to the cruel passions and lust of Xerxes himself. With a
narrative of these, which need not be repeated, Herodotus
dismisses him from his history; clearly feeling, though he
does not phrase it in a formal moral, that public violences
and impieties were thus visited with retribution within the
home, and within the tortured, or, even more severely, the
seared and callous conscience of the man. With such an epi-
logue may be closed the story of too many a selfish scourge of
the race!--an Augustus Caesar, a Norman William, a Prussian
Frederic, a Napoleon, to take names almost at random.

On the 16th of February in the ensuing spring occurred
an eclipse of the sun, which the superstition of the time may
naturally have connected with the final disappointment of
Xerxes and his retirement from Sardis; it was equally natural
that by the time the tradition reached Herodotus the omen
should have been carried back, as he records it, to the days
of the King's inauspicious departure from Sardis for Greece.

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