ent, and then selecting an equal number of tall and
smooth-faced boys, he disguised them to represent the ladies, and gave
each one a dagger, directing him to conceal it beneath his robe. These
counterfeit females were then introduced to the assembly in the place
of those who had retired. The Persians did not detect the deception.
It was evening, and, besides, their faculties were confused with the
effects of the wine. They approached the supposed ladies as they had
done before, with rude familiarity; and the boys, at a signal made by
the prince when the Persians were wholly off their guard, stabbed and
killed every one of them on the spot.

Megabyzus sent an embassador to inquire what became of his seven
messengers; but the Macedonian prince contrived to buy this messenger
off by large rewards, and to induce him to send back some false but
plausible story to satisfy Megabyzus. Perhaps Megabyzus would not have
been so easily satisfied had it not been that the great Ionian
rebellion, under Aristagoras and Histiaeus, as described in the last
chapter, broke out soon after, and demanded his attention in another
quarter of the realm.

The Ionian rebellion postponed, for a time, Darius's designs on
Greece, but the effect of it was to make the invasion more certain and
more terrible in the end; for Athens, which was at that time one of
the most important and powerful of the Grecian cities, took a part in
that rebellion against the Persians. The Athenians sent forces to aid
those of Aristagoras and Histiaeus, and, in the course of the war, the
combined army took and burned the city of Sardis. When this news
reached Darius, he was excited to a perfect phrensy of resentment and
indignation against the Athenians for coming thus into his own
dominions to assist rebels, and there destroying one of his most
important capitals. He uttered the most violent and terrible threats
against them, and, to prevent his anger from getting cool before the
preparations should be completed for vindicating it, he made an
arrangement, it was said, for having a slave call out to him every day
at table, "Remember the Athenians!"

It was a circumstance favorable to Darius's designs against the states
of Greece that they were not united among themselves. There was no
general government under which the whole naval and military force of
that country could be efficiently combined, so as to be directed, in a
concentrated and energetic form, against a comm