need not here enlarge upon the causes and signs of that importance; we will point now to another fact by which its case differed from most other events of contemporary history. This fact is the comparative ignorance of the manners and character of the Persians which still prevailed among the Greeks. The enormous size of their armies, their boundless wealth and luxury, their barbarous tongues and dark faces,—these, exaggerated to still greater proportions in the popular imagination, produced an impression of dim and indefinite greatness, not unlike that in which the mist of time veiled the heroes of mythology. How fully aware the poet was of this is amply shown by his manner of dealing with the subject. He has kept as far as possible from familiar names and places; his hero is not the victorious Greek, but the defeated Persian king; the scene is not the battle-field,—not Marathon, or Thermopylæ, or Salamis,—but the palace of Xerxes, far away in the wonder-land of the east; and all is treated from the Persian side. Instead of the triumph of Israel, he gives us the fears and sorrows of the mother of Sisera and her attendant ladies.
Very much, then, is gained by this treatment. Not only is Xerxes greater in his fall than even Miltiades in his triumph,—as a despot, if great at all, is greater than one leader among many can be in a free people,—but the familiar event is set in a new light, as a Persian calamity instead of a Greek success, and in a light even more flattering to the national pride of Athens.
We have spoken at length on this point, lest it
