"Darius the Mede," says Professor Sayce, "is in fact a _reflection_ into the past of _Darius the son of Hystaspes_,[135] just as the siege and capture of Babylon by Cyrus are a reflection into the past of its siege and capture by the same prince. The name of Darius and the story of the slaughter of the Chaldean king go together. They are alike derived from the unwritten history which, in the East of to-day, is still made by the people, and which blends together in a single picture the manifold events and personages of the past. It is a history which has no perspective, though it is based on actual facts; the accurate combinations of the chronologer have no meaning for it, and the events of a century are crowded into a few years. This is the kind of history which the Jewish _mind in the age of the Talmud loved to adapt to moral and religious purposes_. This kind of history then becomes as _it were a parable, and under the name of Haggada serves to illustrate that teaching of the law_."[136] The favourable view given of the character of the imaginary Darius the Mede, and his regard for Daniel, may have been a confusion with the Jewish reminiscences of Darius, son of Hystaspes, who permitted the rebuilding of the Temple under Zerubbabel.[137] If we look for the _source_ of the confusion, we see it perhaps in the prophecy of Isaiah (xiii. 17, xiv. 6-22), that the _Medes_ should be the destroyers of Babylon; or in that of Jeremiah--a prophet of whom the author had made a special study (Dan. ix. 2)--to the same effect (Jer. li. 11-28); together with the tradition that _a_ Darius--namely, the son of Hystaspes--_had_ once conquered Babylon. XIV. But to make confusion worse confounded, if these chapters were meant for history, the problematic "Darius the Mede" is in Dan. ix. 1 called "the son of Ahasuerus." Now Ahasuerus (Achashverosh) is the same as Xerxes, and is the _Persian_ name Khshyarsha; and Xerxes was the _son_, not the father, of Darius Hystaspis, who was a _Persian_, not a Mede. Before Darius Hystaspis could have been transformed into the son of his own son Xerxes, the reigns, not only of Darius, but also of Xerxes, must have long been past. XV. There is yet another historic sign that this Book did not originate till the Persian Empire had long ceased to exist. In xi. 2 the writer only knows of _four_ kings of Persia.[138] These are evidently Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius Hystaspis, and Xerxes--whom he describes as the richest of them. This king is destroyed by the kingdom of Grecia--an obvious confusion of popular tradition between the defeat inflicted on the Persians by the Republican Greeks in the days of Xerxes (B.C. 480), and the overthrow of the Persian kingdom under Darius Codomannus by Alexander the Great (B.C. 333). * * * * *