If we compare the Persian theory of Empire with the Assyrian, we note
still a capital fault. The Great King of Susa recognized no more
obligation than his predecessors of Nineveh to consider the interests of
those he ruled and to make return to them for what he took. But while,
on the one hand, no better imperial theory was conceivable in the sixth
century B.C., and certainly none was held or acted upon in the East down
to the nineteenth century A.D., on the other, the Persian imperial
practice mitigated its bad effects far more than the Assyrian had done.
Free from the Semitic tradition of annual raiding, the Persians reduced
the obligation of military service to a bearable burden and avoided
continual provocation of frontier neighbours. Free likewise from Semitic
supermonotheistic ideas, they did not seek to impose their creed. Seeing
that the Persian Empire was extensive, decentralized and provided with
imperfect means of communication, it could subsist only by practising
provincial tolerance. Its provincial tolerance seems to have been
systematic. We know a good deal of the Greeks and the Jews under its
sway, and in the history of both we miss such signs of religious and
social oppression as marked Assyrian rule. In western Asia Minor the
satraps showed themselves on the whole singularly conciliatory towards
local religious feeling and even personally comformable to it; and in
Judaea the hope of the Hebrews that the Persian would prove a deliverer
and a restorer of their estate was not falsified. Hardly an echo of
outrage on the subjects of Persia in time of peace has reached our ears.
If the sovereign of the Asiatic Greek cities ran counter to Hellenic
feeling by insisting on "tyrant" rule, he did no more than continue a
system under which most of those cities had grown rich. It is clear that
they had little else to complain of than absence of a democratic freedom
which, as a matter of fact, some of them had not enjoyed in the day of
their independence. The satraps seem to have been supplied with few, or
even no, Persian troops, and with few Persian aides on their