mighty huntsmen before the
Lord. Of the Greeks, only the Spartans were sportsmen; but
where the Spartans hunted foxes and such-like small fry, The
Persians followed your true dangerous wild-fowl: lions,
leopards, and tigers. A great satrap could buy up Greece almost
at any time; could put the Greeks to war amongst themselves, and
finance his favorite side out of his own pocket. On such a scale
they lived; and travelers and mercenaries brought home news of
it to Greece; and Greeks whose wealth might be fabulous strove
to emulate the splendor they heard of. The Greeks made better
heavy armor--one cause of the victories; but for the most part
the Persian crafts and manufactures outshone the Greek by far.
All these things I take from Mahaffy, who speaks of their culture
as "an ancestral dignity for superior to, and different from, the
somewhat mercantile refinement of the Greeks." The secret of the
difference is this: the West Asian manvantara, to which the
Persians belonged, was more than a thousand years older than the
European manvantara, to which the Greeks belonged; so the
latter, beside the former, had an air of _parvenu._ The Greeks
dwelt on the Persian's borders; and fought him when they must;
intrigued with or against him when they might; called him
barbarian for self-respect's sake--and admired and envied him
always. Had he been really a barbarian, in contact with their
superior civilization, he would have become degraded by the
contact; in such cases it always happens that the inferior sops
up the vices only of his betters. But Alexander found the
Persians much the same courtly-mannered, lordly-living, mighty
huntsmen they had been when Herodotus described them; and was
ambitious that his Europeans should mix with them on equal terms
and learn their virtues.

Where and when did this high tradition grow up? There was not
time enough, I think, in that half cycle between the rise of
Cyrus and Marathon. In truth we are to see in these regions
vistas of empires receding back into the dimness, difficult to
sort out and fix their chronology. Cyrus overthrew the Assyrian;
from whose yoke his people had freed themselves some fifteen
years or so before. The Medes had been rising since the earlier
part of that seventh century; sometime then they brought the
kindred race of Persians under their sway. Sometime then, too, I
am inclined to think, lived the Teacher Zoroaster: about whose
date there is more con