Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/44

Relations of Persia with Greece. 29 building palaces. In this manner the captives stationed in the central provinces of the empire combined with self-elected emi- grants in furnishing the kings of Persia with clever artisans, trained in the best workshops of Greece, who lent themselves with inventive and supple dexterity to the demands of a despot whose ^lightest whim was law. Hence it came to pass that, though the Persians did not go to the mountain, the mountain came very near them ; in other words* a sufficient number of Hellenes, either by force or willingly, were established in the very heart of the king- dom, so that contact between the two races must have produced some fruits, the remains of which are to be sought in the sculpture and buildings of Persia, the sole instances of her activity whidi are still extant It would indeed be surprising if attentive study of these should bring us to confess that no sign or mark of Greek taste and Greek fingers is to be traced anywhere in Persia. On the other hand, a few hundred or thousand individuals, if pre- ferred, who either saw the court of Persia as visitors or permanent settlers, were not sufficiently strong to modify to any great extent the surroundings in which circumstances had placed them. We find here nothing to be compared, even remotely, with the influence the lonians exercised upon their neighbours of Lydia, or, to take another example, the ascendency the Greeks b^an to have over the minds of their Roman conquerors, from the end of the third century b.c. In principle the Achxmenid dynasty was in every particular like that of its predecessors in the East. It rested, as thes^ on hereditary despotism subject to no control, the absolute power of a semi-god upon earth. With the Greek, on the contrary, law was looked upon as the sovereign mistress of the commonwealth, the offspring of the wise, the Lycuiguses and Zaieucoses, the Dracons and Solons, or at least the impersonal expression of the common will, the carrying out of which was entrusted to freely chosen magistrates. It will be readily admitted that no two conceptions could be more unlike ; the Greeks themselves were fully conscious of the antithesis they offered, and the impression they left upon their minds is reflected in their philosophic romances — the Cyro' padia, for example, which sets forth the ideal picture of an enlightened prince endowed with every conceivable virtue, together with an indirect criticism against the vices of democracy. Then, too, the account of Herodotus as to the part played at the Digitized by Google