Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/46

 Relations of Persia with Greece. 31 The diffusion of the Greek language in the interior of Asia Minor is coeval with the brilliant epoch of Ionian genius, when its progress was so steady as to daily infringe on the Phrygian, Lydian, Lycian, and other local dialects, and in the beginning of our era finally supplanting them. Nor was its success less marked in the direction of the Italian peninsula, where, if it did not replace exist- ing idioms — one of which, that of Latium, was destined to so grand a future — its superior literary form caused the Italians to borrow therefrom, not only the names of the gods and heroes of Greece, but those of numerous objects unknown to their rudimentary civilization before their intercourse with Hellas. To judge even from the latest inscriptions of the Achaemenid dynasty, nothing of the kind took place in Persia, since neither the words nor the syntax of her language betray sign or token of having been influenced by the Greek tongue. That the latter never became an official idiom, although the Greek subjects of the Great King could be counted by thousands, is proved by the monumental inscriptions of the Persepolitan palaces and those at BehbtQn, written in Persian, Susian, and Assyrian. To make known the edicts and mandates of the sovereign to nations speaking a Semitic dialect, the Ara- maic tongue and Aramaic letters were employed. Attached to the king's person were doubtless dragomans, through whose medium he treated with the envoys of Sparta, Athens, and Thebes; but no state department was created for Asiatic Greece, such as existed for the despatch of business relating to the western provinces, including Egypt, where the correspondence was carried on in Aramaic^ As. to rescripts from the seat of government and sanctuary, but actually oSettd incense to Artemis and Apollo (Herodotus, vl 97) — a measure which pmdenoe and political reasons rendered advisable and necessary, said the Tonians who accompanied the general, for in their eyes Delos was a very sacred place indeed. But in this same campaign Datis destroyed the temples at Naxos and Erethtae, to avenge, he declared, the gods whose temples the Greeks had burnt down at Sardes (/Mf., vL 96, 100). Ten years later, Xerxes acted in precisely the same way viii. 32, 33, 53 ; ix. 13). ' Thucydides (iv. 50) tells the story that in 424 the Athenians stopped a Persian envoy, the bearer of a despatch to the Lacedemonians, written, says the historian, in " Assyrian letter^" that is to say, in Peruan cuneifimns. That no tianslatian was appended thereto is proved from the fact that one had to be made firom the text : Ik twv 'AiTtrvpitiiV ypaixfidriov ras ^irtoroXos yivraypaipafitvoi &.viy'ViTav. Even when dealing with literary documents evidently written in Persian, such as the stelas that Darius set up on the Bosphorus (Herodotus, iv. 87), or the letter that the Great King sent to his allies^ the writers of the fifth century invariably use the expression of A.w6p» ypiftfunu. The term is so far correct iaasmudi as it denotes the origin Digitized by Google