the desire to obtain a
ready and comparatively private access to the Gynaeceum, which must have
been somewhere on the platform, and which may well have lain in this
direction?

The minute account which has been now given of this palace will render
unnecessary a very elaborate description of the remainder. Two grand
palatial edifices seem to have been erected on the platform by later
kings--one by Xerxes and the other by Artaxerxes Ochus; but the latter
of these is in so ruined a condition, and the former is so like the
palace of Darius, that but few remarks need be made upon either. The
palace of Xerxes is simply that of Darius on a larger scale, the pillars
in the portico being increased from two rows of four to two rows of six,
and the great hall behind being a square of eighty instead of a square
of fifty feet, with thirty-six instead of sixteen pillars to support
its roof. On either side of the hall, and on either side of the portico,
were apartments like those already described as abutting on the same
portions of the older palace, differing from them chiefly in being
larger and more numerous. The two largest, which were thirty-one feet
square, had roofs supported on pillars, the numbers of such supports
being in each case four. The only striking difference in the plans of
the two buildings consisted in the absence from the palace of Xerxes of
any apartments to the rear of the great hall. In order to allow space
for an ample terrace in front, the whole edifice was thrown back so
close to the edge of the upper platform that no room was left for any
chambers at the back, since the hall itself was here brought almost to
the very verge of the sheer descent from the central to the low southern
terrace. In ornamentation the palaces also very closely resembled each
other, the chief difference being that the combats of the king with
lions and mythological monsters, which form the regular ornamentation
of the side-chambers in the palace of Darius, occur nowhere in the
residence of his son, where they are replaced by figures of attendants
bringing articles for the toilet or the table, like those which adorn
the main staircase of the older edifice. Figures of the same kind also
ornament all the windows in the palace of Xerxes. A tone of mere sensual
enjoyment is thus given to the later edifice, which is very far from
characterizing the earlier; and the decline of morals at the Court,
which history indicates as rapid about this