Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/270

 General Characteristics of the Palace. 261 been without them ? The story Herodotus tells of Xerxes is well known. Finding himself in Lydia, he came upon so beautiful a plane tree as to become enamoured of it ; he decked it out with golden chains and bracelets of the same metal* as it had been a loved mistress, and set a guard to watch over it.^ The story is too strange and bizarre to have been trumped up, but its quaintness would strike the Greeks that followed in his train, and the memory of it lived in the country. It is in accord with what we know of the care taken by prince and satrap alike of their " paradises," those beautiful parks in which game was preserved ; the pleasure they found in planting and watching the fine growth of trees of various kinds.* Bom in a region where shady groves and water were even more scant than in Greece, Persians held til em as boons without which life would lose much of its savour. The importance they attached to them caused the Greeks to wonder. The latter were far too engrossed with intellectual pursuits, with gain and ambitious designs, to care for nature. One journeying through the islands of the Archipelago can always tell a Greek from a Turkish village. The latter is a green Island, the points of whose minarets bare'y outstrip the heads of sombre cypresses, of walnut, and plane trees. Greek villages, on the contrary, are more populous, richer, and industrious; but at a distance they have the appearance of enormous cubical masses of masonry, with here and there an isolated tree in some of the courtyards, looking quite forlorn amidst that stony mass. Wherever, as in Persia, a man endowed with worldly goods occupies his leisure in devisini^^ long vistas of sombre avenues, that shall be a refreshment to the eye, along with gurgling waters to also a description by the sa:ne author of the park of Pharnabazcs nt HaskyHon {Hil/cnica, IV. i. 15, 16), as well as that given by Plutarch {Ariaxerxcs, xxv.) of a royal p^rk situated in Northern Media. Curious instances as to Persian tastes will be found in an inscription from Dennenjik, near Magnena, on the Mseander, which MM. Cousin and Deachamps have transcribed ; it is the Greek translation of a de^pTtrh Darius Hystaspes addrcssei! to the satrap Gadates. In it the king con. gratulaiei his servant upon the care he bestows on the royal demesnes under his supervision, and the paina he takes *' to grow in that part of Asia adjuiuing on the i^gean pUmts whose native habitat is bcqpond Euphiates* {Sn ^ yip t^i^ ittmwns y^r, TOV? vipav Evpv xap^roi-s iiri to. KaTH) TTj<: Arrtni ftfpt] KaTa<f)VTfvu)v, iiraivw rrijv vpoOtfTii). This text, wtiicli M. Dcschamps h;ui obligingly communiraied to nic, appeared in the JbuiUtm de corrtspondctue heUattque, January, 1890. L^i^iu^cd by Google
 * HeitMiotus, vii. 31.
 * Xenophon, EwnomUsy iv. 20-32 (Park of Cyrus the Younger at Sardes). See