The
intrigues of the party favourable to the invasion of Europe were
backed by the representations of the Grecian exiles. The family and
partisans of the Pisistratidae had fixed themselves in Susa, and the
Greek subtlety and spirit of enterprise maintained and confirmed, for
that unprincipled and able faction, the credit they had already
established at the Persian court. Onomacritus, an Athenian priest,
formerly banished by Hipparchus for forging oracular predictions, was
now reconciled to the Pisistratidae, and resident at Susa. Presented
to the king as a soothsayer and prophet, he inflamed the ambition of
Xerxes by garbled oracles of conquest and fortune, which, this time,
it was not the interest of the Pisistratidae to expose.

About the same period the Aleuadae, those princes of Thessaly whose
policy seems ever to have been that of deadly hostility to the Grecian
republics, despatched ambassadors to Xerxes, inviting him to Greece,
and promising assistance to his arms, and allegiance to his sceptre.

II. From these intrigues Xerxes aroused himself in the second year of
his reign, and, as the necessary commencement of more extended
designs, conducted in person an expedition against the rebellious
Egyptians. That people had neither military skill nor constitutional
hardihood, but they were inspired with the most devoted affection for
their faith and their institutions. This affection was to them what
the love of liberty is in others--it might be easy to conquer them, it
was almost impossible to subdue. By a kind of fatality their history,
for centuries, was interwoven with that of Greece: their perils and
their enemies the same. The ancient connexion which apocryphal
tradition recorded between races so opposite, seemed a typical
prophecy of that which actually existed in the historical times. And
if formerly Greece had derived something of civilization from Egypt,
she now paid back the gift by the swords of her adventurers; and the
bravest and most loyal part of the Egyptian army was composed of
Grecian mercenaries. At the same time Egypt shared the fate of all
nations that intrust too great a power to auxiliaries. Greeks
defended her, but Greeks conspired against her. The adventurers from
whom she derived a fatal strength were of a vain, wily, and irritable
temperament. A Greek removed from the influence of Greece usually
lost all that was honest, all that was noble in the national
character; and with