with pillars. If these were, however (as is probable),
light wooden posts, plated with silver or with gold, and if the ceiling
consisted (as it most likely did) of beams, crossing each other at right
angles, with square spaces between them, all likewise coated with the
precious metals; if moreover the cold stone walls, excepting where
they were broken by a doorway, or a window, were similarly decked; if
curtains of brilliant hues hung across the entrances; if the pavement
was of many-colored stones, and in places covered with magnificent
carpets; if an elevated golden throne, under a canopy of purple, adorned
the upper end of the room, standing against the wall midway between the
two doors--if this were in truth the arrangement and ornamentation of
the apartment, we can well understand that the _coup d'oeil_ must
have been effective, and the impression made on the spectator highly
pleasing. A room fifty feet square, and not much more than twenty high,
could not be very grand; but elegance of form, combined with richness
of material and splendor of coloring, may have more than compensated for
the want of that grandeur which results from mere size.

If it be inquired how a palace of the dimensions described can have
sufficed even for one of the early Persian kings, the reply must
seemingly be that the building in question can only have contained
the public apartments of the royal residence--the throne-room,
banqueting-rooms, guard-rooms, etc.,--and that it must have been
supplemented by at least one other edifice of a considerable size, the
Gynaeceum or "House of the Women." There is ample room on the platform
for such a building, either towards the east, where the ground is now
occupied by a high mound of rubbish, or on the west, towards the edge of
the platform, where traces of a large edifice were noted by Niebuhr. On
the whole, this latter situation seems to be the more probable; and the
position of the Gynaeceum in this quarter may account for the alteration
made by Artaxerxes Ochus in the palace of Darius, which now seriously
interferes with its symmetry. Artaxerxes cut a doorway in the outer
western wall, and another opposite to it in the western wall of the
great hall, adding at the same time a second staircase to the building,
which thus became accessible from the west no less than from the south.
It has puzzled the learned in architecture to assign a motive for this
alteration. May we not find an adequate one in