people. Immense riches flowed to him, therefore, on all
sides, and it was a circumstance particularly favourable to merchants in that country, that it was governed by written laws that screened their properties from any remarkable violence or injustice.
I suppose the phrase in scripture, "The law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not *[1]," must mean only written laws, by which those countries were governed, without being left to the discretion of the judge, as all the East was, and as it actually now is.
In this situation the country was at the birth of Cyrus, who, having taken Babylon †[2] and slain Belshazzer ‡[3], became master of the whole trade and riches of the East. Whatever character writers give of this great Prince, his conduct, with regard to the commerce of the country, shews him to have been a weak one: For, not content with the prodigious prosperity to which his dominions had arrived, by the misfortune of other nations, and perhaps by the good faith kept by his subjects to merchants, enforced by those written laws, he undertook the most absurd and disastrous project of molesting the traders themselves, and invading India, that all at once he might render himself master of their riches. He executed this scheme just as absurdly as he formed it; for, knowing that large caravans of merchants came into Persia and Assyria from India, through the Ariana, (the desert coast that runs all along the Indian Ocean to
- ↑ * Dan. chap. vi. ver. 8. and Esther, chap. i. ver. 19.
- ↑ † Ezra, chap. v. ver. 14 and chap. vi. ver. 5.
- ↑ ‡ Dan. chap. v. ver. 30.
- Dan. chap. vi. ver. 8. and Esther, chap. i. ver. 19. † Ezra, chap. v. ver. 14 and chap. vi. ver. 5.
‡ Dan. chap. v. ver. 30.
