Two months would seem to be a very short time to await the return of an army going on such an expedition into boundless and trackless wilds. There can, however, scarcely be any accidental error in the statement of the time, as the mode which Darius adopted to enable the guard thus left at the bridge to keep their reckoning was a very singular one, and it is very particularly described. He took a cord, it is said, and tied sixty knots in it. This cord he delivered to the Ionian chiefs who were to be left in charge of the bridge, directing them to untie one of the knots every day. When the cord should become, by this process, wholly free, the detachment were also at liberty. They might thereafter, at any time, abandon the post intrusted to them, and return to their homes.
Probable reason for employing it.
Darius's determination to return before the knots should be all untied.
We can not suppose that military men, capable of organizing a force of seventy thousand troops for so distant an expedition, and possessed of sufficient science and skill to bridge the Bosporus and the Danube, could have been under any necessity of adopting so childish a method as this as a real reliance in regulating their operations. It must be recollected, however, that, though the commanders in these ancient days were intelligent and strong-minded men, the common soldiers were but children both in intellect and in ideas; and it was the custom of all great commanders to employ outward and visible symbols to influence and govern them. The sense of loneliness and desertion which such soldiers would naturally feel in being left in solitude on the banks of the river, would be much diminished by seeing before them a marked and definite termination to the period of their stay, and to have, in the cord hanging up in their camp, a visible token that the remnant of time that remained was steadily diminishing day by day; while, in the mean time, Darius was fully determined that, long before the knots should be all untied, he would return to the river.
Chapter IX.
The Retreat from Scythia.
B.C. 513
Motive for Darius's invasion.
The foundation of government.
The motive which dictated Darius's invasion of Scythia seems to have been purely a selfish and domineering love of power. The attempts of a stronger and more highly civilized state to extend its dominion over a weaker and more lawless one, are not, however, necessarily and always of this character. Divine Providence, in making men gregarious in nature, has given them an instinct of organization, which is as intrinsic and as essential a characteristic of the human soul as maternal love or the principle of self-preservation. The right, therefore, of organizations of men to establish law and order among themselves, and to extend these principles to other communities around them, so far as such interpositions are really promotive of the interests and welfare of those affected by them, rests on precisely the same foundation as the right of the father to govern the child. This foundation is the existence and universality of an instinctive principle implanted by the Creator in the human heart; a principle which we are bound to submit to, both because it is a fundamental and constituent element in the very structure of man, and because its recognition and the acknowledgment of its authority are absolutely essential to his continued existence. Wherever law and order, therefore, among men do not exist, it may be properly established and enforced by any neighboring organization that has power to do it, just as wherever there is a group of children they may be justly controlled and governed by their father. It seems equally unnecessary to invent a fictitious and wholly imaginary compact to justify the jurisdiction in the one case as in the other.