Nias

“ But there is a chasm in the history of this empire from the death of Ninias, the son of Ninus, of about 800 years. The history of this empire during this period can only be supplied by conjecture. The governments of these nations were monarchies, but that of the Hebrews in the earliest periods of their history, was patriarchal.
The idea of conquest appears to have grown out of the conflicting interests of the shepherd kings: and from what we learn of them, we ought not to associate in our minds with any of them an extent of territory beyond that of a large plantation or a few thousand acres. ”

“ Nileus, a son of Codrus, who conducted a colony of Ionians to Asia, where he built Ephesus, Miletus, Priene, Colophon, Myus, Teos, Lebedos, Clazomenæ, &c. Pausanias, bk. 7, ch. 2, &c.――A philosopher who had in his possession all the writings of Aristotle. Athenæus, bk. 1.
Nilus, a king of Thebes, who gave his name to the river which flows through the middle of Egypt, and falls into the Mediterranean sea. The Nile, anciently called Ægyptus, is one of the most celebrated rivers in the world. ”

“ King Ninus himself sat down upon the river bank where the waters of the Tigris and the Khusur join, and here he wrought his plans. A band of men went northward to the forest lands, felled trees, and split them into boards with which they fashioned a fleet of wide flat boats. These boats, propelled by sweeps and pushing-poles, were manned by Phoenicia's sons, for Assyria knew no more of ship-craft than hillsmen know the camel's back; yet Ninus employed the skill of others in his self appointed task. ”

“ For generations the great oppressing city had slept buried beneath the fragments of its own ruins, its history lost, its very site forgotten. Its name had passed into the region of myth even in the age of the classical writers of Greece and Rome; Ninos or Nineveh had become a hero-king about whom strange legends were told, and whose conquests were fabled to have extended from the Mediterranean to India. Little was known of the history of the mighty Assyrian Empire beyond what might be learnt from the Old Testament, and that little was involved in doubt and obscurity. ”

“ But Nicias persuaded them to wait another full course of the moon, as if he had not seen it clear again as soon as ever it had passed the region of shadow where the light was obstructed by the earth.
In a manner abandoning all other cares, he betook himself wholly to his sacrifices, till the enemy came upon them with their infantry, besieging the forts and camp, and placing their ships in a circle about the harbor. Nor did the men in the galleys only, but the little boys everywhere got into the fishing-boats and rowed up and challenged the Athenians, and insulted over them. ”

“ The Athenian generals, who were waiting in expectation that it would be opened, soon perceived by the delay that their friends within had been baffled, and immediately resolved to make sure of Nisæa, which lay behind them; an acquisition important not less in itself, than as a probable means for the mastery of Megara. They set about the work with the characteristic rapidity of Athenians. Masons and tools in abundance were forthwith sent for from Athens, and the army distributed among themselves the wall of circumvallation round Nisæa in distinct parts. ”

“ The monk rose, and continued in solemn tones —
"Know then, O Nicias, that, with the aid of God, I will snatch this woman Thaïs from the unclean affections of the world, and give her as a spouse to Jesus Christ. If the Holy Spirit does not forsake me, Thaïs will leave this city and enter a nunnery."
"Beware of offending Venus," replied Nicias. "She is a powerful goddess; she will be angry with you if you take away her chief minister."
"God will protect me," said Paphnutius. "May He also illumine thy heart, O Nicias, and draw thee out of the abyss in which thou art plunged." ”

“ Now, my readers know that there were of old not less than ten cities known by the name of Nysa. At two of these, Nysa in India and Nysa in Ethiopia, Bacchus (Dio Nysus) was held in extreme reverence. In the last-named city, Ptolemy Philadelphus manifested his veneration for the god, by honouring the deity’s great festival after a pleasing fashion. The King had a figure of the joyous divinity made expressly for the occasion. It was eight cubits in length, and was drawn through the city, attired in a tunic of yellow and gold, with a Macedonian mantle hanging from the shoulders. ”

“ A fierce tribe of desert wanderers, who murdered and pillaged in the name of their great God Assur, left Arabia and marched northward until they reached the slopes of the mountains. Then they turned eastward and along the banks of the Euphrates they built a city which they called Ninua, a name which has come down to us in the Greek form of Nineveh. At once these new-comers, who are generally known as the Assyrians, began a slow but terrible warfare upon all the other inhabitants of Mesopotamia. ”

“ This was the ablest thing Nicias did in the whole of his conduct of the expedition. For having drawn out all the strength of the enemy, and made the city destitute of men, he set out from Catana, entered the harbor, and chose a fit place for his camp, where the enemy could least incommode him with the means in which they were superior to him, while with the means in which he was superior to them, he might expect to carry on the war without impediment. ”

“ Thus like an inner within an outer circle, there is developed in the centre of the Old World a zone of riverain lands, forming, so to say, a little world apart, and comprising such famous historical cities as Memphis, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Tyre, Antioch, Kphesus, Miletus, Smyrna, Athens, and Constantinople. In the length of its course the Nile is one of the great rivers of the world, and by many of the tribes along its banks the earth is supposed to be divided into two parts by this mysterious stream, coiled like a snake round the globe and grasping its tail in its mouth. ”

“ What need to starve in Bactria when plenty lieth along the Tigris and the Euphrates? Why break our teeth against a wall of stone when naught may come of it save a bleeding mouth? We storm a city, fling away a nation's wealth as though its coffers served a catapult! Our soldiers sicken at the lack of food and because of the bitterness of long defeat! If Ninus be in truth a god, then let him give this city into our hands ”

