XV. THE FIRST FOREIGN INVASION…

XV. THE FIRST FOREIGN INVASION

Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground; No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould, But one vast realm of wonder spreads around, And all the muse’s tales seem truly told, Till the sense aches with gazing to behold The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon; Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold, Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone: Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.

--BYRON.

Curtius in the well-known passage which begins his celebrated history asks where is the division between Asia and Europe, pointing out that the islands of the Ægean Sea are practically stepping-stones between Asia Minor and Greece, and that from one point of view the intervening bits of water are rather connecting links than a severing barrier. This claim has much to support it in the view of a maritime people; yet from another point of view a very tangible barrier does exist between the two continents. The Persians, as is well known, having their native seat far inland had a standing dread of water. For them the Ægean Sea was unquestionably a barrier, not a bridge. It would probably have been long before they attempted to cross this barrier had not the initiative been taken from the other side. But while it was far from Asia to Europe, it was not far, in the point of view of the sea-faring Greek, from Europe to Asia. To him the sea was a bridge.

No one knows how early the Greeks themselves crossed the various “bridges” of the Ægean and began to make settlements in Asia Minor, but it is known that in a very early day these settlements on the eastern shore had come to play a most important part in Grecian life. It is supposed that in the early day the inhabitants of Asia Minor welcomed the Greek colonist who became valuable to them as a manufacturer, and, in particular, as a trader.

It was long before there seemed anything menacing in the growth of these scattered colonies, and, before the powers of Asia Minor had aroused to a right understanding of the political import of the colonisation that had gone on under their eyes, the whole coast had come practically under the control of these peaceful invaders from the West. Then indeed the Lydians, in particular, were aroused to a realisation of what they had permitted, and sought to make amends by subjecting the colonies that had hitherto been their own masters. The attempt was first made on a large scale by Crœsus, but, before he had completed the task, he was himself overthrown by Cyrus, and the standing broil with the Greek colonies of the coast was one of the perquisites of war which Crœsus handed over to the Persians.

Cyrus himself seems to have thought the Greeks of small importance, as he left a subordinate to dispose of them, while he turned his personal attention to the more powerful Babylonians, but the Greeks were supported by the memory of some generations of freedom, and they did not prove the contemptible foe that they seemed. Cities once conquered were prone to revolt, and the indomitable spirit of the Greeks on this western border of the Persian territory proved a standing source of annoyance. At last Darius determined to put an end to the Grecians once for all, and it was his general who for the first time led a Persian host across the Hellespont and into the precincts of Greece itself. The repulse of this host by the Athenians on the field of Marathon was an event which the Greeks of a later time never tired of celebrating, and which has taken its place in later history as one of the half-dozen great decisive battles of the world. Subjected to a critical view this battle of Marathon, as we shall have occasion to see presently, was not quite so decisive an event as the Athenians were disposed to think it. Still it turned the Persian horde back from Greece for a decade. Then under Xerxes came that stupendous half-organised army that has been the wonder of all after-times; and the glorious events of Thermopylæ, Salamis, Platæa, and Mycale in rapid succession added to the glory of Greek prowess and saved the life of Greece as a nation--saved it from an outer foe that it might die by its own hand. The events of this memorable epoch are among the most important in all Grecian history, and we must view them in detail, drawing largely for our knowledge of them on the great original source, Herodotus, but noting also the impression which they have made upon many generations of historians of other times and other lands.[a]

THE ORIGIN OF ANIMOSITY

Herodotus, born 484, in the midst of the Median wars, wondered at this great conflict between the Greek and barbarian worlds and sought its causes in times more remote than the Trojan war, even in the mythological period.

[Sidenote: [506 B.C.]]

“The most learned of the Persians,” he says, “assert that the Phœnicians were the original exciters of contention. This nation migrated from the borders of the Red Sea to the place of their present settlement, and soon distinguished themselves by their long and enterprising voyages. They exported to Argos, among other places, the produce of Egypt and Assyria. Argos, at that period, was the most famous of all those states which are now comprehended under the general appellation of Greece. On their arrival here, the Phœnicians exposed their merchandise to sale; after remaining about six days, and when they had almost disposed of their different articles of commerce, the king’s daughter, whom both nations agree in calling Io, came among a great number of other women, to visit them at their station. Whilst these females, standing near the stern of the vessel, amused themselves with bargaining for such things as attracted their curiosity, the Phœnicians, in conjunction, made an attempt to seize their persons. The greater part of them escaped, but Io, with many others, remained a captive. They carried them on board, and directed their course for Egypt.

“The relation of the Greeks differs essentially; but this, according to the Persians, was the cause of Io’s arrival in Egypt, and the first act of violence which was committed. In process of time, certain Grecians, concerning whose country writers disagree, but who were really of Crete, are reported to have touched at Tyre, and to have carried away Europa, the daughter of the prince. Thus far the Greeks had only retaliated; but they were certainly guilty of the second provocation. They made a voyage in a vessel of war to Æa, a city of Colchis, near the river Phasis; and, after having accomplished the more immediate object of their expedition, they forcibly carried off the king’s daughter, Medea. The king of Colchis despatched a herald to demand satisfaction for the affront, and the restitution of the princess; but the Greeks replied, that they should make no reparation in the present instance, as the violence formerly offered to Io still remained unexpiated.

“In the age which followed, Alexander [Paris], the son of Priam, encouraged by the memory of these events, determined on obtaining a wife from Greece, by means of similar violence; fully persuaded that this, like former wrongs, would never be avenged.

“Upon the loss of Helen, the Greeks at first employed messengers to demand her person, as well as a compensation for the affront. All the satisfaction they received was reproach for the injury which had been offered to Medea; and they were further asked, how, under circumstances entirely alike, they could reasonably require what they themselves had denied.

“Hitherto the animosity betwixt the two nations extended no farther than to acts of private violence. But at this period, the Greeks certainly laid the foundation of subsequent contention; who, before the Persians invaded Europe, doubtless made military incursions into Asia. The Persians appear to be of opinion, that they who offer violence to women must be insensible to the impressions of justice, but that such provocations are as much beneath revenge, as the women themselves are undeserving of regard: it being obvious, that all females thus circumstanced must have been more or less accessary to the fact. They asserted also, that although women had been forcibly carried away from Asia, they had never resented the affront. The Greeks, on the contrary, to avenge the rape of a Lacedæmonian woman, had assembled a mighty fleet, entered Asia in a hostile manner, and had totally overthrown the empire of Priam. Since which event they had always considered the Greeks as the public enemies of their nation.”

[Sidenote: [515-499 B.C.]]

