Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/34

 10 HISTOEi: u-f GREECE. It is thus that Herodotus represents the great expedition of Xerxes to have originated : partly in the rashness of Mardonius, who reaps liis bitter reward on the field of battle at Platasa, — but still more in the influence of " mischievous Oneiros," who is sent by the gods — as in the second book of the Iliad — to put a cheat upon Xerxes, and even to overrule by terror both his scruples and those of Artabanus. The gods having determined — as in the instances of Astyages, Polykrates, and others — that the Persian empire shall undergo signal humiliation and repulse at the hands of the Greeks, constrain the Persian monarch into a ruinous enterprise against his own better judgment. Such religious imagination is not to be regarded as peculiar to Herod- otus, but as common to him with his contemporaries generally, Greeks as well as Persians, though peculiarly stimulated among the Greeks by the abundance of their epic or quasi-historical poetry : modified more or less in each individual narrator, it is made to supply connecting links as well as initiating causes for the great events of history. As a cause for this expedition, in- comparably the greatest fact and the most fertile in consequences, throughout the political career both of Greeks and Persians, nothing less than a special interposition of the gods would have satisfied the feelings either of one nation or the other. The story of the dream has its rise, as Herodotus tells us,' in Persian fancy, and is in some sort a consolation for the national vanity ; but it is turned and colored by the Grecian historian, who mentions TT/v yvci/LLTjv fierari'&E/iai Ilotee 61 ovtu oKug, roii ^eov TrapaSidovro^, Tuv auv kvderjaerai iir]6ev. The expression tov -deov ■JzapaSiSovTog in this place denotes what is ex- pressed by TO xp^ov yiyvEa-&ai, c. 17. The dream threatens Artabanus and Xerxes for trying to turn aside the current of destiny, — or in other words, to contravene the predetermined will of the gods. ' Herodot. vii, 12. Kal 6r] kov ev ry vvktI eISe bfiv ToiTjvde, uc Xeyerat VnO Uepaiuv. Herodotus seems to use ovsipov in the neuter gender, not ovsipog in the masculine: for the alteration of Biihr (ad vii, 16) of iuv-a in place of iCjvToc, is not at all called for. The masculine gender ovsipog is commonly used in Homer ; but there are cases of the neuter bvEipov. Respecting the influence of dreams in determining the enterprises of the early Turkish Sulta.is, see Von Hammer, Geschichte des Osmanischea Reichs, book ii, vol. i, p. 49.