CHAPTER V. ARCHITECTURE AND OTHER ARTS.

If in the old world the fame of the Persians, as builders and artists, fell on the whole below that of the Assyrians and Babylonians—­their instructors in art, no less than in letters and science—­it was not so much that they had not produced works worthy of comparison with those which adorned Babylon and Nineveh, as that, boasting less antiquity and less originality than those primitive races, they did not strike in the same way the imagination of the lively Greeks, who moreover could not but feel a certain jealousy of artistic successes, which had rewarded the efforts of a living and rival people.  It happened, moreover, that the Persian masterpieces were less accessible to the Greeks than the Babylonian, and hence there was actually less knowledge of their real character in the time when Greek literature was at its best.  Herodotus and Xenophon, who impressed on their countrymen true ideas of the grandeur and magnificence of the Mesopotamian structures, never penetrated to Persia Proper, and perhaps never beheld a real Persian building.  Ctesias, it is true, as a resident at the Achaemenian Court for seventeen years, must certainly have seen Susa and Ecbatana, if not even Persepolis, and he therefore must have been well acquainted with the character of Persian palaces; but, so far as appears from the fragments of his work which have come down to us, he said but little on the subject of these edifices.  It was not until Alexander led his cohorts across the chain of Zagros to the high plateau beyond, that a proper estimate of the great Persian buildings could be made; and then the most magnificent of them all was scarcely seen before it was laid in ruins.  The barbarous act of the great Macedonian conqueror, in committing the palace of Persepolis to the flames, tended to prevent a full recognition of the real greatness of Persian art even after the Greeks had occupied the country; but we find from this time a certain amount of acknowledgment of its merits—­a certain number of passages, which, like that which forms the heading to this chapter, admit alike its grandeur and its magnificence.

If, however, the ancients did less than justice to the efforts of the Persians in architecture, sculpture, and the kindred arts, moderns have, on the contrary, given them rather an undue prominence.  From the middle of the seventeenth century, when Europeans first began freely to penetrate the East, the Persian ruins, especially those of Persepolis, drew the marked attention of travellers; and in times when the site of Babylon had attracted but scanty notice, and that of Nineveh and the other great Assyrian cities was almost unknown, English, French, and German savans measured, described, and figured the Persian remains with a copiousness and exactness that left little to desire.  Chardin, the elder Mebuhr, Le Brun, Ouseley, Ker Porter, exerted themselves with the most praiseworthy zeal to represent