Such were the causes of the animosity between Persians and Greeks as Herodotus conceived them. But the modern historian gives scant credence to these tales. In reality we do not have to go back to the abduction of Io and Helen by the Asiatics, and of Europa and Medea by the Greeks to explain this mutual hate. Equally trivial are such incidents as the flight of the physician Democedes, who deceived Darius that he might return to his native Croton; and the desire of the queen, Atossa, to include Spartan and Athenian women among her slaves. The appeals of Hippias to be reinstated in Athens, and of the Aleuadæ of Thessaly to be delivered from the enemies that oppressed them had, to be sure, a somewhat more serious influence. But the real cause was Persia’s power. This empire had at that time attained its natural limits. Being nearly surrounded by deserts, the sea, wide rivers, and high mountains, there was but one direction in which she could expand, the northwest; and on that side lay a famous country, Greece, whose independence affronted the pride of the Great King. Cyrus had conquered Asia; Cambyses a part of Africa, so Darius, not to be outdone by his predecessors, attacked Europe. The Sardian satrap, Artaphernes, had already replied to the overtures of Clisthenes by demanding that Athens should come under the rule of the Great King. Darius had reorganised his empire and restored in his provinces the order so rudely shaken by the usurpation of the Magian and the efforts of the conquered nations to regain their freedom; it was necessary moreover to furnish occupation for the warlike ardour which still characterised the Persians. With this end in view he planned an important expedition. The Scythians had formerly invaded Asia; it was the recollection of that injury and the desire to subjugate Thrace which adjoined his own empire that pointed out to Darius the route he was to follow. He set out from Susa with a numerous army, crossed the Bosporus on a bridge of boats constructed by the Samian, Mandrocles, and entered Europe bringing seven or eight hundred thousand men in his train, among whom were some Asiatic Greeks commanded by the tyrants of the various cities. He traversed Thrace, crossed the Danube (Ister) on a bridge of boats which he left the Greeks to guard, then penetrated well into Scythia in pursuit of an enemy whom it was impossible to seize. Darius had told the Greeks not to expect him to return after the expiration of sixty days. This time having passed without news of him, the Athenian, Miltiades, tyrant of the Chersonesus, proposed to destroy the bridge that the way into Thrace might not be left open to the Scythians whom he supposed victorious, also that the Persian army might be destroyed by them should it still exist. Histiæus of Miletus opposed this plan, representing to the chiefs, who were all tyrants of Greek cities, that they would surely be overthrown the day they lost the support of their great leader. This reasoning saved Darius, who, returning from his vain pursuit, left with Megabyzus eighty thousand men to complete the subjugation of Thrace, and also to conquer Macedonia.

Megabyzus conquered Perinthus, that part of Thrace which still resisted, Pæonia, and called upon the king of Macedonia to render him homage of earth and water. Amyntas accorded this, and Megabyzus was able to report to his master that the Persian empire at last adjoined Greece in Europe. With this the expedition came to an end. Histiæus’ services were rewarded by the gift of a vast territory on the banks of the Strymon. The site had been well chosen, near the gold and silver mines of Mount Pangæ, at the foot of hills rich in building woods and near the mouth of a river that offered an excellent port on the Ægean Sea. Myrcinus, founded there by Histiæus, would soon have attained the growth and prosperity that were to signalise Amphipolis later on the same spot, had not Megabyzus, in alarm, warned the king of the necessity of preventing this Greek from carrying out the plans he meditated. Histiæus was summoned to Sardis on pretext of being needed for an important consultation, and once there, Darius told him simply that he could not do without his friendship and advice. Histiæus was obliged to accept these gilded chains.

THE IONIC REVOLT

[Sidenote: [499-494 B.C.]]

Several years had passed in unbroken peace when a trivial matter and an obscure man threw all in disorder again. Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades, was powerful at that time, ruling over several islands, possessing a considerable navy and able to place in the field eight thousand hoplites. Unfortunately, like every other Grecian state, Naxos was divided into two factions, the popular and the aristocratic. This latter destroyed itself by an unpardonable crime, similar to that of which Lucretia was victim about the same time in Rome. Sent into exile, they proposed to Aristagoras, Histiæus’ son-in-law and, in his absence, tyrant of Miletus, to take them back to their island. He acceded readily, beholding in fancy the Cyclades, possibly also Eubœa as already under his dominion. But unable to accomplish such an enterprise without help, he succeeded in interesting the satrap of Sardis, Artaphernes, who placed at his disposal a fleet of two hundred ships commanded by Megabates. This Persian rebelled at being under the orders of a Greek and to avenge a slight received in a quarrel that broke out between them, sent information to the Naxians. The success of the expedition depended on secrecy; this once destroyed, it was bound to fail. Aristagoras held to the project four months, spending his own treasure as well as that given him for the enterprise by the king. He feared being obliged to make good this loss, and decided that revolt offered a preferable alternative, in which choice he was aided by the secret instigations of Histiæus. The army he had led before Naxos was still united, and forming part of it were all the tyrants of the cities on the Asiatic coast. These he seized and sent back to their respective cities where they were placed under sentence of death or exile, then established democracy everywhere (499 B.C.). After these deeds, finding it necessary to attach some powerful ally to his cause, he visited Lacedæmon. Cleomenes, its king, questioned him as to the distance of the Persian capital from the sea. “A three months’ march,” replied Aristagoras. “In that case you will leave this place to-morrow,” said the king, “it would be folly to propose to Lacedæmonians to put a three months’ march between themselves and the sea.” Aristagoras tried to bribe him to consent; but for once Spartan virtue was incorruptible and the Ionian went on to Athens. Given permission to speak in the assembly, he described the riches of Persia, and laid stress on the advantage the Greeks would have over a foe to whom the use of spear and shield was unknown, and finally adduced the fact that Miletus was a colony of Athens. The Athenians had more than one grievance against the Persians--the refuge given to Hippias, and the order to recall the tyrant received as a reply to their remonstrances. Aristagoras had little difficulty in persuading them to assure their own safety by carrying the war with which they were menaced over into the enemy’s country, they also believing doubtless that the matter was but a private quarrel between the satrap and Aristagoras. They decreed to the envoy twenty vessels to which were added five triremes from Eretria, this state thus repaying the aid it had formerly received from Miletus in its war against Chalcis. The allies proceeded to Ephesus and thence to Sardis, which they took and pillaged. The houses were thatched with reeds, and, a soldier accidentally setting fire to one of the roofs, the entire city, with the exception of the citadel to which Artaphernes had retired, was consumed, together with the temple of Cybele, venerated as deeply by the Persians as by the Lydians (498). Artaphernes meanwhile had recalled the army that was besieging Miletus, and from all sides gathered the provincial troops; the Athenians began to think of retreat. A defeat they suffered near Ephesus, possibly also treason among themselves, completed their dissatisfaction. They boarded their ships and returned to Athens, leaving their allies to extricate themselves from the difficulty in which they were placed as best they could.

