excitements of the hour, and though, at first his countenance was
beaming with satisfaction and pleasure, his uncle Artabanus, who stood
by his side, soon perceived that tears were standing in his eyes.
Artabanus asked him what this meant. It made him sad, Xerxes replied, to
reflect that, immensely vast as the countless multitude before him was,
in one hundred years from that time not one of them all would be alive.

The tender-heartedness which Xerxes manifested on this occasion, taken
in connection with the stern and unrelenting tyranny which he was
exercising over the mighty mass of humanity whose mortality he mourned,
has drawn forth a great variety of comments from writers of every age
who have repeated the story. Artabanus replied to it on the spot by
saying that he did not think that the king ought to give himself too
much uneasiness on the subject of human liability to death, for it
happened, in a vast number of cases, that the privations and sufferings
of men were so great, that often, in the course of their lives, they
rather wished to die than to live; and that death was, consequently, in
some respects, to be regarded, not as in itself a woe, but rather as the
relief and remedy for woe.

There is no doubt that this theory of Artabanus, so far as it applied to
the unhappy soldiers of Xerxes, all marshaled before him when he uttered
it, was eminently true.

Xerxes admitted that what his uncle said was just, but it was, he said,
a melancholy subject, and so he changed the conversation. He asked his
uncle whether he still entertained the same doubts and fears in respect
to the expedition that he had expressed at Susa when the plan was first
proposed in the council. Artabanus replied that he most sincerely hoped
that the prognostications of the vision would prove true, but that he
had still great apprehensions of the result. "I have been reflecting,"
continued he, "with great care on the whole subject, and it seems to me
that there are two dangers of very serious character to which your
expedition will be imminently exposed."

Xerxes wished to know what they were.

"They both arise," said Artabanus, "from the immense magnitude of your
operations. In the first place, you have so large a number of ships,
galleys, and transports in your fleet, that I do not see how, when you
have gone down upon the Greek coast, if a storm should arise, you are
going to find shelter for them. There are no harbors there large eno