Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/279

 PERSIA:; INVASION OF GREECE POSTPONED. 261 did he ever pay a second visit to the coasts of the ^Egean. Yet the amorous influences of Atossa, set at work by Demokedes might well have been sufficiently powerful to induce Darius to assail Greece instead of Scythia, a choice in favor of which all other recommendati ins concurred; and the historj of free Greece would then probably have stopped at this point, without unrolling any of the glories which followed. So incalculably great has been the influence of Grecian development, during the Jwo centuries between 500-300 B.C., on the destinies of man- kind, that we cannot pass without notice a contingency which threatened to arrest that development in the bud. Indeed, it may be remarked that the history of any nation, considered as a se- quence of causes and effects, affording applicable knowledge, requires us to study not merely real events, but also imminent contingencies, events which were on the point of occurring, but yet did not occur. When we read the wailings of Atossa in the Persaa of -iEschylus, for the humiliation which her son Xerxes had just undergone in his flight from Greece, 1 we do not easily persuade ourselves to reverse the picture, and to conceive the same Atossa twenty years earlier, numbering as her slaves at Susa the noblest Herakleid and Alkmseonid maidens from Greece. Yet the picture would really have been thus reversed, the wish of Atossa would have been fulfilled, and the wailings would have been heard from enslaved Greek maidens in Persia, if the mind of Darius had not happened to be preoccupied with a project not less insane even than those of Kambyses against Ethiopia and the Libyan desert. Such at least is the moral of the story of Dcmokedes. That inline expedition across the Danube into Scythia comes now to be recounted. It was undertaken by Darius for the pur- pose of avenging the inroad and devastation of the Scythians in Media and Upper Asia, about a century before. The lust of conquest imparted unusual force to this sentiment of wounded dignity, which in the case of the Scythians could hardly be con- nected with any expectation of plunder or profit. In spite of the dissuading admonition of his brother Artabanus, 2 Darius 1 JEschyl. Pers. 435- 945, etc.
 * Uerwlot. iv, 1, 83. There is nothing to mark the precise year of th