ever exercised as Queen-Consort.  The habits of reverence and obedience, in which the boy had been reared, retained commonly their power over the man; and the monarch who in public ruled despotically over millions of men, succumbed, within the walls of the seraglio, to the yoke of a woman, whose influence he was too weak to throw off.  The Queen-Mother had her seat at the royal table whenever the king dined with his wife; and, while the wife sat below, she sat above the monarch.  She had a suite of eunuchs distinct from those of her son.  Ample revenues were secured to her, and were completely at her disposal.  She practically exercised—­though she could not perhaps legally claim—­a power of life and death.  She screened offenders from punishment, procuring for them the royal pardon, or sheltering them in her own apartments; and she poisoned, or openly executed, those who provoked her jealousy or resentment.

The service of the harem, so far as it could not be fitly performed by women, was committed to eunuchs.  Each legitimate wife—­as well as the Queen-Mother—­had a number of these unfortunates among her attendants; and the king intrusted the house of the concubines, and also that of the virgins, to the same class of persons.  His own attendants seem likewise to have been chiefly eunuchs.  In the later times, the eunuchs acquired a vast political authority, and appear to have then filled all the chief offices of state.  They were the king’s advisers in the palace, and his generals in the field.  They superintended the education of the young princes, and found it easy to make them their tools.  The plots and conspiracies, the executions and assassinations, which disfigure the later portion of the Persian annals, maybe traced chiefly to their intrigues and ambition.  But the early Persian annals are free from these horrors; and it is clear that the power of the eunuchs was, during this period, kept within narrow bounds.  We hear little of them in authentic history till the reign of Xerxes.  It is remarkable that the Persepolitan sculptures, abounding as they do in representations of Court life, of the officers and attendants who approached at all closely to the person of the monarch, contain not a single figure of a eunuch in their entire range.  We may gather from this that there was at any rate a marked difference between the Assyrian and the early Persian Court in the position which eunuchs occupied at them respectively:  we should not, however, be justified in going further and questioning altogether the employment of eunuchs by the Persian monarchs during the early period, since their absence from the sculptures may be accounted for on other grounds.