Persia from the Earliest Period to the Arab

HISTORY OF PERSIA. 63
the immediate command of Artaxerxes. The two
brothers (it is said) once so nearly met, that Cyrus
with his javelin struck Artaxerxes from his horse.
With the death of Cyrus, the war, which was really
a mere quarrel between the two brothers, came to an
end. Nor, indeed, but for the celebrated retreat of the
Greeks to the shores of the Black Sea, and Xeno-
phon's account of it, would it have any special interest :
combined, however, with the notorious fact that this
mere handful of Greeks had, during the battle, done
almost all the righting, the story
of this retreat
produced effects little, at the time, anticipated,
in the after history of the East and West. So far
as Persia was concerned, it is true that, by the victory
at Cunaxa, a dangerous rebel had been crushed;
but this success was dearly won, as it substituted for
the brave and energetic Cyrus, the weak and effeminate
Artaxerxes ; and still more so, as it made known
to the Western Greeks, how easily the heart of Persia
could be reached, by a small and resolute force, if
well led. If the small army originally commanded by
Clearchus, was able to set at nought the daily assaults
of a force thirty or forty times their number, Greeks
and Persians must alike have felt that the conquest
of the whole Persian empire was no impossible feat
of arms. It is more than probable that sober re-
flections on the course of this war suggested to the
genius of such a man as Alexander 'the certainty of
his ultimate success, in the great war in which, seventy
years later, he engaged.
Previously to the safe return of the " Ten thousand,"
the Greeks fancied the district between the Black and