r them, watch over them,
submit to endless and most humiliating privations in their behalf, and
commit, if commanded to do so, the most inexcusable and atrocious
crimes to sustain the demigods they have thus made in their lofty
estate, we have, in the case of this Persian monarchy, one of the most
extraordinary exhibitions.

The Persian monarchy appears, in fact, even as we look back upon it
from this remote distance both of space and of time, as a very vast
wave of human power and grandeur. It swelled up among the populations
of Asia, between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, about five
hundred years before Christ, and rolled on in undiminished magnitude
and glory for many centuries. It bore upon its crest the royal line
of Astyages and his successors. Cyrus was, however, the first of the
princes whom it held up conspicuously to the admiration of the world
and he rode so gracefully and gallantly on the lofty crest that
mankind have given him the credit of raising and sustaining the
magnificent billow on which he was borne. How far we are to consider
him as founding the monarchy, or the monarchy as raising and
illustrating him, will appear more fully in the course of this
narrative.

Cotemporaneous with this Persian monarchy in the East, there
flourished in the West the small but very efficient and vigorous
republics of Greece. The Greeks had a written character for their
language which could be easily and rapidly executed, while the
ordinary language of the Persians was scarcely written at all. There
was, it is true, in this latter nation, a certain learned character,
which was used by the priests for their mystic records, and also for
certain sacred books which constituted the only national archives. It
was, however, only slowly and with difficulty that this character
could be penned, and, when penned, it was unintelligible to the great
mass of the population. For this reason, among others, the Greeks
wrote narratives of the great events which occurred in their day,
which narratives they so embellished and adorned by the picturesque
lights and shades in which their genius enabled them to present the
scenes and characters described as to make them universally admired,
while the surrounding nations produced nothing but formal governmental
records, not worth to the community at large the toil and labor
necessary to decipher them and make them intelligible. Thus the Greek
writers became the historians, not only of