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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: indulge in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks
rouged, his eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life,
shut up from all his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.
He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes,
an Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs
likewise to avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers--the
Persians had no cavalry--defeat the innumerable horsemen of the
Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable captivity, and so
change, one legend says, in a single battle, the fortunes of the
whole East.
And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly
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