the Shah Nameh, the land of Kaikobad the Great and Kaikhusru.  Too remote for all scholars even to agree that it existed; set by those who do believe in it at about 1100 B.C.—­we hear of a “Powerful empire in Bactria”—­ which is up towards Afghanistan; I take it that it was from this the Persian tradition came—­last down to, and through, the period of the Achaemenidae.  What arts, what literature, these latter may have had, are lost; nothing is known of their creative and mental culture; but, to quote Mahaffy once more, it is exceedingly unlikely they had none.  Dio Chrysostom, in the first century B.C., says that “neither Homer nor Hesiod sang of the chariots and horses of Zeus so worthily as Zoroaster”; which may mean, perhaps, that a tradition still survived in his time of a great Achaemenian poetry.  Why then is this culture lost, since if it existed, it was practically contemporary with that of the Greeks?  Because contemporaneity is a most deceiving thing; there is nothing in it.  Persia now is not contemporary with Japan; nor modern China with Europe or America.  The Achaemenians are separated from us by two pralayas; while between us and the Greeks there is but one.  When our present Europe has gone down, and a new barbarism and Middle Ages have passed over France, Britain and Italy, and given place in turn to a new growth of civilization—­what shall we know of this Paris, and Florence, and London?  As much and as little as we know now of Greece and Rome.  We shall dig them up and reconstruct them; found our culture on theirs, and think them very wonderful for mere centers of (Christian) paganism; we shall marvel at their genius, as shown in the fragments that go under the names of those totally mythological poets, Dante and Milton; and at their foul cruelty, as shown by their capital punishment and their wars.  And what shall we know of ancient Athens and Rome?  Our scholars will sneer at the superstition that they ever existed; our theologians will say the world was created somewhat later.

Or indeed, no; I think it will not be so.  I think we shall have established an abiding perception of truth:  Theosophy will have smashed the backbone of this foolish Kali-Yuga as a little, before then.

So that Creasy is all out in his estimate of the importance of Marathon and the other victories.  Wars are only straws to show which way the current flows; and they do that only indifferently.  They are not the current themselves, and they do not direct it; and were men wise enough to avoid them, better than the best that was ever won out of war would be won by other means that the Law would provide.  And yet the Human Spirit will win something out of all eventualities, even war, if Kama and the Cycles permit.  In a non-political sense the Persian Wars bore huge harvest for Greece; the Law used them to that end.  The great effort brought out all the latent resources of the Athenian mind:  the successes heightened