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varied with his situation, and that misfortune awakened the virtues 

 to which prosperity is unfavourable. He is allowed, however, by 

 both parties to have been a prince of great personal bravery and 

 accomplishments, and it was to a happy exertion of fortitude that 

 he retained, even the few years he reigned, the possession of the 

 Persian throne ; for, according to Diodorus, when the perfidious 

 regicide, fearing his independent spirit, resolved to dispatch him as 

 he had done Arses, and caused the fatal, but disguised, potion, that 

 was to mingle him with his predecessors, to be administered to his 

 sovereign, Darius, apprized of his villany, ordered the traitor to be 

 brought into his presence, and there compelled him to drink the 

 poison which he had prepared for himself*. 



During these revolutions at Susa, the states of Greece were again 

 convulsed with violent internal dissensions, where a new 'competitor 

 for the sovereign power had started up in Thebes, the hitherto- 

 despised capital of Baeotia. With the continued and obstinate con- 

 tests, however, that immediately followed between the Lacedaemo- 

 nian and Athenian states, or rather the greater part of confederated 

 Greece with that aspiring republic, rapid in its exaltation, and not 

 less rapid in its decline, the History of India could have no possi- 

 ble concern, had not Philip, the father of its destined conqueror 

 been brought up under Epaminoridas, its invincible general, and 

 instructed by him in the principles and practice of that military 

 science, which he afterwards so effectually and fatally employed, 

 in conjunction with the blackest perfidy, the deepest dissimulation, 

 the profusest bribery, by means of the gold mines at Philippi, and 

 in defiance of the fulminating eloquence of Demosthenes, to subvert 

 the liberties of all Greece. When that event was effected by a 

 series of events, the consideration of which is foreign to our subject, 



* Died. Sic. lib. xvii. sect. C. 