The Ionians continued the contest, drawing into their movement all the cities on the Hellespont and the Propontis, together with Chalcedonia and Byzantium, the Carians and the island of Cyprus. The Persians got together several armies; one, directed northward against the cities of the Hellespont, took several towns, then fell back towards the south against the Carians, who, after losing two battles, surrendered. Another attacked Cyprus with the Phœnician fleet that had been defeated by the Ionians, but the treachery of a Cypriote chief delivered the island over to the enemy. Acting jointly in the centre, Artaphernes and Otanes captured Clazomenæ and Cyme, and then advanced with a considerable force against Miletus, the last bulwark of Ionia. Here Aristagoras was no longer chief; he had basely deserted and escaped to Myrcinus, and was later killed in an attack on a Thracian city. As regards Histiæus, Darius, deceived by his promises, had recently restored him to liberty, but the Milesians, having no liking for tyrants, refused to receive him. Getting together a small force of Mytilenæans he became a pirate and was killed in a descent on the Asiatic coast. The Ionians assembled at the Panionium, deliberated as to the best means of saving Miletus. It was decided to risk a naval battle; Chios furnished a hundred ships, Lesbos seventy, Samos sixty, and Miletus itself eighty, the fleet numbering in all three hundred and fifty-three ships. The Persians had six hundred.

[Sidenote: [494-492 B.C.]]

In the Greek fleet was a very able man who would have saved Ionia had she been willing to be saved. This was Dionysius, a Phocæan, who demonstrated to the allies that strict discipline and constant practice in manœuvres would assure them success. For seven days he drilled the crews in all the movements of naval warfare, but at the end of this time the effeminate Ionians had had enough; they left the ships, pitched their tents on land, and forgot that the enemy existed. As was unavoidable after taking such a course, their moral fibre became relaxed and treachery began to show among them. When the day of battle arrived, the Samians, in the hottest of the action, deserted their post and made for their own island. The Ionians were defeated despite the splendid courage of the Chian sailors and of Dionysius, who himself took three of the enemy’s vessels. When he saw that the battle was lost he boldly pushed on to Tyre and sank several merchant ships, retiring to Sicily with the wealth obtained. The rest of his life was passed in pursuing on the open sea Phœnician, Carthaginian, and Tyrrhenian ships.

All hope was lost for Miletus; it was taken and its inhabitants transported to Ampe, at the mouth of the Tigris (494). Chios, Lesbos, Tenedos, shared Miletus’ fate, and several cities of the Hellespont were destroyed by fire. The inhabitants of Chalcedon and Byzantium abandoned these cities to seek a home on the northwest coast of the Pontus Euxinus, in Mesambria. Miltiades also deemed it prudent to leave the Chersonesus; he returned to Athens, where he was soon to find himself arrayed against those very Persians from whom he now sought flight. The news of Ionia’s downfall echoed sadly throughout Greece, Athens, in particular, being affected. Phrynichus presented a play entitled the Capture of Miletus at which the entire audience burst into tears, and the poet was sentenced to pay a fine of a thousand drachmæ “for having revived the memory of a great domestic misfortune.” Tears like these expiate many faults.

Meanwhile Darius had not forgotten that after the burning of Sardis he had sworn to be revenged on the Athenians. He gave to his son-in-law, Mardonius, command over a newly raised army that was to enter Europe by way of Thrace while the fleet followed along the coast. Mardonius, to conciliate the Greeks in Asia, restored to them a democratic government, bearing in mind that the authors of the recent revolt had been two of the tyrants that Persia supported.

Megabazus had already subdued all the nations between the Hellespont and Macedonia. Mardonius crossed the Strymon and gave his fleet rendezvous in the Thermaic Gulf. He took Thasos and was passing along the coast of Chalcidice when on doubling the promontory of Mount Athos, which rises nineteen hundred and fifty metres out of the sea, his fleet encountered a terrific gale that wrecked three hundred ships and destroyed twenty thousand lives. About the same time Mardonius, attacked at night by the Thracians, lost many of his men and was himself wounded. He continued the expedition, but was so enfeebled after the subjugation of the Brygians that he felt himself obliged to return to Asia.

A more formidable armament was at once prepared. Before sending it forth Darius despatched heralds to Greece demanding homage of earth and water, and, in the case of maritime cities, a contingent of galleys. The greater part of the islands and several cities yielded to this demand, Ægina even anticipating the desire of the Great King. The indignation of Athens and Sparta was such that they forgot the respect due to envoys. “You want earth and water?” replied the Spartans, “very well, you shall have both,” and the unfortunate men were thrown into a well. The Greeks cast them into the barathrum, and if a not very authentic tale may be believed, condemned to death the interpreter who had defiled the Greek tongue by translating into it the orders of a barbarian.[18]

WAR WITH ÆGINA

[Sidenote: [492 B.C.]]

Athens was constantly at war with the Æginetans, and she now seized an opportunity their conduct offered to accuse them to the Lacedæmonians of treachery to the common cause. This appeal to the Spartans was equivalent to acknowledging their claims to supremacy as the recognised chiefs of Hellas, the exigencies of the situation having silenced pride. Cleomenes shared the resentment of the Athenians, and proceeded to Ægina to seize the offenders. But his colleague Demaratus, who had already betrayed him in an expedition into Attica, informed the islanders and the enterprise fell through.

To put an end to his colleague’s vexatious opposition Cleomenes caused it to be declared by the Pythia, whom he had won over, that Demaratus was not of royal blood, thus obtaining his deposition. Leotychides, who had joined with him in this scheme, succeeded the deposed king, to whom he was next of kin, and by outrageous treatment drove him from Sparta. Demaratus sought out Hippias in his exile and, like him, begged hospitality of the great protector of kings.

Cleomenes next proceeded to Ægina and took thence ten hostages whom he delivered over to the Athenians. This was the last public act of the turbulent chief who later became insane and perished miserably by his own hand; Leotychides, convicted of having taken bribes from the enemy he should have stubbornly opposed, died in exile. “Thus,” says Herodotus, “did the gods punish the perjury of these two princes.” Meanwhile the Æginetans demanded the return of their hostages, and, Athens refusing to surrender them, they attacked and captured the sacred galley that was carrying to Cape Sunium many prominent citizens. War immediately broke out. An Æginetan attempted to overthrow, in his island, the oligarchical government. He got possession of the citadel, but reinforcements not reaching him in time, he left in the hands of the enemy seven hundred of his men, who were massacred without mercy. One of these poor creatures succeeded in escaping and made his way to the temple of Ceres where he expected to find safe refuge. The gates being closed, he clung with both hands to the latch-ring, and all efforts to make him let go being unavailing, the butchers cut off his hands, which even in the convulsions of death still preserved their frenzied hold. Herodotus, accustomed as he was to civil war, raises not a word of protest against this slaughter of seven hundred citizens, he remarks only upon the sacrilege committed on account of one of them. “No sacrifice,” he says piously, “will be sufficient to appease the wrath of the goddess.” The nobles were all ejected from the island before they had expiated their act of sacrilege. This war did not close, in fact, until nine years after the second expedition of the Persians.[d]

THE FIRST INVASION

[Sidenote: [492-490 B.C.]]

