t
extraordinary features of the plot are the same, viz., the striking
likeness between the impostor and the dead prince, and the complete
success which, for a time, attended the fraud. In both narrations,
too, we can perceive, behind the main personages ostensibly brought
forward, the outline of a profound device of the magi to win back from
the Persian conquerors, and to secure to a Mede, the empire of the
East.

[40] Herodotus says it was resolved that the king could only marry
into the family of one of the conspirators; but Darius married two
daughters and one grand-daughter of Cyrus. It is more consonant with
eastern manners to suppose that it was arranged that the king should
give his own daughters in marriage to members of these six houses. It
would have been scarcely possible to claim the monopoly of the royal
seraglio, whether its tenants were wives or concubines, and in all
probability the king's choice was only limited (nor that very rigidly)
to the family of Cyrus, and the numerous and privileged race of the
Achaemenids.

[41] Besides the regular subsidies, we gather from Herodotus, I. c.
92, that the general population was obliged to find subsistence for
the king and his armies. Babylon raised a supply for four months, the
resources of that satrapy being adequate to a third part of Asia.

[42] That comparatively small and frontier part of India known to
Darius.

[43] Forming a revenue of more than 100,000l. sterling.--Heeren's
Persians, chap. ii.

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

[48] 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 househo