Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/152

142 "whether the actual enjoyments of love could be superior to the imaginative pleasures felt in reading the tale of Panthea as related by Xenophon, or the tale of Timoclea as told by Aristobulus, or of Thebe by Theopompus?" These two last writers were historians of the time of Alexander the Great, who appear to have introduced love episodes into their histories, which are now lost. As in old Homer, and as in India at the present day, the conception of love in the story of Panthea is a conception of post-nuptial, and not ante-nuptial, passion. The action commences, so to speak, at a point after the third volume of a modern novel would have concluded. As such, and on account of its simplicity, the tragical story of Abradâtes and Panthea may be despised by the English reader, especially if unmarried. But taking the ancient Greeks as they are, we may find some interest in observing the points in which they differ from ourselves.

After his victory over Crœsus, and after taking the city of Sardis, Cyrus proceeded to the conquest of Babylon. Xenophon, like the other authorities, represents him as effecting this by diverting the course of the Euphrates, and entering the city by the river-bed at midnight, while all the Babylonians were engaged in a revel. The whole account is interspersed with a record of the sagacious provisions and wise exhortations of Cyrus, which takes off from its liveliness, and makes the narrative unworthy of the greatness of the event. In vividness and reality this crowning act in the creation of the Persian empire falls far short of those smaller incidents in which