Whilst these two nations were thus engaged in hostilities, the domestic of the Persian monarch continued regularly to bid him “Remember the Athenians,” which incident was further enforced by the unremitting endeavours of the Pisistratidæ to criminate that people. The king himself was very glad of this pretext, effectually to reduce such of the Grecian states as had refused him “earth and water.” He accordingly removed from his command Mardonius, who had been unsuccessful in his naval undertakings; he appointed two other officers to commence an expedition against Eretria and Athens; these were Datis, a native of Media, and Artaphernes his nephew, who were commanded totally to subdue both the above places, and to bring the inhabitants captive before him.

These commanders, as soon as they had received their appointment, advanced to Aleum in Cilicia, with a large and well-provided body of infantry. Here, as soon as they encamped, they were joined by a numerous reinforcement of marines, agreeably to the orders which had been given. Not long afterwards, those vessels arrived to take the cavalry on board, which in the preceding year Darius had commanded his tributaries to supply. The horse and foot immediately embarked, and proceeded to Ionia, in a fleet of six hundred triremes. They did not, keeping along the coast, advance in a right line to Thrace and the Hellespont, but loosing from Samos, they passed through the midst of the islands, and the Icarian Sea, fearing, as we should suppose, to double the promontory of Athos, by which they had in a former year severely suffered. They were further induced to this course by the island of Naxos which before they had omitted to take.

Proceeding therefore from the Icarian Sea to this island, which was the first object of their enterprise, they met with no resistance. The Naxians, remembering their former calamities, fled in alarm to the mountains. Those taken captive were made slaves, the sacred buildings and the city were burned. This done, the Persians sailed to the other islands.

At this juncture the inhabitants of Delos deserted their island and fled to Tenos. The Persian fleet was directing its course to Delos, when Datis, hastening to the van, obliged them to station themselves at Rhenea, which lies beyond it. As soon as he learned to what place the Delians had retired, he sent a herald to them with this message: “Why, oh sacred people, do you fly, thinking so injuriously of me? If I had not received particular directions from the king my master to this effect, I, of my own accord, would never have molested you, nor offered violence to a place in which two deities were born. Return therefore, and inhabit your island as before.” Having sent this message, he offered upon one of their altars incense to the amount of three hundred talents [£60,000 or $300,000].

[Sidenote: [490 B.C.]]

After this measure, Datis led his whole army against Eretria, taking with him the Ionians and Æolians. The Delians say, that at the moment of his departure the island of Delos was affected by a tremulous motion, a circumstance which, as the Delians affirm, never happened before or since. The deity, as it should seem by this prodigy, forewarned mankind of the evils which were about to happen. Greece certainly suffered more and greater calamities during the reigns of Darius son of Hystaspes, Xerxes son of Darius, and Artaxerxes son of Xerxes, than in all the preceding twenty generations; these calamities arose partly from the Persians, and partly from the contentions for power among its own great men. It was not therefore without reason that Delos, immovable before, should then be shaken, which event indeed had been predicted by the oracle:

“Although Delos be immovable, I will shake it.”

It is also worth observation, that, translated into the Greek tongue, Darius signifies one who compels, Xerxes, a warrior, Artaxerxes, a great warrior; and thus they would call them if they used the corresponding terms.

The barbarians, sailing from Delos to the other islands, took on board reinforcements from them all, together with the children of the inhabitants as hostages. Cruising round the different islands, they arrived off Carystus; but the people of this place positively refused either to give hostages, or to serve against their neighbours, Athens and Eretria. They were consequently besieged, and their lands wasted; and they were finally compelled to surrender themselves to the Persians.

The Eretrians, on the approach of the Persian army, applied to the Athenians for assistance; this the Athenians did not think proper to withhold; they accordingly sent them the four thousand men to whom those lands had been assigned which formerly belonged to the Chalcidian cavalry; but the Eretrians, notwithstanding their application to the Athenians, were far from being firm and determined. They were so divided in their resolutions, that whilst some of them advised the city to be deserted, and a retreat made to the rocks of Eubœa, others, expecting a reward from the Persians, prepared to betray their country. Æschines, the son of Nothon, an Eretrian of the highest rank, observing these different sentiments, informed the Athenians of the state of affairs, advising them to return home, lest they should be involved in the common ruin. The Athenians attended to this advice of Æschines, and by passing over to Oropus, escaped the impending danger.

The Persians, arriving at Eretria, came near Tamynæ, Chærea, and Ægilia; making themselves masters of these places, they disembarked the horse, and prepared to attack the enemy. The Eretrians did not think proper to advance and engage them; the opinion for defending the city had prevailed, and their whole attention was occupied in preparing for a siege. The Persians endeavoured to storm the place, and a contest of six days was attended with very considerable loss on both sides. On the seventh, the city was betrayed to the enemy by two of the more eminent citizens, Euphorbus, son of Alcimachus, and Philager, son of Cyneas. As soon as the Persians got possession of the place, they pillaged and burned the temples to avenge the burning of their own temples at Sardis. The people, according to the orders of Darius, were made slaves.

After this victory at Eretria, the Persians stayed a few days, and then sailed to Attica, driving all before them, and thinking to treat the Athenians as they had done the Eretrians. There was a place in Attica called Marathon, not far from Eretria, well adapted for the motions of cavalry: to this place therefore they were conducted by Hippias, son of Pisistratus.

As soon as the Athenians heard this, they advanced to the same spot, under the conduct of ten leaders, with the view of repelling force by force. The last of these was Miltiades. His father Cimon, son of Stesagoras, had been formerly driven from Athens by the influence of Pisistratus, son of Hippocrates. During his exile, he had obtained the prize at the Olympic games, in the chariot-race of four horses. This honour, however, he transferred to Miltiades his uterine brother. At the Olympic games which next followed he was again victorious, and with the same mares. This honour he suffered to be assigned to Pisistratus, on condition of his being recalled; a reconciliation ensued, and he was permitted to return. Being victorious a third time, on the same occasion, and with the same mares, he was put to death by the sons of Pisistratus, Pisistratus himself being then dead. He was assassinated in the night, near the Prytaneum, by some villains sent for the purpose: he was buried in the approach to the city, near the hollow way; and in the same spot were interred the mares which had three times obtained the prize at the Olympic games. If we except the mares of Evagoras of Sparta, no other ever obtained a similar honour. At this period, Stesagoras, the eldest son of Cimon, resided in the Chersonesus with his uncle Miltiades; the youngest was brought up at Athens under Cimon himself, and named Miltiades, from the founder of the Chersonesus.

