[6] As for the treasures, Cyrus allowed the captors to keep them, but he had the absconders beheaded out of hand, so that for the future a thief by night was hardly to be found.

Thus the Persians passed their time.

[7] But the Medes drank and feasted and made music and took their fill of good cheer and all delights; there was plenty to serve their purpose, and work enough for those who did not sleep.
[8] Cyaxares, the king of the Medes, on the very night when Cyrus set forth, drank himself drunk in company with the officers in his own quarters to celebrate their good fortune.

Hearing uproar all about him, he thought that the rest of the Medes must have stayed behind in the camp, except perhaps a few, but the fact was that their domestics, finding the masters gone, had fallen to drinking in fine style and were making a din to their hearts' content, the more so that they had procured wine and dainties from the Assyrian camp.

[9] But when it was broad day and no one knocked at the palace gate except the guests of last night's revel, and when Cyaxares heard that the camp was deserted--the Medes gone, the cavalry gone--and when he went out and saw for himself that it was so, then he fumed with indignation against Cyrus and his own men, to think that they had gone off and left him in the lurch.