Marathon; to a Persian of the time, probably, that failure on
the Greek frontier looked a small matter enough. A Pancho Villa
to 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.