This Miltiades, the Athenian leader, in advancing from the Chersonesus, escaped from two incidents which alike threatened his life: he was pursued as far as Imbros by the Phœnicians, who were exceedingly desirous to take him alive, and present him to the King; on his return home, where he thought himself secure, his enemies accused, and brought him to a public trial, under pretence of his aiming at the sovereignty of the Chersonesus; from this also he escaped, and was afterwards chosen a general of the Athenians by the suffrages of the people.

The Athenian leaders, before they left the city, despatched Phidippides to Sparta: he was an Athenian by birth, and his daily employment was that of a courier. To this Phidippides, as he himself affirmed, and related to the Athenians, the god Pan appeared on Mount Parthenius, which is beyond Tegea. The deity called him by his name, and commanded him to ask the Athenians why they so entirely neglected him, who not only wished them well, but who had frequently rendered them service, and would do so again. All this the Athenians believed, and as soon as the state of their affairs permitted, they erected a temple to Pan near the citadel: ever since the above period, they venerate the god by annual sacrifices, and the race of torches.

Phidippides, who was sent by the Athenian generals, and who related his having met with Pan, arrived at Sparta on the second day of his departure from Athens. He went immediately to the magistrates, and thus addressed them: “Men of Lacedæmon, the Athenians supplicate your assistance, and entreat you not to suffer the most ancient city of Greece to fall into the hands of the barbarians: Eretria is already subdued, and Greece weakened by the loss of that illustrious place.” After this speech of Phidippides, the Lacedæmonians resolved to assist the Athenians; but they were prevented from doing this immediately by the prejudice of an inveterate custom. This was the ninth day of the month, and it was a practice with them to undertake no enterprise before the moon was at the full: for this, therefore, they waited.

In the night before Hippias conducted the barbarians to the plains of Marathon, he saw this vision: he thought that he lay with his mother. The inference which he drew from this was, that he should again return to Athens, be restored to his authority, and die in his own house of old age: he was then executing the office of a general. The prisoners taken in Eretria he removed to Ægilia, an island belonging to the Styreans; the vessels which arrived at Marathon, he stationed in the port, and drew up the barbarians in order as they disembarked. Whilst he was thus employed, he was seized with a fit of sneezing, attended with a very unusual cough. The agitation into which he was thrown, being an old man, was so violent, that as his teeth were loose, one of them dropped out of his mouth upon the sand. Much pains were taken to find it, but in vain; upon which Hippias remarked with a sigh to those around him, “This country is not ours, nor shall we ever become masters of it--my lost tooth possesses all that belongs to me.”

Hippias conceived that he saw in the above incident, the accomplishment of his vision. In the meantime the Athenians, drawing themselves up in military order near the temple of Hercules, were joined by the whole force of the Platæans. The Athenians had formerly submitted to many difficulties on account of the Platæans, who now, to return the obligation, gave themselves up to their direction. The occasion was this: the Platæans being oppressed by the Thebans, solicited the protection of Cleomenes the son of Anaxandrides, and of such Lacedæmonians as were at hand; they disclaimed, however, any interference, for which they assigned this reason:

“From us,” said they, “situated at so great a distance, you can expect but little assistance; for before we can even receive intelligence of your danger, you may be effectually reduced to servitude; we would rather recommend you to apply to the Athenians, who are not only near, but able to protect you.”

The Lacedæmonians, in saying this, did not so much consider the interest of the Platæans, as they were desirous of seeing the Athenians harassed by a Bœotian war. The advice was nevertheless accepted, and the Platæans going to Athens, first offered a solemn sacrifice to the twelve deities, and then sitting near the altar, in the attitude of supplicants, they placed themselves formally under the protection of the Athenians. Upon this the Thebans led an army against Platæa, to defend which, the Athenians appeared with a body of forces. As the two armies were about to engage, the Corinthians interfered; their endeavours to reconcile them so far prevailed, that it was agreed, on the part of both nations, to suffer such of the people of Bœotia as did not choose to be ranked as Bœotians, to follow their own inclinations. Having effected this, the Corinthians retired, and their example was followed by the Athenians; these latter were on their return attacked by the Bœotians, whom they defeated. Passing over the boundaries, which the Corinthians had marked out, they determined that Asopus and Hysiæ should be the future limits between the Thebans and Platæans. The Platæans having thus given themselves up to the Athenians, came to their assistance at Marathon.

The Athenian leaders were greatly divided in opinion; some thought that a battle was by no means to be hazarded, as they were so inferior to the Medes in point of number; others, among whom was Miltiades, were anxious to engage the enemy. Of these contradictory sentiments, the less politic appeared likely to prevail, when Miltiades addressed himself to the polemarch, whose name was Callimachus of Aphidna. This magistrate, elected into his office by vote, has the privilege of a casting voice: and, according to established customs, is equal in point of dignity and influence to the military leaders. Miltiades addressed him thus:

“Upon you, O Callimachus, it alone depends, whether Athens shall be enslaved, or whether, in the preservation of its liberties, it shall perpetuate your name even beyond the glory of Harmodius and Aristogiton. Our country is now reduced to a more delicate and dangerous predicament than it has ever before experienced; if conquered, we know our fate, and must prepare for the tyranny of Hippias; if we overcome, our city may be made the first in Greece. How this may be accomplished, and in what manner it depends on you, I will explain: the sentiments of our ten leaders are divided, some are desirous of an engagement, others the contrary. If we do not engage, some seditious tumult will probably arise, which may prompt many of our citizens to favour the cause of the Medes; if we come to a battle before any evil of this kind take place, we may, if the gods be not against us, reasonably hope for victory: all these things are submitted to your attention, and are suspended on your will. If you accede to my opinion, our country will be free, our city the first in Greece.”

These arguments of Miltiades produced the desired effect upon Callimachus, from whose interposition it was determined to fight. Those leaders, who from the first had been solicitous to engage the enemy, resigned to Miltiades the days of their respective command. This he accepted, but did not think proper to commence the attack till the day of his own particular command arrived in its course.

THE BATTLE OF MARATHON

When this happened, the Athenians were drawn up for battle in the following order: Callimachus, as polemarch, commanded the right wing, in conformity with the established custom of the Athenians; next followed the tribes, ranged in close order, according to their respective ranks; the Platæans, placed in the rear, formed the left wing. Ever since this battle, in those solemn and public sacrifices, which are celebrated every fifth year, the herald implores happiness for the Platæans, jointly with the Athenians. Thus the Athenians produced a front equal in extent to that of the Medes. The ranks in the centre were not very deep, which of course constituted their weakest part; but the two wings were more numerous and strong.

