Gyndes river
place · 2 works · 2 mentions · 2 anchored passages
Gyndes · that river · the river Gyndes
spoken of as
1 expressionin the texts
The Histories
River in which Cyrus's sacred horse drowns, subsequently divided by his army into hundreds of canals as punishment.
When Cyrus reached the Gyndes river on his march to Babylon, which rises in the mountains of the Matieni and flows through the Dardanean country into another river, the Tigris, that again passes the city of Opis and empties into the Red Sea —when, I say, Cyrus tried to cross the Gyndes, which was navigable there, one of his sacred white horses dashed recklessly into the river trying to get through …
After uttering this threat, he paused in his march against Babylon, and, dividing his army into two parts, drew lines planning out a hundred and eighty canals running every way from either bank of the Gyndes;
Then at the beginning of the following spring, when Cyrus had punished the Gyndes by dividing it among the three hundred and sixty canals, he marched against Babylon at last.
On Anger
A river which Cyrus's army was crossing when a royal horse was swept away.
he swore, therefore, that he would reduce that river, which was carrying off the king's retinue, to such a state that it could be crossed and trodden even by women.
For when, about to besiege Babylon, he was hurrying to a war whose greatest crises lie in opportunities, he tried to cross the river Gyndes, which spreads wide, at a ford—a thing scarcely safe even when it has felt the summer and been brought to its lowest.
To this he then transferred all the apparatus of war, and sat over the work so long that he split the channel into a hundred and eighty trenches, dispersed it into three hundred and sixty streams, and left it dry, the waters flowing off in different directions.