succession.[244] Neither Darius himself, nor any of those around him, had ever before seen so overwhelming a manifestation of the Persian imperial force. To an Oriental eye, incapable of appreciating the real conditions of military preponderance,—accustomed only to the gross and visible computation of numbers and physical strength,—the king who marched forth at the head of such an army appeared like a god on earth, certain to trample down all before him—just as most Greeks had conceived respecting Xerxes,[245] and by stronger reason Xerxes respecting himself, a century and a half before. Because all this turned out a ruinous mistake, the description of the feeling, given in Curtius and Diodorus, is often mistrusted as baseless rhetoric. Yet it is in reality the self-suggested illusion of untaught men, as opposed to trained and scientific judgment. [243] Diodor. xvii. 30, 31. Diodorus represents the Persian king as having begun to issue letters of convocation for the troops, _after_ he heard the death of Memnon; which cannot be true. The letters must have been sent out before. [244] Curtius, iii. 2. [245] Herodot. vii. 56—and the colloquy between Xerxes and Demaratus, vii. 103, 104—where the language put by Herodotus into the mouth of Xerxes is natural and instructive. On the other hand, the superior penetration of Cyrus the younger expresses supreme contempt for the military inefficiency of an Asiatic multitude—Xenophon, Anabas. i. 7, 4. Compare the blunt language of the Arcadian Antiochus—Xen. Hellen. vii. i. 38; and Cyropæd. viii. 8, 20.