Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/45

 30 History op Art in Antiquity. court of Darius and Xerxes by Demaratus, where the primary rule was never to contradict or thwart in any way the royal caprice, clearly shows that Greek politicians, accustomed to a government carried on by debate^ in which it was necessary to persuade equals, must often have felt embarrassed lest they should offend the sus- ceptibilities of their royal master.* Contact with Greece and the splendid examples of her political and intellectual life had no counteracting influence on Persia; quite the contrary. As time went on the evil effects of her government became more and more manifest ; at the head was a prince enervated by harem life^ intent upon repressing intrigues and rival claims of near kinsmen by wholesale massacres, whose growing incapacity to govern peoples whom he never saw, or control the movements of armies he had ccnscfl to command, were known to all. The religious beliefs of Greece, which, thanks to the prestige of poetry and art, Iiad spread with astonishing rapidity along the coasts of the Mediterranean, and above all the Italian peninsula, among the Etruscans, SabelUans and Latins, would seem to have waited until Alexander, to cross Taurus and penetrate into the interior. Conquest had brought under the dominion of the Persians the whole of Anterior Asia and forced them out of their secluded plateau, but whilst they retained Ahur^- Mazda as their god, and ascribed to him their victories, they yielded, as we have seen, to the attractions of alien creeds ; but the deities they admitted into their pantheon belonged to nations amongst whom their kings were wont to spend part of the year.' Thus Anahita, by royal decree, received the public vows of princes and Persian satraps, and it is just possible that, in places, the Mylitta of Chaidaea and the Syrian Ashtoreth shared the same fortune. In Egypt,. such amon^ the Achaemenidae as were gifted with political insight did homage to Baal-Ammon, Ptah, Osiris, and Apis, the earthly representative of the latter at Isis and Neith. In Greece, on the contrary, the Persians destroyed ail the temples they liq;hted upon, and there is no indication from which we might infer that they tried to propitiate gods whose altars they had violated and who visited on them their acts of violence, or that they learnt the names or invoked the might of Zeus, Apollo, Athene, and Hera.* from Assyriaoi and A»t» (i. 131). Digitized by Google
 * Herodotus, vii. 3, tot 105, 209, 23.4-237 ; viii. 65.
 * This is clearly the meaning of Herodotus when he speaks of borrowings n>ade
 * To this ttere>ras one exceptioa In 490 B.& Datii not only spared tfie DeUan