Herodotus apolo-
gizes for it as he resumes the thread of his narrative of Per-
sian history, and recounts the uprising of the false Smerdis,
the death of Cambyses, and the reign of Smerdis, his over-
throw, and the enthronement of his successor Darius, the
great organizer of the Persian Empire. Indians and Arabians
now come into the cycle. Samos is subjugated, and, as a
preface to the subjugation, we learn the fate of Polycrates,
and the book closes with an account of the revolt of Babylon
and the quelling of the same. The Persian Empire is firmly
rooted, and begins again to send forth its runners northward
and westward. In the fourth book we follow Darius into the
land of the Scythians, and many chapters are given up to
Scythian history and geography. The Scythian expedition
was a failure, and this failure encouraged the Ionians to plan
a revolt. Nor was the attempt to extend the Persian rule
over Libya an unqualified success. Most of the Libyans cared
naught for the Great King, but the tale of the famous colony
of Cyrene is told, and an account of the Libyans is given.
Largely ethnographical and geographical as the fourth book
is, it does not detach itself so much as does the second, and
prepares us for the closer complication of Greece and Persia
in the fifth. Thrace and Macedon furnish the introductory
chapters to the Ionian revolt, which is the main theme of the
remainder of the fifth book and the opening of the sixth.