us only from the Greek
side; so all succeeding ages have been enthusiastically
Prohellene. We are to think that Europe since has been great and
free and glorious, because free and cultured Greeks then held
back a huge and barbarous Asian despotism. All of which is great
nonsense. Europe since has not been great and free and glorious;
very often she has been quite the reverse. She has, at odd
times, been pottering around her ideal schemes of government;
which Asia in large part satisfied herself that she had found
long ago. As for culture and glory, the trumps have now been
with the one, now with the other. And the Persians were not
barbarians by any means. And when you talk of Asia, remember
that it is as far a cry from Persia to China, as from Persian to
England. Let us have not more of this preoccupation with
externals, and blind eyes to the Spirit of Man. I suppose
ballot-boxes and referenda and recalls and the like were
specified, when it was said _Of such is the kingdom of Heaven?_...

But Persia would not have flowed out over Europe, if Marathon,
Salamis, and Plataea had gone the other way. Empires wax and wane
like the moon; they ebb and flow like the tides; and are governed
by natural law as these are; and as little depend, ultimately,
upon battle, murder, and sudden death; which are but effects that
wisdom would evitate; we are wrong in taking them for causes. Two
things you can posit about any empire: it will expand to its
maximum; then ebb and fall away. Though the daily sun sets not on
its boundaries, the sun of time will set on its decay; because
all things born in time will die; and no elixer of life has been
found, nor ever will be. There is an impulse from the inner
planes; it strikes into the heart of a people; rises there, and
carries them forward upon an outward sweep; then recedes, and
leaves them to their fall. Its cycle may perhaps be longer or
shorter; but in the main its story is always the same, and bound
to be so; you cannot vote down the cycles of time. What hindered
Rome from mastery of Europe; absolute mastery; and keeping it
forever? Nothing--but the eternal Cyclic Law. So Persia.

She was the last phase of that West Asian manvantara which began
in 1890 and was due to end in 590 B. C. As such a phase, a
splendor-day of thirteen decades should have been hers; that, we
find, being always the length of a national illumination. She
began under Cyrus in 558; flowed out unde