mission of Mr Murray, reduced from that given in Grote's History of Greece.

The editor has frequently referred to Mr Paley's works; but he would be very sorry to be understood as limiting his obligations to the instances in which he has expressed them. He has throughout derived great assistance from an edition of the play by the late W. S. Teuffel (Leipzig, 1875), one very modest in outward form, but full of varied learning and marked by sound sense and judgment on every difficult question. To the Lexicon of Mr Linwood, whose recent loss we have also to mourn, he has owed very much.

He has to thank the Rev. Edwin Hatch, Vice-Principal of St Mary Hall, for permission to use a still unpublished translation of Aristotle's Ethics by his brother the late Rev. W. M. Hatch, Fellow of New College, and several private friends for valuable help and suggestions.

P.

b

INTRODUCTION.

In the year 486 B.C., four years after the Battle of Marathon, Darius king of Persia died, having shewn himself in a reign of thirty-six years a wise and strong ruler; and having, two great failures notwithstanding, one the expedition against Athens, the other that against Scythia, done much to consolidate the Empire of the East and to perfect its administration. One of the last acts of his life had been to settle

a dispute among his sons as to the succession by preferring Xerxes, whom Atossa daughter of Cyrus had borne to him since his own accession to the throne, to elder sons borne by another wife. This decision was due partly to the position of Atossa, the only one probably of Darius' wives who was called his queen, partly to the fact that Xerxes was through her a direct descendant of Cyrus the founder of the Persian monarchy. Xerxes at the time of his coming to the throne cannot have been much less than thirty years old'.

1 See Herod. Ix. 108.