The preparations for the attack being thus made, and the appearance of the victims favourable, the Athenians ran toward the barbarians. There was betwixt the two armies an interval of about eight furlongs. The Persians seeing them approach by running, prepared to receive them, and as they observed the Athenians to be few in number, destitute both of cavalry and archers, they considered them as mad, and rushing on certain destruction; but as soon as the Greeks mingled with the enemy, they behaved with the greatest gallantry. They were the first Greeks that we know of, who ran to attack an enemy; they were the first also who beheld without dismay the dress and armour of the Medes; for hitherto in Greece the very name of a Mede excited terror.

After a long and obstinate contest, the barbarians in the centre, composed of the Persians and the Sacæ, obliged the Greeks to give way, and pursued the flying foe into the middle of the country. At the same time the Athenians and Platæans, in the two wings, drove the barbarians before them; then making an inclination toward each other, by contracting themselves, they formed against that part of the enemy which had penetrated and defeated the Grecian centre, and obtained a complete victory, killing a prodigious number, and pursuing the rest to the sea, where they set fire to their vessels.

Callimachus the polemarch, after the most signal acts of valour, lost his life in this battle. Stesilaus also, the son of Thrasylas, and one of the Grecian leaders, was slain. Cynægirus, son of Euphorion, after seizing one of the vessels by the poop, had his hand cut off with an axe, and died of his wounds: with these many other eminent Athenians perished.

In addition to their victory, the Athenians obtained possession of seven of the enemy’s vessels. The barbarians retired with their fleet, and taking on board the Eretrian plunder, which they had left in the island, they passed the promontory of Sunium, thinking to circumvent the Athenians, and arrive at their city before them. The Athenians impute the prosecution of this measure to one of the Alcmæonidæ, who they say held up a shield as a signal to the Persians, when they were under sail.

While they were doubling the cape of Sunium, the Athenians lost no time in hastening to the defence of their city, and effectually prevented the designs of the enemy. Retiring from the temple of Hercules, on the plains of Marathon, they fixed their camp near another temple of the same deity, in Cynosarges. The barbarians anchoring off Phalerum, the Athenian harbour, remained there some time, and then retired to Asia.

The Persians lost in the battle of Marathon six thousand four hundred men, the Athenians one hundred and ninety-two. In the heat of the engagement a most remarkable incident occurred: an Athenian, the son of Cuphagoras, whose name was Epizelus, whilst valiantly fighting, was suddenly struck with blindness. He had received no wound, nor any kind of injury, notwithstanding which he continued blind for the remainder of his life. Epizelus, in relating this calamity, always declared, that during the battle he was opposed by a man of gigantic stature, completely armed, whose beard covered the whole of his shield: he added, that the spectre, passing him, killed the man who stood next him.[c]

Thus far we have followed the account of Herodotus. His high repute, for many years scoffed at, has had a sudden and cordial revival. Minute surveys of the Grecian battle-fields have recently been made by George Beardoe Grundy,[f] who finds Herodotus remarkably accurate in his topography and in his sifting of evidence and discarding of what he could not definitely substantiate. It is well to read, however, a typical account of the battle of Marathon, by a German critic Busolt, whose cautious use of Herodotus has made the following account of this battle famous.[a]

At the head of the army marched Callimachus the polemarch, who in his capacity of military chief was entitled to important privileges and honours. Not only did he offer sacrifices and vows, and in the order of battle assume the place of honour at the head of the right wing, but he was also entitled to vote with the Strategi in the council of war, and it even appears that as president of the latter he registered his vote last. In spite of this the actual command of the army was in the hands of the leaders of the regiments of the phylæ, amongst whom the chief command alternated in daily rotation. The Strategi at that time included, so far as we know, Aristides, Stesilaus, and Miltiades, who had apparently been elected as the tenth by his phyle, the Œneis. The Athenian army is said to have marched out nine or ten thousand strong, but no confidence can be placed in these numbers as they rest on a later and unreliable authority.

Similarly, we have no decided, tangible information, as to what it was that induced the Athenians not to fortify themselves behind the walls of their city, but to venture into the open field to encounter an enemy, far superior in numbers and also, since the victory over the Ionians, evidently dreaded in Hellas. Perhaps the fate of Eretria may have exercised a decisive influence on the resolution of the Athenians. The town walls may not have been in the best condition, and, as in particular there was good cause to distrust the followers of the Pisistratidæ, there must have been some apprehension lest the latter should find occasion, while the Persian army lay before the town, to enter into relations with the enemy, as the Eretrian traitors had done. But if they decided for contest in the open field it was advisable to join battle in as favourable a position as possible; so that the country might be protected from plunder and foraging. It was therefore necessary to renounce the idea of barring the passes of Pentelicus and its outlying slopes, since this position might be easily turned by way of the sea. Still less durst they risk a battle in the open plain, where the enemy would have all the advantage belonging to their overwhelming numbers, and the Persian cavalry would have full play.

The most favourable place to take up a position would be in one of the long narrow side valleys, which adjoin the plain of Marathon and in which a small army might safely encamp opposite a large one. In one of these side valleys and indeed in that of Avlon itself, was the temple precinct of the Heracleum, by which the Athenian army took up its position. The flanks were covered by the slopes of Argaliki (right) and of Kotroni (left) and secured against a turning movement. Whilst it was well calculated for an attack the position also afforded protection against an advancing enemy. The limited breadth of the entrance to the valley hindered the Persians from bringing forward the whole strength of their infantry and from using their cavalry effectively.[19] If they elected to make no attack but to slip past the Athenian army, two ways offered themselves for the march against Athens. One of these led by Marathon or Vrana to Cephisia, the other between the outlying slopes of Pentelicus towards Pallene and the Mesogæa. But it was only this last road that was practicable for vehicles and an army with cavalry and baggage. On the march by either of these two routes the Persians must expose their flank to the enemy. If they took ship, that they might make direct for Phalerum, they were liable to be attacked by the Athenian army before they could get away.

