of keeping off foreign enemies; and of furnishing an adequate military contingent for the foreign enterprises of the great king. To every satrap was attached a royal secretary or comptroller of the revenue, who probably managed the imperial finances in the province, and to whom the court of Susa might perhaps look as a watch upon the satrap himself. The satrap or the secretary apportioned the sum payable by the satrapy in the aggregate among the various component districts, towns, or provinces, leaving to the local authorities in each of these latter the task of assessing it upon individual inhabitants. From necessity, therefore, as well as from indolence of temper and political incompetence, the Persians were compelled to respect the authorities which they found standing both in town and country, and to leave in their hands a large measure of genuine influence. Often even the petty kings who had governed separate districts during their state of independence, prior to the Persian conquest, retained their title and dignity as tributaries to the court of Susa. The empire of the great king was thus an aggregate of heterogeneous elements, connected together by no tie except that of common fear and subjection—noway coherent nor self-supporting, nor pervaded by any common system or spirit of nationality.'
Continuation through Greek and Roman History. How Darius,
in consequence of the assistance rendered by the Athenians to the Ionian
Greeks of Asia Minor, who had revolted against him (B. C. 502), sent a
vast Persian army into European Greece; how this army was defeated by
the Athenian general, Miltiades, with only 11,000 men, in the glorious
battle of Marathon (B. C. 490); how, ten years later, Xerxes, the son and
successor of Darius, undertook an expedition against Greece with a host
of several millions, and was defeated by Themistocles in a naval battle at
Salamis (B. C. 480), which was followed by two contemporaneous defeats
of his lieutenants at Platæa and Mycale (B. C. 479); how the Persians
were thus finally driven back into Asia; how for a century and a-half
relations, sometimes hostile and sometimes friendly, were maintained between
the Greek states and the Persian monarchs, the degenerate successors
of Darius and Xerxes, under whom the empire had begun to crumble;
how at length, in the reign of Darius Codomannus (B. C. 324), Alexander
the Great retaliated on the Persians the wrongs they had done the
Greeks by invading and destroying their decrepit empire, and organizing
all the countries between the Adriatic and the Indus under, not a Semitic,
as in the case of the Assyrian empire, nor an Indo-Germanic, as in the
case of the Persic empire, but a Greek or Pelasgic system; how, on Alexander's
death (B. C. 323), this vast agglomeration of the human species
fell asunder into three Greek monarchies—the Macedonian monarchy, including
the states of European Greece; the Egyptian monarchy of the
Ptolemies, including, besides Egypt, Ph[oe]nicia, Palestine, and Arabia; and
the Syrian monarchy of the Seleucidæ, comprehending, although with a
weak grasp, Asia Minor (or at least parts of it which had belonged to the
Lydian and Assyrian empires), Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia—with the
loss, however, of the countries between the Tigris and the Indus, where a
germ of independence arose (B. C. 236) in a native nomad dynasty, which
ultimately united all the tribes of Iran in one empire, called the Parthian
