BABYLON AND PERSIA

432 MEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA.ointo ordinary Oriental cruelty. Besides, Dareios hadreturned home bitterly mortified and irritated byhis bootless and senseless expedition into the wildsof Scythia, and gladly vented his irritation on thosewho displeased him. His great grudge was nowagainstthe Greeksnot those of Asia, but thoseacross the sea, the people of Hellas.He knew thatthey were one nation with these rebellious colonies,that they gave them support, encouragement, andsympathy, and determined to make an end of theentire obnoxious race.Little did he dream tliat themortification and losses of his Scythian campaignwere as nothing to those which he was to exj.erienceat the hands of this nestful of traders,seamen, farmers, and craftsmen ; that Miltiades, afterbeing overruled by his timid and selfish compeers onMara?h°on,^'^^ Danube, would yet satisfy his patriotic490 B.C. ambition, and, as the hero of Marathon, bea check on the overwhelming deluge from the East ;or that not only not he himself, but his children,'his children's children should ever be able to achievethe task which he now undertook, with all the cau¬tion and preparation of a wise general, indeed, butwith absolute faith in its quick and easy completion.But this glorious struggle and triumph of the fewlifted to superhuman heroism by an ennobling moralprinciple, as against the, merely brutal force of num¬bers, does not properiy belong any more to the history 'of the East, nor to that of remote antiquity :it isthe dawn of a new star, in the West, and of timeswhich, from their spirit, actors, and achievements,may almost be called modern. At the bottom of