We shall run little risk in conjecturing that, among the intelligent and able men thus carried off, surgeons and physicians would be selected as the first and most essential. Apollônidês of Kôs—whose calamitous end has been alluded to in a previous note—was resident as surgeon, or physician, with Artaxerxês Longimanus (Ktêsias, Persica, c. 30), and Polykritus of Mendê, as well as Ktêsias himself, with Artaxerxês Mnêmon (Plutarch, Artaxerxês, c. 31). But his history suggests, in another point of view, far more serious reflections. Like the Milesian Histiæus (of whom I shall speak hereafter,) he cared not what amount of risk he brought upon his country in order to procure his own escape from a splendid detention at Susa. And the influence which he originated and brought to bear was on the point of precipitating upon Greece the whole force of the Persian empire, at a time when Greece was in no condition to resist it. Had the first aggressive expedition of Darius, with his own personal command and fresh appetite for conquest, been directed against Greece instead of against Scythia (between 516-514 B. C.), Grecian independence would have perished almost infallibly. For Athens was then still governed by the Peisistratids; what she was, under them, we have had occasion to notice in a former chapter. She had then no courage for energetic self-defence, and probably Hippias himself, far from offering resistance, would have found it advantageous to accept Persian dominion as a means of strengthening his own rule, like the Ionian despots: moreover, Grecian habit of coöperation was then only just commencing. But fortunately, the Persian invader did not touch the shore of Greece until more than twenty years afterwards, in 490 B. C.; and during that precious interval, the Athenian character had undergone the memorable revolution which has been before described. Their energy and their organization had been alike improved, and their force of resistance had become decupled; moreover, their conduct had so provoked the Persian that resistance was then a matter of necessity with them, and submission on tolerable terms an impossibility. When we come to the grand Persian invasion of Greece, we shall see that Athens was the life and soul of all the opposition offered. We shall see farther, that with all the efforts of Athens, the success of the defence was more than once doubtful; and would have been converted into a very different result, if Xerxês had listened to the best of his own counsellors. But had Darius, at the head of the very same force which he conducted into Scythia, or even an inferior force, landed at Marathon in 514 B. C., instead of sending Datis in 490 B. C.,—he would have found no men like the victors of Marathon to meet him. As far as we can appreciate the probabilities, he would have met with little resistance except from the Spartans singly, who would have maintained their own very defensible territory against all his