With empire had come an enormous accession of wealth.

The accumulated stores of ages, the riches of the Ninevite kings--the "gold," the "silver," and the "pleasant furniture" of those mighty potentates, of which there was "none end"-- together with all the additions made to these stores by the Median monarchs, had fallen into his hands, and from comparative poverty he had come per saltum into the position of one of the wealthiest--if not of the very wealthiest--of princes.

An ordinary Oriental would have been content with such a result, and have declined to tempt fortune any more.

But Cyrus was no ordinary Oriental.

Confident in his own powers, active, not to say restless, and of an ambition that nothing could satiate, he viewed, the position which he had won simply as a means of advancing himself to higher eminence.