Persia from the Earliest Period to the Arab

62 HISTORY OF PERSIA.
Thapsacus, at which place
he at once forded the
Euphrates ; and thence, pushing forwards, at the rate
of about fourteen miles a day, in thirty-three days
more arrived within 120 miles of Babylon, without
encountering any enemy. As is so often the case,
want of resistance begat want of care, the march
became negligent, the men piled their arms on
waggons or beasts of burthen, and Cyrus himself exchanged
his horse for a chariot All of a sudden, a
single horseman at great speed announced the immediate
presence of the Great King and of his whole
army ; but, as three hours elapsed before the combat of
Cunaxa (8.0.401) commenced, there was time enough,
had Cyrus known anything of military tactics, to have
so disposed his army, as possibly to have changed the
fortune of the day. As it was, he did little more than
arrest the confusion into which his army was at first
thrown by this unexpected intelligence. The battle
that ensued was clearly very one-sided, as the army
of Artaxerxes far outnumbered that of his brother;
moreover, his cavalry was greatly in excess of those
of Cyrus. On the other hand, his scythed chariots,
though specially ordered to resist the Greeks,
fled at their first onslaught, and in their flight,
their friends more than their foes. The
damaged
actual battle occupied but a short time, ending as
is well known, in the complete defeat and death
of Cyrus, his cause having been greatly injured by
the impetuosity of the Greeks, who, like the Highlanders
of 1745-6, rushed madly in the pursuit, un-
heeding what necessarily followed, the outflanking
of Cyrus himself by the portion of the army under