was
strengthened by every new act of obedience. When he found, at length,
that his hold upon the guards was sufficiently strong, he produced his
two final decrees, one ordering the guards to depose Oretes from his
power, and the other to behead him. Both the commands were obeyed.

The events and incidents which have been described in this chapter
were of no great importance in themselves, but they illustrate, more
forcibly than any general description would do the nature and the
operation of the government exercised by Darius throughout the vast
empire over which he found himself presiding.

Such personal and individual contests and transactions were not all
that occupied his attention. He devoted a great deal of thought and of
time to the work of arranging, in a distinct and systematic manner,
the division of his dominions into provinces, and to regulating
precisely the amount of tribute to be required of each, and the modes
of collecting it. He divided his empire into twenty great districts,
each of which was governed by a ruler called a _satrap_. He fixed the
amount of tribute which each of these districts was to pay, making it
greater or less as the soil and the productions of the country varied
in fertility and abundance. In some cases this tribute was to be paid
in gold, in others in silver, and in others in peculiar commodities,
natural to the country of which they were required. For example, one
satrapy, which comprised a country famous for its horses, was obliged
to furnish one white horse for every day in the year. This made three
hundred and sixty annually, that being the number of days in the
Persian year. Such a supply, furnished yearly, enabled the king soon
to have a very large troop of white horses; and as the horses were
beautifully caparisoned, and the riders magnificently armed, the body
of cavalry thus formed was one of the most splendid in the world.

The satrapies were numbered from the west toward the east. The western
portion of Asia Minor constituted the first, and the East Indian
nations the twelfth and last. The East Indians had to pay their
tribute in ingots of gold. Their country produced gold.

As it is now forever too late to separate the facts from the fiction
of ancient history, and determine what is to be rejected as false and
what received as true, our only resource is to tell the whole story
just as it comes down to us, leaving it to each reader to decide for
himself what he will