Although Darius seems rather to have possessed the ardour for
conquest than the genius for war, his reign was memorable for many
military triumphs, some cementing, others extending, the foundations
of the empire. A formidable insurrection of Babylon, which resisted a
siege of twenty-one months, was effectually extinguished, and the new
satrap government, aided by the yearly visits of the king, appears to
have kept from all subsequent reanimation the vast remains of that
ancient empire of the Chaldaean kings. Subsequently an expedition
along the banks of the Indus, first navigated for discovery by one of
the Greeks whom Darius took into his employ, subjected the highlands
north of the Indus, and gave that distant river as a new boundary to
the Persian realm. More important, had the fortunes of his son been
equal to his designs, was the alarming settlement which the monarch of
Asia effected on the European continent, by establishing his
sovereignty in Thrace and Macedonia--by exacting homage from the isles
and many of the cities of Greece--by breaking up, with the crowning
fall of Miletus, the independence and rising power of those Ionian
colonies, which ought to have established on the Asiatic coasts the
permanent barrier to the irruptions of eastern conquest. Against
these successes the loss of six thousand four hundred men at the
battle of Marathon, a less number than Darius deliberately sacrificed
in a stratagem at the siege of Babylon, would have seemed but a petty
counterbalance in the despatches of his generals, set off, as it was,
by the spoils and the captives of Euboea. Nor were the settlements in
Thrace and Macedon, with the awe that his vast armament excited
throughout that portion of his dominions, an insufficient recompense
for the disasters of the expedition, conducted by Darius in person,
against the wandering, fierce, and barbarous Mongolian race, that,
known to us by the name of Scythians, worshipped their war-god under
the symbol of a cimeter, with libations of human blood--hideous
inhabitants of the inhospitable and barren tracts that interpose
between the Danube and the Don.

VIII. Thus the heritage that passed from Darius to Xerxes was the
fruit of a long and, upon the whole, a wise and glorious reign. The
new sovereign of the East did not, like his father, find a disjointed
and uncemented empire of countries rather conquered than subdued,
destitute alike of regular revenues and local governm