y a
destruction of at least one million of his species, unprovoked but by
his ambition, without any motives but pride, cruelty, and madness, and
without any benefit to himself (for Justin expressly tells us he did not
maintain his conquests), but solely to make so many people, in so
distant countries, feel experimentally how severe a scourge Providence
intends for the human race, when he gives one man the power over many,
and arms his naturally impotent and feeble rage with the hands of
millions, who know no common principle of action, but a blind obedience
to the passions of their ruler.

The next personage who figures in the tragedies of this ancient theatre
is Semiramis; for we have no particulars of Ninus, but that he made
immense and rapid conquests, which doubtless were not compassed without
the usual carnage. We see an army of about three millions employed by
this martial queen in a war against the Indians. We see the Indians
arming a yet greater; and we behold a war continued with much fury, and
with various success. This ends in the retreat of the queen, with scarce
a third of the troops employed in the expedition; an expedition which,
at this rate, must have cost two millions of souls on her part; and it
is not unreasonable to judge that the country which was the seat of war
must have been an equal sufferer. But I am content to detract from this,
and to suppose that the Indians lost only half so much, and then the
account stands thus: in this war alone (for Semiramis had other wars) in
this single reign, and in this one spot of the globe, did three millions
of souls expire, with all the horrid and shocking circumstances which
attend all wars, and in a quarrel, in which none of the sufferers could
have the least rational concern.

The Babylonian, Assyrian, Median, and Persian monarchies must have
poured out seas of blood in their formation, and in their destruction.
The armies and fleets of Xerxes, their numbers, the glorious stand made
against them, and the unfortunate event of all his mighty preparations,
are known to everybody. In this expedition, draining half Asia of its
inhabitants, he led an army of about two millions to be slaughtered, and
wasted by a thousand fatal accidents, in the same place where his
predecessors had before by a similar madness consumed the flower of so
many kingdoms, and wasted the force of so extensive an empire. It is a
cheap calculation to say, that the Persian empire, in its w