chase; if you failed to catch him, pooh, it was nothing!
Xerxes is no Darius, true: Artaxerxes I, no Cyrus, nor nothing
like. But through both their reigns there is in the main good
government in most of the provinces; excellent law and order;
and a belief still in the high civilizing mission of the
Persians. Peace, instead of the old wars of conquest; but you
would have seen no great falling off. Hystaspes himself had
been less conqueror than consolidator; the Augustus of the
Achaemenids, greater at peace than at war;--though great at
that too, but not from land-frontiers; and indeed, had ample
provocation, as those things go, for his punitive expedition that
failed. For the rest, he had strewn the coast with fine harbors,
and reclaimed vast deserts with reservoirs and dikes; had
explored the Indus and the ocean, and linked Egypt and Persia by
a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile. Well; and Xerxes carried
it on; he too played the great Achaemenid game; did he not send
ships to sail round Africa? If there was no more conquering, it
was because there was really nothing left to conquer; who would
bother about that Greece?--Darius Hystaspes was the last strong
kind, yes; but Datius Nothus was the first gloomy tyrant, or at
least his queen, bloodthirsty Parysatis, was; which was not til
434. So that Persia too had her good thirteen decades of
comfortable, even glorious, years.

Whereafter we see her wobbling under conflicting cyclic
impulses down to her final fall. For lack of another to take her
place, she was still in many ways the foremost power; albeit
here and there obstreperous satraps were always making trouble.
When Lysander laid Athens low in 404, it was Persian financial
backing enabled him to do it; but Cyrus might march in to her
heart, and Xenophon out again, but two years later, and none to
say them effectually nay. Had there been some other West Asian
power, risen in 520 or thereabouts, to outlast Persia and finish
its day with the end of the great cycle in 390, one supposes the
Achaemenids would have fallen in the four-twenties, and left that
other supreme during the remaining years. But there was none.
The remains of Nineveh and Babylon slept securely in the Persian
central provinces; there was nothing there to rise; they had
their many days long since. Egypt would have done something, if
she could; would have like to;--but her own cycles were against
her. She had the last of her cyclic