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mediately, under the walls of Ephesus, served only, for the present, 

 to bind more firmly the Persian fetters on their Greek subjects of 

 Asia Minor. For Athens, and the other Greek confederates who 

 assisted the revolters, a severer vengeance was meditated by the 

 conqueror, and the accidental burning of Sardis was but a prelude 

 to those more fatal flames by which the finest temples and loftiest 

 edifices of Greece were consumed, and Athens itself, with other 

 celebrated cities, levelled with the dust. Hystaspes, however, 

 did not survive this event long enough to inflict that ultimate 

 revenge : he lived, indeed, to witness the desolation of Eretria, 

 one marked object of his implacable resentment, but he also lived 

 to have the transports it occasioned effaced amid the pangs inflicted 

 by the disgraceful defeat of his troops on the plain of Marathon, 

 that disastrous plain on which the Persian eagles, for the first time, 

 bowed the head in battle to the rising genius of Greece*. 



BAHAMAN, the son of Asfendiar, and consequently the grand- 

 son of Gushstap, is mentioned in the Oriental histories as the im- 

 mediate successor of the latter on the throne of Persia. His 

 Persian surname is DIRAZDEST, literally translated by the Greeks 

 Mx0;E/f, or the Long-Handed, in which we have a just specimen 

 of the confused manner in which the Greeks have handed down to 

 us, in the order of succession, the names of the Persian sovereigns. 

 This prince ought properly to be the Xerxes of the Greeks; a 

 name probably derived from SHIRSHAH. Sir William Jones offers 

 the only explanation which I have met with of this difficulty, when 

 he says, " Our chronologists place the reign of Xerxes after Darius 

 Hystaspes ; and he might, perhaps, have outlived both Lohorasp 

 and his successor -f. He must, however, on this supposition, have 

 flourished to a wonderful old age, and, at all events, is a very 



* Herodot. lib. vi. cap 99-102. t Short Hist, of Persia, p. 50. 



