er over the
man; and the monarch who in public ruled despotically over millions
of men, succumbed, within the walls of the seraglio, to the yoke of a
woman, whose influence he was too weak to throw off. The Queen-Mother
had her seat at the royal table whenever the king dined with his wife;
and, while the wife sat below, she sat above the monarch. She had a
suite of eunuchs distinct from those of her son. Ample revenues were
secured to her, and were completely at her disposal. She practically
exercised--though she could not perhaps legally claim--a power of life
and death. She screened offenders from punishment, procuring for them
the royal pardon, or sheltering them in her own apartments; and she
poisoned, or openly executed, those who provoked her jealousy or
resentment.

The service of the harem, so far as it could not be fitly performed by
women, was committed to eunuchs. Each legitimate wife--as well as the
Queen-Mother--had a number of these unfortunates among her attendants;
and the king intrusted the house of the concubines, and also that of the
virgins, to the same class of persons. His own attendants seem likewise
to have been chiefly eunuchs. In the later times, the eunuchs acquired
a vast political authority, and appear to have then filled all the chief
offices of state. They were the king's advisers in the palace, and his
generals in the field. They superintended the education of the young
princes, and found it easy to make them their tools. The plots and
conspiracies, the executions and assassinations, which disfigure the
later portion of the Persian annals, maybe traced chiefly to their
intrigues and ambition. But the early Persian annals are free from these
horrors; and it is clear that the power of the eunuchs was, during this
period, kept within narrow bounds. We hear little of them in authentic
history till the reign of Xerxes. It is remarkable that the Persepolitan
sculptures, abounding as they do in representations of Court life, of
the officers and attendants who approached at all closely to the person
of the monarch, contain not a single figure of a eunuch in their entire
range. We may gather from this that there was at any rate a marked
difference between the Assyrian and the early Persian Court in the
position which eunuchs occupied at them respectively: we should not,
however, be justified in going further and questioning altogether the
employment of eunuchs by the Persian monarchs during the ea