Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/266

 256 History of Art in Antiquity. one after another every imaginable combination, such at least as the nature of the materials and the sites fixed upon permitted him to take up. On the other hand, royal existence was very complex ; its needs were many and most diverse, and it was imperative that the edifices in which it would be carried on should satisfy them all. Space must be found to place the king, his family, and his harem in conditions so vast and luxurious as should permit of those refinements and soft living without which the Persians — unlike their ruder and sober progenitors, who with Cyrus had subjugated Asia — could no longer dispense with.' Around the monarch had to be grouped a whole host of officials, body-guards and serving -men, and, next to the private apartments, those vast state-rooms suited for public ceremonies and national festivals. Such residences involved, accordinq' to localities, dis- tributions more or less spacious, more or less complete. Capitals, as Ecbatana. Susa, and Persepoli;, were not alone in possessing royal palaces. There were houses also in lesser centres where kings stopped a few days durin^^ their periodical progress through their states,' so as to escape from the extreme of cold and heat, which they would have found irksome and not void of actual suffering. All they had to do was to profit by the marked difference of climate induced by the relief of the soil, to shift their quarters from the neighbourhood of the sea and the plains of Mesopotamia in summer, for the first ledges of the Iranic plateau, or, further still, to the foot of the lofty mountain ranges which command it on the north. Hence they dividtxl the year between Babylon and Susa. In the spring they would, doubtless, go for a few weeks to Taoce, on the Persian Gulf, a little way from modern Bender-Bushir. They would then journey back to Ecbatana, where during the whole summer they enjoyed the crisp refreshing breezes blowing from the hills, sitting under beautiful trees watered by clear mountain torrents which rush with roaring sound down the gorges of Demawend. In the autumn they resided at Persepolis.^ Of course, a mere " box," such as the kings owned on the seaboard, could not be on the same scale as the palace at Susa, where they made a longer stay and received foreign embassies. Yet even at Susa or Babylon a winter house «»P. S«3)- ' Atheiunis, xil 8. L.iyu,^cd by Google
 * StntbOb XV. iiL 3.