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The Gyndes is the Diyâla, which runs into the Tigris from the north-east about fifty miles from Babylon; this identification is clear from v. 52. 5, where it is the next river to South. For the Matieni cf. i. 72. 2 n. and iii. 94. 1. The Dardanians are otherwise unknown. Ὦπιν. H. mentions Opis because it is the highest point of navigation from the sea up the Tigris (Strabo, 739). Opis, which lay nearly fifty miles north of the Diyâla, at the junction of the Physcus and the Tigris (Xen. Anab. ii. 4. 25), was the scene of the Macedonian mutiny in 324 B. C. συμψήσας: literally ‘rub together’, and so ‘obliterate’. Here = ‘sucking down’.
κατέτεινε: i. e. his army. ‘He extended it.’ Maspero (iii. 635) accepts the story as partly true; Cyrus, he thinks, with the main army turned the defensive works on the north of Babylon, by lowering the water in the Tigris and the Gyndes. (Cf. Caes. B. C. i. 61 for a similar operation on the Sicoris in 49 B. C.) There was one battle (R. P. v2. 162) near Opis, as H. says (190. 1), and it was immediately followed by a revolt in Akkad (i. e. N. Babylonia). Meantime Gobryas, marching down the left bank of the Gyndes with a portion of the army, took Babylon by treachery, while the main defensive force was resisting Cyrus. In the same way Prášek (i. 229) accepts the story of c. 191 as describing the preparations to intimidate the capital, and force a capitulation. Even if these views be correct, the story told to H. was completely misleading; the city was taken by treachery (App. IV, § 6). But it is more likely that H. is partly right (as thus suggested) than that the whole narrative is an invention borrowed from the irrigation works on the Gyndes (as Sir H. Rawlinson, ad loc.). The form it takes is religious in colouring; ‘white horses’ were sacred to the sun (iii. 90. 3 n.; cf. vii. 40. 4); hence the offending river is divided into as many channels (360) as there are days in the year.
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