family of their own citizens, which for a period had forcibly
seized on and exercised despotic power at Athens, it nerved them
to defy the wrath of King Darius, and to refuse to receive back
at his bidding the tyrant whom they had some years before driven
from their land.

The enterprise and genius of an Englishman have lately confirmed
by fresh evidence, and invested with fresh interest, the might of
the Persian monarch, who sent his troops to combat at Marathon.
Inscriptions in a character termed the Arrow-headed, or
Cuneiform, had long been known to exist on the marble monuments
at Persepolis, near the site of the ancient Susa, and on the
faces of rocks in other places formerly ruled over by the early
Persian kings. But for thousands of years they had been mere
unintelligible enigmas to the curious but baffled beholder: and
they were often referred to as instances of the folly of human
pride, which could indeed write its own praises in the solid
rock, but only for the rock to outlive the language as well as
the memory of the vain-glorious inscribers. The elder Niebuhr,
Grotefend, and Lassen had made some guesses at the meaning of the
Cuneiform letters; but Major Rawlinson, of the East India
Company's service, after years of labour, has at last
accomplished the glorious achievement of fully revealing the
alphabet and the grammar of this long unknown tongue. He has, in
particular, fully deciphered and expounded the inscriptions on
the sacred rock of Behistun, on the western frontiers of Media.
These records of the Achaemenidae have at length found their
interpreter; and Darius himself speaks to us from the consecrated
mountain, and tells us the names of the nations that obeyed him,
the revolts that he suppressed, his victories, his piety, and his