But this is not all. The man who is exalted to the pedestal of a god is made dizzy by his own altitude. Absolutism drove the Roman Emperor Caligula mad; it punished the Xerxes of Herodotus with childishness. The silly monarch who would decorate a tree with the jewellery of a prince in reward for its fruitfulness, and flog and chain the Hellespont as a punishment for its tempestuousness, is not fit to be let out of the nursery. Such conduct as his discovers an ineptitude that is next door to idiocy. When the same man appears on the pages of Scripture under the name of Ahasuerus, his weakness is despicable. The most keen-sighted ruler of millions is liable to be misinformed; the strongest administrator of a gigantic empire is compelled to move with difficulty in the midst of the elaborate organisation of his government. But Ahasuerus is neither keen-sighted nor strong. He is a victim of the last court intrigue, a believer in the idlest gossip; and he is worse, for even on the suppositions presented to him he behaves with folly and senseless fury. His conduct to Vashti is first insulting and then ungrateful; for fidelity to her worthless husband would prompt her to decline to risk herself among a crew of drunken revellers. His consent to the diabolical proposal of his grand vizier for a massacre, without an atom of proof that the victims are guilty, exhibits a hopeless state of mental feebleness. His equal readiness to transfer the mandate of wholesale murder to persons described indefinitely as the "enemies" of these people shows how completely he is twisted about by the latest breeze. As the palace plots develop we see this great king in all his pride and majesty tossed to and fro like a shuttle-cock. And yet he can sting. It is a dangerous game for the players, and the object of it is to get the deadly venom of the royal rage to light on the head of the opposite party. We could not have a more certain proof of the vanity of "ambition that o'erleaps itself" than this conversion of immeasurable power into helpless weakness on the part of the Persian sovereign.
We naturally start with this glaring exhibition of the irony of fate in our study of Ahasuerus, because it is the most pronounced factor in his character and career. There are other elements of the picture, however, which are not, like this, confined to the abnormal experience of solitary rulers. Next to the revenge of absolutism on its possessor, the more vulgar effects of extravagant luxury and self-indulgence are to be seen in the degraded Persian court life. Very likely the writer of our Book of Esther introduces these matters with the primary object of enhancing the significance of his main theme by making us feel how great a danger the Jews were in, and how magnificent a triumph was won for them by the heroic Jewess of the harem. But the scene that he thus brings before us throws light on the situation all round. Xerxes' idea of unbridled power is that it admits of unlimited pleasure. Our author's picture of the splendid palace, with its richly coloured awnings stretched across from marble pillars to silver rods over the tesselated pavement, where the most exalted guests recline in the shade on gold and silver seats, while they feast hugely and drink heavily day after day, shows us how the provinces were being drained to enrich the court, and how the royal treasury was being lavished on idle festivity. That was bad enough, but its effects were worse. The law was licence. "The drinking was according to the law," and this law was that there should be no limit to it, everybody taking just as much wine as he pleased. Naturally such a rule ostentatiously paraded before a dissolute company led to a scene of downright bestial debauchery. According to Herodotus, the Persians were addicted to drunkenness, and the incident described in the first chapter of Esther is quite in accordance with the Greek historian's account of the followers of Xerxes.