It is thus that Herodotus represents the great expedition of Xerxes to have originated: partly in the rashness of Mardonius, who reaps his bitter reward on the field of battle at Platæa,—but still more in the influence of “mischievous Oneiros,” who is sent by the gods—as in the second book of the Iliad—to put a cheat upon Xerxes, and even to overrule by terror both his scruples and those of Artabanus. The gods having determined—as in the instances of Astyagês, Polykratês, and others—that the Persian empire shall undergo signal humiliation and repulse at the hands of the Greeks, constrain the Persian monarch into a ruinous enterprise against his own better judgment. Such religious imagination is not to be regarded as peculiar to Herodotus, but as common to him with his contemporaries generally, Greeks as well as Persians, though peculiarly stimulated among the Greeks by the abundance of their epic or quasi-historical poetry: modified more or less in each individual narrator, it is made to supply connecting links as well as initiating causes for the great events of history. As a cause for this expedition, incomparably the greatest fact and the most fertile in consequences, throughout the political career both of Greeks and Persians, nothing less than a special interposition of the gods would have satisfied the feelings either of one nation or the other. The story of the dream has its rise, as Herodotus tells us,[17] in Persian fancy, and is in some sort a consolation for the national vanity; but it is turned and colored by the Grecian historian, who mentions also a third dream, which appeared to Xerxes after his resolution to march was finally taken, and which the mistake of the Magian interpreters falsely construed[18] into an encouragement, though it really threatened ruin. How much this religious conception of the sequence of events belongs to the age, appears by the fact, that it not only appears in Pindar and the Attic tragedians generally, but pervades especially the Persæ of Æschylus, exhibited seven years after the battle of Salamis,—in which we find the premonitory dreams as well as the jealous enmity of the gods towards vast power and overweening aspirations in man,[19] though without any of that inclination, which Herodotus seems to have derived from Persian informants, to exculpate Xerxes by representing him as disposed himself to sober counsels, but driven in a contrary direction by the irresistible fiat of the gods.[20] [17] Herodot. vii, 12. Καὶ δή κου ἐν τῇ νυκτὶ εἶδε ὄψιν τοιήνδε, ὡς λέγεται ὑπὸ Περσέων. Herodotus seems to use ὄνειρον in the neuter gender, not ὄνειρος in the masculine: for the alteration of Bähr (ad vii, 16) of ἐῶντα in place of ἐῶντος, is not at all called for. The masculine gender ὄνειρος is commonly used in Homer; but there are cases of the neuter ὄνειρον.