and a belief still in the high civilizing mission of the Persians.  Peace, instead of the old wars of conquest; but you would have seen no great falling off.  Hystaspes himself had been less conqueror than consolidator; the Augustus of the Achaemenids, greater at peace than at war;—­though great at that too, but not from land-frontiers; and indeed, had ample provocation, as those things go, for his punitive expedition that failed.  For the rest, he had strewn the coast with fine harbors, and reclaimed vast deserts with reservoirs and dikes; had explored the Indus and the ocean, and linked Egypt and Persia by a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile.  Well; and Xerxes carried it on; he too played the great Achaemenid game; did he not send ships to sail round Africa?  If there was no more conquering, it was because there was really nothing left to conquer; who would bother about that Greece?—­Darius Hystaspes was the last strong kind, yes; but Datius Nothus was the first gloomy tyrant, or at least his queen, bloodthirsty Parysatis, was; which was not til 434.  So that Persia too had her good thirteen decades of comfortable, even glorious, years.

Whereafter we see her wobbling under conflicting cyclic impulses down to her final fall.  For lack of another to take her place, she was still in many ways the foremost power; albeit here and there obstreperous satraps were always making trouble.  When Lysander laid Athens low in 404, it was Persian financial backing enabled him to do it; but Cyrus might march in to her heart, and Xenophon out again, but two years later, and none to say them effectually nay.  Had there been some other West Asian power, risen in 520 or thereabouts, to outlast Persia and finish its day with the end of the great cycle in 390, one supposes the Achaemenids would have fallen in the four-twenties, and left that other supreme during the remaining years.  But there was none.  The remains of Nineveh and Babylon slept securely in the Persian central provinces; there was nothing there to rise; they had their many days long since.  Egypt would have done something, if she could; would have like to;—­but her own cycles were against her.  She had the last of her cyclic days under the XXVIth Dynasty.  In 655 Psamtik I reunited and resurrected her while his overlord Assurbanipal was wrecking his—­Assurbanipal’s—­empire elsewhere; thirteen decades afterwards, in 525, she fell before Cambyses.  Thirteen decades, nearly, of Persian rule followed, with interruptions of revolt, before she regained her independence in 404;—­stealing, you may say, the nine years short from the weakness of Persia.  Then she was free for another half -cycle, less one year; a weak precarious freedom at best, lost to Artaxerxes Ochus in 340.  All but the first fourteen years of it fell beyond the limits of the manvantara; the West Asian forces were spent.  Egypt was merely waiting til the Greek cycle should have sunk low enough and on to the military plane; and had not long to wait.  She paid back most of her nine years to Persia; then hailed Alexander as her savior; and was brought by him, to some extent, under the influence of European cycles; to share then in what uninteresting twilight remained to Greece, and presently in the pomps and crimsons of Rome.