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are well known to the learned of the Persian nation. He is said to 

 have killed by stratagem the formidable Rostam, who had rebelled 

 and made himself independent in the provinces . of Sejestan and 

 Cabul : but this, we have observed, must be a mistake, or Rostam, 

 in that case, must have lived to four hundred years of age. A 

 descendant only of the mighty chief of that name can be alluded 

 to by the Persian annalist *. 



From Xerxes (or, rather, the last-mentioned Ardeshir) to the 

 reign of Darius, the younger, under whom the fatal Macedonian 

 invasion took place, according to the Persian annals, only two sove- 

 reigns swayed the Persian sceptre. These were Homai and her son 

 Darab, and neither of these are recorded to have had any particular 

 intercourse, either in the way of friendship or hostility, with India, 

 which probably continued, during this long interval, to remain un- 

 disturbed and in its ancient state of tributary subjection. For the 

 sake of connecting, however, the Persian, Greek, and Indian, his- 

 tory of this important period, and on the presumption that the 

 Greek historians are worthy of credit in their narration of facts, 

 which either the policy of the Persian historians may have con- 

 cealed, or of which, if recorded, every vestige was swept away during 

 the long troubles that convulsed Persia to its centre, urged, I say, 

 by these motives, I shall regulate this part of the history by the 

 accounts that have descended to us from classical writers concern- 

 ing the order of succession of the Persian sovereigns, and take a 

 rapid review of the principal events that continued to increase the 

 rooted hatred of the two former nations till that dreadful catastrophe 

 took place. 



The advantageous terms which the valour of Cymon, the Athenian 

 general, had extorted from Artaxerxes at the conclusion of the 



* Ibid. p. 74, and Sir William Jones's Short Hist, of Persia, p. 52. 



