he may show the future, and the remedy, if there be any. They praise the dead monarch, who "wasted not his subjects' blood," and with repeated cries call him from the tomb. Darius comes. The ghost rises from the ground before his tomb, like the ghost in "Hamlet," in
"That fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Persia
Did sometimes march;"
and, anxiously startled, asks what troubles are troubling the state. Like the Danish king, Darius, for all his greatness, speaks with awe and reverence of the realms from which he comes: the gods there are stern, and will not easily allow the dead to return; his time is short; the "fearful summons" will soon call him back. He hears the full story of the calamity, and attributes all to the arrogance and rashness of his son, who had dared to chain the sacred Hellespont and divine Bosporus, and "to rise above the gods and Neptune's might.""Those who urged him on," says the ghost, "to this mad enterprise, have done a deed of ruin such as never yet was done to Persia, and have wasted the grand fabric which so many illustrious kings had raised. Greece must be attacked no more; the very earth fights for her, destroying your troops by famine and disease. The remnant who survive shall not return. In their wanton insolence they have overthrown temples and statues of the gods, and now heaven's anger is upon them. On Platæa's fields they shall lie in heaps, to teach mortals humility."
