Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/37

 22 History of Art in Antiquity. being required to watch and report on his colleague ; whilst all were dependent on a permanent control, whose special duty was to prevent any attempt at jrevolt or the recovery of their inde- pendence. Thanks to these wise measures, the twenty-five or thirty satrapies into which Darius divided the empire furnished the central government with vast sums of money and numerous contingents.* It is impossible, even approxitnately, to form an estimate of the whole forces the Great king, in time of war, was able to move in the field. The figures found in Greek historians are evidently much beyond the mark ; but, given the extent of the territory, we can hardly conceive any limits to the armaments, save those arising from difficulties of transport, commissariat; and the distances to be traversed. The revenue of the sovereign was derived from two main sources : payments in kind levied for the maintenance of the army and his household, and a tribute payable in precious metals. The hitter alone amounted to no less than 146 cuboic talents, or, in silver weight, to 82.799 francs. By computing the relative value money has had at different times, it is found that this budget of receipts corresponds to nearly to the payment of State servants ; for satraps and their retinue lived on the province they governed.* Thus a notion is gained of the enormous quantities of metal that went to swell the royal treasury, as well as the part played by the gold of Persia in her foreign policy, when her kings found it more! convenient and less risky to buy up Greece in detail than to fight her in pitched battles. The demands made upon the privy purse of the sovereign, as we now should say, left almost untouched the capital (consisting of specie, notably ingots) which was accumulating in thp strong- holds of Ecbatana and Susa, since the court expenditure, no matter how large, as already stated, was well>nigh covered by land dues delivered in kind, sheep and oxen, grain, and other comestibles. When all necessary outlay had been made, the sovereign had still at his disposal prodigious sums, the exact amount of which it would have puzzled him to name. Could uses be found for these more in harmony with the traditions of Oriental monarchies whose business probably consisted in keeping the court informed of all that went on in the province. — ^Trs. Digitized by Google
 * f 27,000^000 of English money, of which no fraction was diverted
 * Herodotus, iii. 95.
 * Maspbro^ Ifia. amimu its pet^ dei*Oriemi, and edit, p. 617.