Thus Babylon was taken a second time, and when Darius was master of the Babylonians, he destroyed their walls and tore away all their gates, neither of which Cyrus had done at the first taking of Babylon ; moreover he impaled about three thousand men that were prominent among them; as for the rest, he gave them back their city to live in. Further, as the Babylonians, fearing for their food, had strangled their own women, as I described above, Darius provided wives to give them a posterity by appointing that each of the neighboring nations should send a certain number of women to Babylon ; the sum of the women thus collected was fifty thousand: these were the mothers of those who now inhabit the city.