whole
army from the Black and Red Seas toward the nitre-covered plains of
Mesopotamia in the ensuing spring; the passage of the Euphrates fringed
with its weeping-willows at the broken bridge of Thapsacus; the crossing
of the Tigris; the nocturnal reconnaissance before the great and
memorable battle of Arbela; the oblique movement on the field; the
piercing of the enemy's centre--a manoeuvre destined to be repeated
many centuries subsequently at Austerlitz; the energetic pursuit of
the Persian monarch; these are exploits not surpassed by any soldier of
later times.

A prodigious stimulus was thus given to Greek intellectual activity.
There were men who had marched with the Macedonian army from the Danube
to the Nile, from the Nile to the Ganges. They had felt the hyperborean
blasts of the countries beyond the Black Sea, the simooms and
sand-tempests of the Egyptian deserts. They had seen the Pyramids which
had already stood for twenty centuries, the hieroglyph-covered obelisks
of Luxor, avenues of silent and mysterious sphinxes, colossi of monarchs
who reigned in the morning of the world. In the halls of Esar-haddon
they had stood before the thrones of grim old Assyrian kings, guarded by
winged bulls. In Babylon there still remained its walls, once more than
sixty miles in compass, and, after the ravages of three centuries and
three conquerors, still more than eighty feet in height; there were
still the ruins of the temple of cloud encompassed Bel, on its top was
planted the observatory wherein the weird Chaldean astronomers had held
nocturnal communion with the stars; still there were vestiges of the two
palaces with their hanging gardens in which were great trees growing in
mid-air, and the wreck of the hydraulic machinery that had supplied
them with water from the river. Into the artificial lake with its vast
apparatus of aqueducts and sluices the melted snows of the Armenian
mountains found their way, and were confined in their course through
the city by the embankments of the Euphrates. Most wonderful of all,
perhaps, was the tunnel under the river-bed.

EFFECT ON THE GREEK ARMY. If Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon, presented
stupendous and venerable antiquities reaching far back into the night of
time, Persia was not without her wonders of a later date. The pillared
halls of Persepolis were filled with miracles of art--carvings,
sculptures, enamels, alabaster libraries, obelisks, sphinxes, colossal
bulls. Ecbatana, the