ore terrible
foe even than Miltiades and his army,--the all-conqueror Death, to whose
might the greatest monarchs must succumb. Burning with fury, Darius
ordered the levy of a mighty army, and for three years busy preparations
for war went on throughout the vast empire of Persia. But, just as the
mustering was done and he was about to march, that grisly foe Death
struck him down in the midst of his schemes of conquest, and Greece was
saved,--the great Darius was no more.

Xerxes, son of Darius, succeeded him on the throne. This new monarch was
the handsomest and stateliest man in all his army. But his fair outside
covered a weak nature; timid, faint-hearted, vain, conceited, he was not
the man to conquer Greece, small as it was and great as was the empire
under his control; and the death of Darius was in all probability the
salvation of Greece.

Xerxes succeeded not only to the throne of Persia, but also to the vast
army which his father had brought together. He succeeded, moreover, to a
war, for Egypt was in revolt. But this did not last long; the army was
at once set in motion, Egypt was quickly subdued, and the Egyptians
found themselves under a worse tyranny than before.

Greece remained to conquer, and for that enterprise the timid Persian
king was not eager. Marathon could not be forgotten. Those fierce
Athenians who had defeated his father's great host were not to be dealt
with so easily as the unwarlike Egyptians. He held back irresolute, now
persuaded to war by one councillor, now to peace by another, and
finally--so we are told--driven to war by a dream, in which a tall,
stately man appeared to him and with angry countenance commanded him not
to abandon the enterprise which his father had designed. This dream came
to him again the succeeding night, and when Artabanus, his uncle, and
the advocate of peace, was made to sit on his throne and sleep in his
bed, the same figure appeared to him, and threatened to burn out his
eyes if he still opposed the war. Artabanus, stricken with terror, now
counselled war, and Xerxes determined on the invasion of Greece.

This story we are told by Herodotus, who told many things which it is
not very safe to believe. What we really know is that Xerxes began the
most stupendous preparations for war that had ever been known, and added
to the army left by his father until he had got together the greatest
host the world had yet beheld. For four years those preparations, to
which