Hereupon the remaining chiefs, alarmed for their safety, made their submission, consenting to pay an annual tribute, and admitting Assyrian officers into their territories, who watched, if they did not even control, the government.
We are now approaching the time when Media seems to have been first consolidated into a monarchy by the genius of an individual.

Sober history is forced to discard the shadowy forms of kings with which Greek writers of more fancy than judgment have peopled the darkness that rests upon the "origines" of the Medes.

Arbaces, Maudaces, Sosarmus, Artycas, Arbianes, Artseus, Deioces--Median monarchs, according to Ctesias or Herodotus, during the space of time comprised within the years B.C.

875 and 655--have to be dismissed by the modern writer without a word, since there is reason to believe that they are mere creatures of the imagination, inventions of unscrupulous romancers, not men who once walked the earth.

The list of Median kings in Ctesias, so far as it differs from the list in Herodotus, seems to be a pure forgery--an extension of the period of the monarchy by the conscious use of a system of duplication.