When the Athenians had taken up their stand at the Heracleum, the whole fighting force of the Platæans joined them. It appears from this that the armies had been encamped opposite one another for several days, since the Platæans could of course only start for Marathon after they had heard of the decisive resolution of the Athenians to go out to meet the enemy in that place. Since the Persians showed no signs of attacking the Attic position and since doubtful tidings had already arrived from Sparta, Miltiades decided to anticipate the attack himself, in order, as Herodotus says, to leave those who cherished projects of high treason no time to affect a wider circle of citizens and create discord. Yet half of his colleagues held the Athenian army to be too weak and declared against a battle. Under these circumstances the decision lay with the vote of the polemarch Callimachus, and the latter sided with Miltiades. Thereupon, each of the Strategi, who had voted for the battle, surrendered his command for the day on which it was his turn to assume it to Miltiades. The latter did indeed accept it, but it is nevertheless said that he did not advance to the attack until the day arrived on which he held the command-in-chief himself in his own right. This statement is very doubtful, but shows that Herodotus was unacquainted with the tradition that Miltiades advanced to the attack when he received the news that the Persians were embarking and that the cavalry were on the sea-shore. If the battle-day was selected in this way, Miltiades could not certainly have voluntarily waited for his day. Now it is principally Herodotus whom we have to go upon, as the oldest authority and the one on which later writers have generally preferred to draw, and, moreover, the tradition of the embarkation of the cavalry is a completely unreliable one; all hypotheses therefore which are built upon it and on the circumstance of the display of the shield on the height of Pentelicus are to be regarded as of no value.

In the order of battle the Athenians placed themselves according to the official order of the phylæ. At their head as leader of the right wing, stood the polemarch Callimachus, with the phyle Æantis, to which he himself, as an Aphidnæan, belonged. The Platæans received a place on the extreme left. The front of the Athenians was turned to the northeast. The left wing was covered by the slope of Kotroni and the trees which fringed it; the right was not very far from the shore. The ground permitted Miltiades to make the line of battle the same length as that of the enemy, in order to protect himself from a flank movement. The wings had to be strong enough both to repel an attempt to surround them and to effect a charge; he therefore ranged the centre only a few lines deep, whilst the wings were relatively strong. The attack was not unexpected by the Persians; they had time to form in order of battle with a centre including their picked troops, Persians and Sacæ, while the cavalry seem to have been kept in reserve behind the hills. They were, however, astounded by the manner of the attack. According to Herodotus the space between the two lines of battle amounted to eight stadia. The serried ranks of the Athenians covered this distance at a run (in some nine minutes) chiefly to avoid the chance that the cavalry might fall upon them by the way, and in order to get as quickly as possible past the hail of Persian arrows and come to a hand-to-hand combat. For the Persians began their battles with a fight at a distance, and their army was essentially a defensive army, to which Hellenic hoplites were superior in a struggle of man against man. Moreover the speed of the forward movement must have added force to the charge of the heavy-armed infantry. The shock of meeting probably took place between the Charadra and the Brexisa; the Persian foot stood firm and the fight lasted a long time. Finally the Athenians and Platæans with great force threw back the enemy, on either wing, although their centre was pierced by the Persians and Sacæ and pursued inland. In consequence, the victorious wings left the vanquished to fly, wheeled inwards and turned their united front against the Persians and Sacæ. A new fight ensued, which ended in the total defeat of the barbarians. Many of them were driven, in their flight, into the great swamp of Kato Suli, and there perished.

In the meantime, the Persian wings which had been vanquished in the onset, had had some time in which to launch a number of ships and get first on board. In especial, the embarkation of the cavalry, which had probably remained behind the wings, must have been effected. This cannot have required very much time, since the horse-transports were flat-built vessels. When the Athenians wished to follow up the pursuit of the Persians and Sacæ by the shore, they attempted to take or set fire to such ships as were still within reach. Thereupon there ensued a hot fight in which fell many men of name, such as polemarch Callimachus, the strategus Stesilaus, and Cynægirus, brother of the poet Æschylus. The Athenians succeeded in gaining possession of only seven ships; with the others the Persians got away and then made for the islet of Ægilia, to take on board the Eretrians they had left there.

The Persians were already in their ships, when it was noticed in the Athenian camps that a signal had been made by a shield, set up apparently upon the height of Pentelicus. It was believed that it had been given by the traitors in the town. Apparently on the morning after the battle the Persian fleet left Ægilia and steered its course for Cape Sunium. As soon as the Athenians observed the direction taken, the strategi could no longer doubt that it was the town which was aimed at. Forthwith they started with the army, and, by a rapid forced march, succeeded in reaching Athens before the enemy, and there set up a camp on the Heracleum, at the southern foot of Lycabettus, in Cynosarges. The Persian fleet soon showed itself above the height of Phalerum, yet made no attack, but only anchored for a time and then sailed back to Asia.

Presumably Datis did not venture on a landing in sight of the Athenian army after the experience of Marathon. The defeat was not indeed a crushing one, but had been by no means insignificant, for the Persians had lost 6400 killed, to which a considerable number of wounded is to be added. Of the Athenians, 192 citizens had fallen in the battle. The town bestowed on them the peculiar honour of a common burial on the battle-field itself. Close by, a tropæum of white marble and a monument to Miltiades were erected. With the tithe of the spoil, the Athenians erected, amongst other things, a bronze group at Delphi. Every year, on the sixth of Bœdromion, the festival of Artemis Agrotera, a great goat sacrifice was offered to that goddess for the crowd of defeated enemies, in fulfilment of a vow of the polemarch, before the battle.

Pan, who had thrown his terror amongst the barbarians, received a sanctuary in the grotto on the northwest side of the rock-citadel. To him also an annual sacrifice was offered and a torch-race instituted. The memory of the victory which the Athenians, as advance guard of the Hellenes, had achieved always filled them with special pride. Poets and orators could not refer to it often enough.

The day of the battle cannot be determined with precision. Only this much is certain, that the fight took place at the time of the full moon, in one of the last months of the summer of the year 490. For after the full moon two thousand Lacedæmonians marched hastily from Sparta and made every effort to reach Athens in time. On the third day they arrived in Attica, but the battle had already been fought. After having viewed the scene of the Persian overthrow they started on their return march spreading eulogies on the Athenians.[g]

In an article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (1898), J. A. R. Munro[h] declares that the reason the Persians chose so disadvantageous a field as Marathon, was purely to lure Miltiades and the troops out of Athens while the plot was maturing by which the supporters of Hippias should open the gates and admit the Persians by way of Phalerum. But as usually happens, something hung fire, the Spartans approached and, before the signal of the shield could be raised, Miltiades had routed the land forces with undreamed success and was hastening back to Athens.

In this view, the strategy of the Persians becomes somewhat less contemptible and the march of the Spartans seems not so useless.[a]

ON THE COURAGE OF THE GREEKS

Modern history will never cease to ring with grateful praises of the Athenians and Platæans for their defence of Greece against Persia. They were the bulwark of the Occident against the Orient, of Europe against Asia. The Persian scholar can see many ways in which, to his mind at least, it would have been best if the Asiatic conquest of Greece had not thus been postponed for centuries. We of to-day shall always be glad that events fashioned themselves as they did until Europe was ready to resist any general enforcement of Asiatic ideals and customs.

