Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete

[ Such are the expressions of Herodotus. His testimony is corroborated by the anecdotes in his own history, and, indeed, by all other ancient authorities.

45 (return (#x13_x_13_i14))

[ Dinon. (Apud Athen., lib. xiii.) observes, that the Persian queen tolerated the multitude of concubines common to the royal seraglio, because they worshipped her, like a divinity.

46 (return (#x13_x_13_i14))

[ See, in addition to more familiar authorities, the curious remarks and anecdotes relative to the luxury of the Persian kings, in the citations from Dinon, Heraclides, Agathocles, and Chares of Mitylene, scattered throughout Athenaeus, lib. xii., xiii., xiv.; but especially lib. xii.

47 (return (#x13_x_13_i14))

[ Strabo, lib. xv, Herod., lib. i., c. cxxxi., etc.

48 (return (#x13_x_13_i14))

[ Among innumerable instances of the disdain of human life contracted after their conquest by those very Persians who, in their mountain obscurity, would neither permit their sovereign to put any one to death for a single offence, nor the master of a household to exercise undue severity to a member of his family (Herod., lib. i., c. cxxxvii.), is one recorded by Herodotus, and in the main corroborated by Justin. Darius is at the siege of Babylon; Zopyrus, one of the seven conspirators against the magian, maims himself and enters Babylon as a deserter, having previously concerted with Darius that a thousand men, whose loss he could best spare, should be sent one day to the gate of Semiramis, and two thousand, another day, to the gates of Ninus, and four thousand, a third day, to the Chaldaean gates. All these detachments Zopyrus, at the head of the Babylonians, deliberately butchered. The confidence of the Babylonians thus obtained, Zopyrus was enabled to betray the city to the king. This cold-blooded and treacherous immolation of seven thousand subjects was considered by the humane Darius and the Persians generally a proof of the most illustrious virtue in Zopyrus, who received for it the reward of the satrapy of Babylon. The narrative is so circumstantial as to bear internal evidence of its general truth. In fact, a Persian would care no more for the lives of seven thousand Medes than a Spartan would care for the lives of suspected Helots.

49 (return (#x13_x_13_i14))

[ Herodot., lib. i., c. cxxxiv. The Pasargadae, whom the ancient writers evidently and often confound with the whole Persian population, retained the old education and severe discipline for their youth, long after the old virtues had died away. (See Strabo, xv., Herod., lib. i., and the rhetorical romance of Xenophon.) But laws and customs, from which the animating spirit of national opinion and sentiment has passed, are but the cenotaphs of dead forms embalmed in vain.

50 (return (#x13_x_13_i21))

[ Ctesias, 20.

51 (return (#x13_x_13_i24))

[ Herod., lib vii., c. xi.

52 (return (#x13_x_13_i26))

[ Juvenal, Richardson, etc. The preparations at Mount Athos commenced three years before Xerxes arrived at Sardis. (Compare Herod., l. vii. 21, with 33, 37.)

53 (return (#x13_x_13_i28))

[ Differently computed; according to Montfaucon, the sum total may be estimated at thirty-two millions of Louis d’ors.

54 (return (#x13_x_13_i36))

[ It must be confessed that the tears of Xerxes were a little misplaced. He wept that men could not live a hundred years, at the very moment when he meditated destroying a tolerable portion of them as soon as he possibly could.—Senec. de Brev. Vit., c. 17.

55 (return (#x13_x_13_i38))

[ Common also to the ancient Germans.

56 (return (#x13_x_13_i39))

[ For this reason—whoever died, whether by disease or battle, had his place immediately supplied. Thus their number was invariably the same.

57 (return (#x13_x_13_i41))

[ Diod. Sic.

58 (return (#x13_x_13_i42))

[ See note [Footnote 48:.

59 (return (#x14_x_14_i2))

[ Her., lib. vii., c. 138.

60 (return (#x14_x_14_i8))

[ Mueller on the Greek Congress.

61 (return (#x14_x_14_i9))

[ Mueller on the Greek Congress.

62 (return (#x14_x_14_i19))

[ Anaxandrides, king of Sparta, and father of Cleomenes and Leonidas, had married his niece: she was barren. The Ephors persuaded him to take another wife; he did so, and by the second wife. Cleomenes was born. Almost at the same time, the first wife, hitherto barren, proved with child. And as she continued the conjugal connexion, in process of time three sons were born; of these Leonidas was the second. But Cleomenes, though the offspring of the second wife, came into the world before the children by the first wife and therefore had the prior right to the throne.

63 (return (#x14_x_14_i21))

[ It is impossible by any calculations to render this amount more credible to modern skepticism. It is extremely likely that Herodotus is mistaken in his calculation; but who shall correct him?

64 (return (#x14_x_14_i30))

[ The Cissii, or Cissians, inhabited the then fertile province of Susiana, in which was situated the capital of Susa. They resembled the Persians in dress and manners.

65 (return (#x14_x_14_i31))

[ So Herodotus (lib. vii., c. 218); but, as it was summer, the noise was probably made rather by the boughs that obstructed the path of the barbarians, than by leaves on the ground.

66

[ Diod. Sic., xi., viii.

67 (return (#x14_x_14_i38))

[ Justin, ii., ix.

68 (return (#x14_x_14_i39))

[ Another Spartan, who had been sent into Thessaly, and was therefore absent from the slaughter of Thermopylae, destroyed himself.

69 (return (#x14_x_14_i41))