Given a woman without imagination or originality, and that woman deserves no credit whatsoever for her righteousness. She exists; she does not live; for her temptation possesses no attractive lure. Yet given another woman, of beauty, temper, brains, and for her the battles of good and evil will be waged till her fires are dead. Her better self must battle against ambition, passion, the blood of direct inheritance, the thousand ghostly guides that lead her into perilous ways, while on the scales of circumstances must hang the issue of her rise or fall. She must face still other foes, in men who are stronger than herself--men who seek her charms for weel or woe; for perfect love is a woman's highest goal, and a man may make or mar it by the mould of his great or little heart.
If, therefore, in her later days Semiramis was evil, the fault was not all her own. She chose her master--not the master of her mind, but the master of her woman's heart, and to him she gave her all. What wonder, then, that when her all was filched by lustful treachery, departing peace awoke a sleeping devil in her blood?
Great faults had Queen Semiramis, and many, as viewed by enlightened women from a reach of two thousand years; yet who shall say that evil would have claimed this splendid savage had fate not raised another savage to mould her destiny?
It is not the purpose of this work to present a series of historical facts, for even the legends of Semiramis are too absurd and fragmentary to admit of such a hope. Its aim--in emulation of the worthy Greeks--is, at least, to entertain, albeit a truth or two may now and again be handled carelessly. It treats of ancient loves and wars, a tangle of myth and probability--a patch-work, woven into a quilt which, at worst, may assist the reader in going peacefully to sleep.
King Ninus sat his war horse, gazing sadly out across the walls of Zariaspa. His cheek was bronzed by the brush of many winds, his muscles hardened by the toil of battle in a hundred lands; the blood of dauntless youth ran riot in his veins, yet it whispered at his heart that the King had failed.
Behind him the mountains of Hindu-Kush towered, dull and purple, in the morning light, their peaks obscured in coils of snake-like mist. Southward they ran, a ragged line of hills, till they reached the height of Hindu-Koh and claimed a brotherhood with the mighty Himalayas. To right and left the hill-steeps lay, a barren waste of rock and stunted shrubbery, while at the feet of Assyria's King stretched fertile valleys, and the plains of Bactria reaching away to the banks of the River Oxus.