When Isaiah wrote, Babylon sat a queen among the nations, in the pride of pomp and power, in the full security of strength; yet he graphically depicted her desolation and foretold her present state, while he pronounced her doom—a perpetual desolation. She shall never be rebuilt! Her towers are fallen and her site marked by ruins.
The decline of Babylon had begun. It was certain, although slow. Years were to pass before the sentence should be fully executed. At the period, when the transactions recorded in the book of Esther took place, Shushan was the royal city of Persia. We are told that in this—the City of Lilies—the king Ahasuerus held a great feast, probably in celebration of some recent success, or in commemoration of some great national event. He assembled all the princes and nobles of his vast empire, extending from Egypt to India, and gave a feast or succession of festivities, which continued for more than the third of a year.
All that oriental splendour and magnificence could contribute, all the expedients that eastern luxury could desire, to multiply the resources and to heighten the enjoyment of pleasure, were brought to aid the designs of the monarch and to add to the festivities of his court.
Yet motives of policy may have combined with the designs of pleasure. In all ages the despot has sought to blind and dazzle the people by a display of power and magnificence; and the princes and nobles around, from distant provinces, have swelled the retinue of their attendants.
The amusements of monarchs and of courts have, through all varieties of manners and degrees of refinement, been much the same. The ancient Syrian or Persian, like the modern British or French monarch, had his royal parks and forests for hunting.
All nations have patronized the various trials of skill and strength, and the mimic fight has ever been an amusement where war was the great business of life. And the royal pageantry was doubtless intermingled with the religious ceremonies which allowed a license to criminal indulgence and at the same time offered a supposed expiation for crime.
While these employed the day, the games of chance, the wine, the music, the movements of the degraded dancing-girl, and the tricks of the buffoon and the jester, amused the late hours and varied the festive scenes of the night.
The feast was drawing to a close, and, at the termination of this long season of hilarity, Ahasuerus extended the pleasures of the occasion to all classes of his subjects at Shushan.
He threw open his palaces and pleasure-grounds, his parks and gardens—always of vast extent around eastern palaces—and admitted all the citizens to a feast prepared for them. Tents had been erected within the precincts of the palace for the tables—and these tents were furnished with all the luxurious appendages of the east—with white and green and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and marble pillars; while the beds—the couches around the tables, against which the ancients reclined—were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red and blue, and black and white marble; while they gave them to drink in vessels of gold. Until these last days the princes and nobles alone had participated in the festive scenes; but now, as we have said, all ranks were allowed to share, and the citizens of Shushan, subjects of Ahasuerus, thronged the palace and trod the royal gardens, and, entering the tents, enjoyed all that royalty could offer in ancient Persia—far surpassing in costly splendour and elegance the entertainments of modern courts. And surely the monarch must have had strong confidence in the security of his government and the loyalty of his people, as he thus from day to day, for successive days, flung open to them the recesses of his palace.