efforts,—like the Mysians and Pisidians in Asia Minor, or like the Mainots of Laconia in later days; but Hellas generally would have become a Persian satrapy. Fortunately, Darius, while bent on invading some country, had set his mind on the attack of Scythia, alike perilous and unprofitable. His personal ardor was wasted on those unconquerable regions, where he narrowly escaped the disastrous fate of Cyrus,—nor did he ever pay a second visit to the coasts of the Ægean. Yet the amorous influences of Atossa, set at work by Dêmokêdês might well have been sufficiently powerful to induce Darius to assail Greece instead of Scythia,—a choice in favor of which all other recommendations concurred; and the history of free Greece would then probably have stopped at this point, without unrolling any of the glories which followed. So incalculably great has been the influence of Grecian development, during the two centuries between 500-300 B. C., on the destinies of mankind, that we cannot pass without notice a contingency which threatened to arrest that development in the bud. Indeed, it may be remarked that the history of any nation, considered as a sequence of causes and effects, affording applicable knowledge, requires us to study not merely real events, but also imminent contingencies,—events which were on the point of occurring, but yet did not occur. When we read the wailings of Atossa in the Persæ of Æschylus, for the humiliation which her son Xerxês had just undergone in his flight from Greece,[479] we do not easily persuade ourselves to reverse the picture, and to conceive the same Atossa twenty years earlier, numbering as her slaves at Susa the noblest Hêrakleid and Alkmæônid maidens from Greece. Yet the picture would really have been thus reversed,—the wish of Atossa would have been fulfilled, and the wailings would have been heard from enslaved Greek maidens in Persia,—if the mind of Darius had not happened to be preoccupied with a project not less insane even than those of Kambysês against Ethiopia and the Libyan desert. Such at least is the moral of the story of Dêmokêdês. [479] Æschyl. Pers. 435-845, etc.