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 of keeping off foreign enemies; and of furnishing an adequate military contingent for the foreign enterprises of the great king. To every satrap was attached a royal secretary or comptroller of the revenue, who probably managed the imperial finances in the province, and to whom the court of Susa might perhaps look as a watch upon the satrap himself. The satrap or the secretary apportioned the sum payable by the satrapy in the aggregate among the various component districts, towns, or provinces, leaving to the local authorities in each of these latter the task of assessing it upon individual inhabitants. From necessity, therefore, as well as from indolence of temper and political incompetence, the Persians were compelled to respect the authorities which they found standing both in town and country, and to leave in their hands a large measure of genuine influence. Often even the petty kings who had governed separate districts during their state of independence, prior to the Persian conquest, retained their title and dignity as tributaries to the court of Susa. The empire of the great king was thus an aggregate of heterogeneous elements, connected together by no tie except that of common fear and subjection—noway coherent nor self-supporting, nor pervaded by any common system or spirit of nationality.'

How Darius, in consequence of the assistance rendered by the Athenians to the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor, who had revolted against him ( 502), sent a vast Persian army into European Greece; how this army was defeated by the Athenian general, Miltiades, with only 11,000 men, in the glorious battle of Marathon ( 490); how, ten years later, Xerxes, the son and successor of Darius, undertook an expedition against Greece with a host of several millions, and was defeated by Themistocles in a naval battle at Salamis ( 480), which was followed by two contemporaneous defeats of his lieutenants at Platæa and Mycale ( 479); how the Persians were thus finally driven back into Asia; how for a century and a-half relations, sometimes hostile and sometimes friendly, were maintained between the Greek states and the Persian monarchs, the degenerate successors of Darius and Xerxes, under whom the empire had begun to crumble; how at length, in the reign of Darius Codomannus ( 324), Alexander the Great retaliated on the Persians the wrongs they had done the Greeks by invading and destroying their decrepit empire, and organizing all the countries between the Adriatic and the Indus under, not a Semitic, as in the case of the Assyrian empire, nor an Indo-Germanic, as in the case of the Persic empire, but a Greek or Pelasgic system; how, on Alexander's death ( 323), this vast agglomeration of the human species fell asunder into three Greek monarchies—the Macedonian monarchy, including the states of European Greece; the Egyptian monarchy of the Ptolemies, including, besides Egypt, Ph[oe]nicia, Palestine, and Arabia; and the Syrian monarchy of the Seleucidæ, comprehending, although with a weak grasp, Asia Minor (or at least parts of it which had belonged to the Lydian and Assyrian empires), Syria, Assyria, and Babylonia—with the loss, however, of the countries between the Tigris and the Indus, where a germ of independence arose ( 236) in a native nomad dynasty, which ultimately united all the tribes of Iran in one empire, called the Parthian