PERSEPOLIS. 
577 
dotal city in the neighbourhood, to bestow the beneficence of 
a king upon their inhabitants, and to offer his oblations to the 
gods. We learn from everal writers, that at different periods 
both Cyrus and his successors had added to the splendours 
of the city which the Greeks called Persepolis. (Strabo. Diod. 
Siculus.) Xenophon clearly points out its situation, by noticing 
its no great distance from the frontiers of Media. But however 
the Persian monarchs might choose to pass their lives, first in one 
capital, and then another, of their wide dominions, their ultimate 
repose was always sought in the sepulchral caves of their native 
mountains. Here we see their tombs ; and the most authentic 
historians testify, how almost invariably their remains were 
transported hither. The traces which were left of the once 
great and flourishing capital of ancient Perm , have been gra¬ 
dually disappearing ever since the year 982, when the final blow 
which destroyed it as a city, was struck by Sumeanah-a-Dowlah, 
a vizier of the caliph of Bagdad, then master of Persia. Sue- 
ceeding princes and their ministers, (though seldom either of the 
native race,) continued an extraordinary hostility to these memo¬ 
rials of former greatness ; as if the destruction of the works and 
earthly monuments of the illustrious dead, could destroy the me¬ 
mory of virtues which can never die ! But notwithstanding these 
incessant dilapidations for so many ages, mighty ruins yet sur¬ 
vived ; and a few human beings still found a dwelling-place 
amongst its roofless walls, so late as the the sixteenth century; 
but, “ how was the glorious city become dim !” We are told that 
only a few huts then occupied the courts of the successors of 
Cyrus. Mons. Favine, in his curious and chivalric “ Chronicle of 
the World,” published in Paris about the year 1619, gives an in¬ 
teresting account of how the very subject we are now discussing 
4 E 
VOL. I. 
