On the ground of moral resemblance to that tyrant, however, every trait leads us to Xerxes. The king who scourged and fettered the sea ; who beheaded his engineers because the elements de stroyed their bridge over the Hellespont ; who so ruthlessly slew the eldest son of Pythius because his father besought him to leave him one sole sup port of his declining years ; who dishonoured the remains of the valiant Leonidas; and who be guiled the shame of his defeat by such a course of sensuality, that he publicly offered a reward for the inventor of a new pleasure—is just the despot to divorce his queen because she would not ex pose herself to the gaze of drunken revellers; is just the despot to devote a whole people, his sub jects, to an indiscriminate massacre; and by way of preventing that evil, to restore them the right of self-defence (which it is hard to conceive how the first edict ever could have taken away), and thus to sanction their slaughtering thousands of his other subjects.
There are also remarkable coincidences of date between the history of Xerxes and that of Aha suerus. In the third year of his reign the latter gave a grand feast to his nobles, which lasted iSo days (Esth. i. 3); the former, in his third year, also assembled his chief officers to deliberate on the invasion of Greece (Herod, vii. 8). Nor
should we wonder to find no nearer agreement in the two accounts than is expressed in the mere fact of the nobles being assembled. The two re lations are quite compatible ; each writer only mentioning that aspect of the event which had interest for him. Again, Ahasuerus married Esther at Shushan, in the seventh year of his reign : in the same year of his reign, Xerxes re turned to Susa with the mortification of his de feat, and sought to forget himself in pleasure;— not an unlikely occasion for that quest for fair virgins for the harem (Esth. ii. 2). Lastly, the tribute imposed on the land and isles of the sea also accords with the state of his revenue, ex hausted by his insane attempt against Greece. In fine, these arguments, negative and affirmative, render it so highly probable that Xerxes is the Ahasuenis of the book of Esther, that to demand more conclusive evidence, would be to mistake the very nature of the question.
The fourth Ahasuerus ('.kaanpos) is mentioned in Tobit xiv. 15, in connection with the destruc tion of Nineveh. That circumstance points out Cyaxares I. as the person intended (Herod. i. io6 , Rawlinson, Bampon Lecture, p. 185).— 1 N.