inspiration to high deeds; but, en masse, rarely founded on
enduring principles. That jumping into the seas was nothing to
the Persians; they were not sung to it; it was not done in
defense of home, or upon a motive of sudden passion, as hate or
the like; but permanent elements in their character moved them
to it quietly, as to the natural thing to do. But if Greeks
had done it, with what kudos, like Thermopylae, it would have
come down!

They were great magnificoes, very lordly gentlemen, those Persian
nobles; _hijosdalgo,_ as they say in Spain; men of large lives,
splendor and leisure, scorning trade; 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