ld a bridge across the Hellespont or the
Bosporus, to unite Europe and Asia; and he was also going to make an
incursion into the country of the Scythians, the people by whom Cyrus,
his great predecessor, had been defeated and slain. It would be a great
glory for him, he said, to succeed in a conquest in which Cyrus had so
totally failed.

But these plans would not answer the purpose which Atossa had in view.
She urged her husband, therefore, to postpone his invasion of the
Scythians till some future time, and first conquer the Greeks, and annex
their territory to his dominions. The Scythians, she said, were savages,
and their country not worth the cost of conquering it, while Greece
would constitute a noble prize. She urged the invasion of Greece, too,
rather than Scythia, as a personal favor to herself, for she had been
wanting, she said, some slaves from Greece for a long time--some of the
women of Sparta, of Corinth, and of Athens, of whose graces and
accomplishments she had heard so much.

There was something gratifying to the military vanity of Darius in being
thus requested to make an incursion to another continent, and undertake
the conquest of the mightiest nation of the earth, for the purpose of
procuring accomplished waiting-maids to offer as a present to his queen.
He became restless and excited while listening to Atossa's proposals,
and to the arguments with which she enforced them, and it was obvious
that he was very strongly inclined to accede to her views. He finally
concluded to send a commission into Greece to explore the country, and
to bring back a report on their return; and as he decided to make the
Greek physician the guide of the expedition, Atossa gained her end.

A full account of this expedition, and of the various adventures which
the party met with on their voyage, is given in our history of Darius.
It may be proper to say here, however, that the physician fully
succeeded in his plans of making his escape. He pretended, at first, to
be unwilling to go, and he made only the most temporary arrangements in
respect to the conduct of his affairs while he should be gone, in order
to deceive the king in regard to his intentions of not returning. The
king, on his part, resorted to some stratagems to ascertain whether the
physician was sincere in his professions, but he did not succeed in
detecting the artifice, and so the party went away. The physician never
returned.

Atossa had four sons. Xerxe