beautiful and
the magnificent, which, though not uncommon in the East, did not
characterize many of the Sassanian sovereigns. The architectural remains
of Chosroes, which will be noticed in a future chapter, the descriptions
which have come down to us of his palaces at Dastagherd and Canzaca, the
accounts which we have of his treasures, his court, his seraglio, even
his seals, transcend all that is known of any other monarch of his line.
The employment of Byzantine sculptors and architects, which his works
are thought to indicate, implies an appreciation of artistic excellence
very rare among Orientals. But against these merits must be set a number
of most serious moral defects, which may have been aggravated as time
went on, but of which we see something more than the germ, even while
he was still a youth. The murder of his father was perhaps a state
necessity, and he may not have commanded it, or have been accessory
to it before the fact; but his ingratitude towards his uncles, whom he
deliberately put to death, is wholly unpardonable, and shows him to have
been cruel, selfish, and utterly without natural affection, even in the
earlier portion of his reign. In war he exhibited neither courage nor
conduct; all his main military successes were due to his generals; and
in his later years he seems never voluntarily to have exposed himself to
danger. In suspecting his generals, and ill-using them while living, he
only followed the traditions of his house; but the insults offered to
the dead body of Shahen, whose only fault was that he had suffered a
defeat, were unusual and outrageous. The accounts given of his seraglio
imply either gross sensualism or extreme ostentation; perhaps we may
be justified in inclining to the more lenient view, if we take into
consideration the faithful attachment which he exhibited towards Shirin.
The cruelties which disgraced his later years are wholly without excuse;
but in the act which deprived him of his throne, and brought him to a
miserable end--his preference of Merdasas as his successor--he exhibited
no worse fault than an amiable weakness, a partiality towards the son of
a wife who possessed, and seems to have deserved, his affection.

The coins of the second Chosroes are numerous in the extreme, and
present several peculiarities. The ordinary type has, on the obverse,
the king's head in profile, covered by a tiara, of which the chief
ornament is a crescent and star between two outstr