ns, Susians, Medes, Armenians, Iranians from Bactriana, Sakae, and
Indians were all in readiness to do their best, and were accompanied
by every instrument of military warfare employed in Oriental tactics;
chariots armed with scythes, the last descendants of the chariotry which
had dominated all the battle-fields from the time of the XVIIIth Theban
dynasty down to the latest Sargonids, and, employed side by side with
these relics of a bygone day, were Indian elephants, now for the first
time brought into use against European battalions. These picked troops
sold their lives dearly, but the perfection of the Macedonian arms, and,
above all, the superiority of the tactics employed by their generals,
carried the day; the evening of the 30th of September found Darius in
flight, and the Achaemenian empire crushed by the furious charges of
Alexander's squadrons. Babylon fell into their hands a few days later,
followed by Susa, and in the spring of 330, Ecbatana; and shortly after
Darius met his end on the way to Media, assassinated by the last of his
generals.

With his death, Persia sank back into the obscurity from which Cyrus had
raised her rather more than two centuries previously. With the exception
of the Medes, none of the nations which had exercised the hegemony of
the East before her time, not even Assyria, had had at their disposal
such a wealth of resources and had left behind them so few traces of
their power. A dozen or so of palaces, as many tombs, a few scattered
altars and stelae, remains of epics preserved by the Greeks, fragments of
religious books, often remodelled, and issuing in the Avesta--when
we have reckoned up all that remains to us of her, what do we find
to compare in interest and in extent with the monuments and wealth of
writings bequeathed to us by Egypt and Chaldaea? The Iranians received
Oriental civilisation at a time when the latter was in its decline, and
caught the spirit of decadence in their contact with it. In succeeding
to the patrimony of the nations they conquered, they also inherited
their weakness; in a few years they had lost all the vigour of their
youth, and were barely able to maintain the integrity of the empire
they had founded. Moreover, the great peoples to whom they succeeded,
although lacking the vigour necessary for the continuance of their
independent existence, had not yet sunk so low as to acquiesce in their
own decay, and resign themselves to allowing their national li