“ For the Egyptians say that the Nile in their country is not only the saviour and benefactor of the land, but also wards off destruction by fire, when the sun, throughout long periods, in conjunction or combination with fiery constellations, fills the atmosphere with heat and scorches everything. For it has not power enough, so they say, to evaporate or exhaust the fountains of the Nile. And so too neither from the Greeks has philosophy altogether departed, nor has she forsaken Athens or Sparta or Corinth. ”

“ I shall look upon the Ionian Sea, not merely from a train or a steamboat as before, but at long leisure: I shall see the shores where once were Tarentum and Sybaris, Croton and Locri. Every man has his intellectual desire; mine is to escape life as I know it and dream myself into that old world which was the imaginative delight of my boyhood. The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. ”

“ So well established was its claim to the foremost place in the development of civilisation, that the Greeks themselves regarded the Nilotic region as the common cradle of mankind. Whatever be the constituent ethnical elements of the nation to which we trace the germs of our intellectual life, it is certain that their civilisation was of African origin. It had its earliest seat in the narrow and fertile valley of the Nile, between the arid rock and the still more arid sands of the wilderness. ”

“ NINUS, in Greek mythology, the eponymous founder of Nineveh (q.v.) , and thus the city itself personified. He was said to have been the son of Belos or Bel, to have conquered in seventeen years the whole of western Asia with the help of Ariaeus, king of Arabia, and to have founded the first empire. During the siege of Bactra he met Semiramis, the wife of one of his officers, Onnes, whom he took from her husband and married. ”

“ Farewell, maiden; we must part....”
“Don’t leave me!” cried the girl, seizing Ninus’ robe. “Look!” she added drawing from her arm a glittering gold band, “if this is enough, take it.”
“I am easily satisfied,” said Ninus, snatching the gold. “Well then, I’ll tell you everything. Before a baetylus will show its power one must fast thrice seven days and hold no conversation with men; then the stone must be washed in spring-water and clad in swaddling clothes like a little child. Even this is not enough. A lamp must be lighted in a clean room in the house, incense offered, and prayers repeated. ”

“ It was pitch dark before we neared Nios, however, and as the moon was due to be late in rising that night we got no warning glimpse of the land, but were made aware of its approach only by a shapeless bulk in the dark which suddenly appeared on either hand, the entrance to the harbor being vaguely indicated by a single light, past which we felt our way at little more than a drifting pace until we were dimly conscious of hills all about, half-guessed rather than visible in the gloom. ”

“ From no other spot, perhaps, can the mind become so fully impressed by the fact that to the Nile, and the Nile alone, does Egypt owe all she has of fertility and wealth. Beyond is the desert of sand, a sea-bed without its animate forms, lifeless and waste. Dean Stanley has well observed, that the Nile, as it glides between the Tombs of the Pharaohs, and the City of the Caliphs, is indeed a boundary between two worlds. ”

“ Indeed we ourselves had been so fortunate, on the previous evening, as to attend this quaint nocturnal ceremony at the neighboring island of Ios, or Nios, as it is variously called.
Our little ship, as is the usual custom among the Greeks, had a shrine in the end of its saloon, with an icon, and a lamp was perpetually burning before it. The Greek takes his religion seriously, and makes it a part of his life afloat and ashore, it would seem. ”

“ And yet Nicias, the capitalist who worked this hideous trade, was the most pious and God-fearing man at Athens. So high was his reputation for integrity and religion, that the people insisted on appointing him again and again to commands for which he was wholly unfit; and when at last he ruined the great Athenian army before Syracuse, and lost his own life, by his extreme devoutness and his faith in the threats and warnings of the gods—even then the great sceptical historian, who cared for none of these things, condones all his blunders for the sake of his piety and his respectability. ”

“ To the Assyrians of Nineveh (as has been already mentioned) is ascribed in early times a very extensive empire, covering much of Upper Asia, as well as Mesopotamia or the country between the Euphrates and the Tigris. Respecting this empire,—its commencement, its extent, or even the mode in which it was put down,—nothing certain can be affirmed; but it seems unquestionable that many great and flourishing cities,—and a population inferior in enterprise, but not in industry, to the Phenicians,—were to be found on the Euphrates and Tigris, in times anterior to the first Olympiad. ”

“ The god indeed called the city Nysa, and the land Nysaea after his nurse Nysa. The mountain also which is near the city he named Meros (i.e. thigh) , because, according to the legend, he grew in the thigh of Zeus. From that time we inhabit Nysa, a free city, and we ourselves are independent, conducting our government with constitutional order. And let this be to thee a proof that our city owes its foundation to Dionysus; for ivy, which does not grow in the rest of the country of India, grows among us.”
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CHAPTER II. Alexander at Nysa. ”

“ Nevertheless the spirit of sturdy independence is one that has endured. The Greeks carried their vision of freedom further than the political independence of each state, and one of their chief characteristics was their personal freedom. In a speech to the Athenian army before the battle in the harbour at Syracuse, Nicias "reminded them that they were the inhabitants of the freest country in the world, and how in Athens there was no interference with the daily life of any man." ”

“ And in the next place, no man ever had so little reason to complain of the popular judgment as Nikias. The mistakes of the people in regard to him had always been those of indulgence, over-esteem, and over-constancy. But Nikias foresaw too well that he would have more to answer for at Athens than the simple fact of sanctioning retreat under existing circumstances. ”

“ Till at last Nicias falling down to Gylippus, "Let pity, O Gylippus," said he, "move you in your victory; not for me, who was destined, it seems, to bring the glory I once had to this end, but for the other Athenians; as you well know that the chances of war are common to all, and the Athenians used them moderately and mildly towards you in their prosperity." ”

“ Each petty canton had its own Nile, whose influence upon fertility and culture was sufficient to become worthy to propitiate, and therefore to personify. Had Greece been united under one monarchy, and characterized by one common monotony of soil, a single river, a single mountain, alone might have been deemed divine. ”