and in the face of this common danger, they can co-operate after a fashion.  The world is in a tumult and threatens to fall; but behind all the noise and ominous thunder, by heaven, you can hear the roll of hexameters, and an old blind sorrow-stricken bard chanting.  The soul of a nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music of olden proud resounding lines.  Who led the Grecian fleet at Salamis?—­Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these centuries.  Who led the victors at Marathon?  Not sly Athenian Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth:  blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian eye could see:  the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias; Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.

The story of the Persian Wars comes to us only from the Greek side; so all succeeding ages have been enthusiastically Prohellene.  We are to think that Europe since has been great and free and glorious, because free and cultured Greeks then held back a huge and barbarous Asian despotism.  All of which is great nonsense.  Europe since has not been great and free and glorious; very often she has been quite the reverse.  She has, at odd times, been pottering around her ideal schemes of government; which Asia in large part satisfied herself that she had found long ago.  As for culture and glory, the trumps have now been with the one, now with the other.  And the Persians were not barbarians by any means.  And when you talk of Asia, remember that it is as far a cry from Persia to China, as from Persian to England.  Let us have not more of this preoccupation with externals, and blind eyes to the Spirit of Man.  I suppose ballot-boxes and referenda and recalls and the like were specified, when it was said Of such is the kingdom of Heaven?...

But Persia would not have flowed out over Europe, if Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea had gone the other way.  Empires wax and wane like the moon; they ebb and flow like the tides; and are governed by natural law as these are; and as little depend, ultimately, upon battle, murder, and sudden death; which are but effects that wisdom would evitate; we are wrong in taking them for causes.  Two things you can posit about any empire:  it will expand to its maximum; then ebb and fall away.  Though the daily sun sets not on its boundaries, the sun of time will set on its decay; because all things born in time will die; and no elixer of life has been found, nor ever will be.  There is an impulse from the inner planes; it strikes into the heart of a people; rises there, and carries them forward upon an outward sweep; then recedes, and leaves them to their fall.  Its cycle may perhaps be longer or shorter; but in the main its story is always the same, and bound to be so; you cannot vote down the cycles of time.  What hindered Rome from mastery of Europe; absolute mastery; and keeping it forever?  Nothing—­but the eternal Cyclic Law.  So Persia.