Granting the importance, then, of the victory to its fullest extent, it cannot but make for truth to realise how little the Greeks knew all they were doing, how selfish and mutually jealous they were, and in what a humble manner they accomplished so much more than they dreamed or desired.[a] The realism of this glorious feat could not be more vividly phrased than by Prof. J. P. Mahaffy in his Rambles and Studies in Greece:

“Byron may well be excused for raving about the liberty of the Greeks, for truly their old conflict at Marathon where a thousand ill-disciplined men repulsed a larger number of still worse disciplined Orientals, without any recondite tactics,--perhaps even without any very extraordinary heroism,--how is it that this conflict has maintained a celebrity which has not been equalled by all the great battles of the world, from that day down to our own? The courage of the Greeks was not of the first order. Herodotus praises the Athenians in this very battle for being the first Greeks that dared to look the Persians in the face. Their generals all through history seem never to feel sure of victory, and always endeavour to harangue their soldiers into a fury. Instead of advising coolness, they specially incite to rage--ὀργῇ προσμίξωμεν, says one of them in Thucydides--as if any man not in this state would be sure to estimate the danger fully, and run away.

“It is, indeed, true that the ancient battles were hand to hand, and therefore parallel to our charges of bayonets, which are said to be very seldom carried out by two opposing lines, as one of them almost always gives way before the actual collision takes place. This must often have taken place in Greek battles, for, at Amphipolis, Brasidas in a battle lost seven men; at a battle of Corinth, mentioned by Xenophon--an important battle, too--the slain amounted to eight; and these battles were fought before the days when whole armies were composed of mercenaries, who spared one another, as Ordericus Vitalis says, ‘for the love of God, and out of good feeling for the fraternity of arms.’ So, then, the loss of 192 Athenians, including some distinguished men, was rather a severe one. As to the loss of the Persians, I so totally disbelieve the Greek accounts of such things, that it is better to pass it by in silence.

“Perhaps most readers will be astonished to hear of the Athenian army as undisciplined, and of the science of war as undeveloped, in those times. Yet I firmly believe this was so. The accounts of battles by almost all the historians are so utterly vague, and so childishly conventional, that it is evident these gentlemen were not only quite ignorant of the science of war, but could not easily find any one to explain it to them. We know that the Spartans, the most admired of all Greek warriors, were chiefly so admired because they devised the system of subordinating officers to one another within the same detachment, like our gradation from colonel to corporal. So orders were passed down from officer to officer, instead of being bawled out by a herald to a whole army.

“But this superiority of the Spartans who were really disciplined, and went into battle coolly, like brave men, certainly did not extend to strategy, but was merely a question of better drill. As soon as any real strategist met them, they were helpless. Thus Iphicrates, when he devised Wellington’s plan of meeting their attacking column in line, and using missiles, succeeded against them, even without firearms. Thus Epaminondas, when he devised Napoleon’s plan of massing troops on a single point, while keeping his enemy’s line occupied, defeated them without any considerable struggle. As for that general’s great battle of Mantinea, which seems really to have been introduced by some complicated strategical movements, it is a mere hopeless jumble in our histories. But these men were in the distant future when the battle of Marathon was being fought.

“Yet what signifies all this criticism? In spite of all scepticism, in spite of all contempt, the battle of Marathon, whether badly or well fought, and the troops at Marathon, whether well or ill trained, will ever be more famous than any other battle or army, however important or gigantic its dimensions. Even in this very war, the battles of Salamis and Platæa were vastly more important and more hotly contested. The losses were greater, the results were more enduring, yet thousands have heard of Marathon to whom the other names are unknown. So much for literary ability--so much for the power of talking well about one’s deeds. Marathon was fought by Athenians; the Athenians eclipsed the other Greeks as far as the other Greeks eclipsed the rest of the world in literary power. This battle became the literary property of the city, hymned by poet, cited by orator, told by aged nurse, lisped by stammering infant; and so it has taken its position, above all criticism, as one of the great decisive battles which assured the liberty of the West against oriental despotism.”[j]

IF DARIUS HAD INVADED GREECE EARLIER

Had the first aggressive expedition of Darius, with his own personal command and fresh appetite for conquest, been directed against Greece instead of against Scythia (between 516-514 B.C.), Grecian independence would have perished almost infallibly. For Athens was then still governed by the Pisistratidæ. She had then no courage for energetic self-defence, and probably Hippias himself, far from offering resistance, would have found it advantageous to accept Persian dominion as a means of strengthening his own rule, like the Ionian despots: moreover the Grecian habit of co-operation was then only just commencing. But fortunately the Persian invader did not touch the shore of Greece until more than twenty years afterwards, in 490 B.C.; and during that precious interval, the Athenian character had undergone the memorable revolution which has been before described. Their energy and their organisation had been alike improved and their force of resistance had become decupled; moreover, their conduct had so provoked the Persians that resistance was then a matter of necessity with them and submission on tolerable terms an impossibility. When we come to the grand Persian invasion of Greece, we shall see that Athens was the life and soul of all the opposition offered. We shall see further, that with all the efforts of Athens, the success of the defence was more than once doubtful; and would have been converted into a very different result, if Xerxes had listened to the best of his own counsellors. But had Darius, at the head of the very same force which he conducted into Scythia, or even an inferior force, landed at Marathon in 514 B.C., instead of sending Datis in 490 B.C.--he would have found no men like the victors of Marathon to meet him. As far as we can appreciate the probabilities, he would have met with little resistance, except from the Spartans singly, who would have maintained their own very defensible territory against all his effort--like the Mysians and Pisidians in Asia Minor, or like the Mainots of Laconia in later days; but Hellas generally would have become a Persian satrapy.[k]

FOOTNOTES

[18] [It is worthy of mention that since this embassy there were no diplomatic relations between Athens and Persia until, in the last days of 1902, a Persian ambassador was appointed to the Hellenic court--an interval of about twenty-four hundred years.]

[19] [“Large trees felled and scattered over the plain obstructed the movements of the cavalry,” says Bulwer-Lytton, not naming his authority.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XVI. MILTIADES AND THE ALLEGED FICKLENESS OF REPUBLICS

Happy would it have been for Miltiades if he had shared the honourable death of the polemarch Callimachus, in seeking to fire the ships of the defeated Persians at Marathon. The short sequel of his history will be found in melancholy contrast with the Marathonian heroism.

His reputation had been great before the battle, and after it the admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds: it appears, indeed, to have reached such a pitch that his head was turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to place it altogether at his discretion; giving them no intimation whither he intended to go, but merely assuring them that, if they would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise from the lips of the recent victor of Marathon was sufficient, and the armament was granted, no man except Miltiades knowing what was its destination. He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town, and sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of one hundred talents [£20,000 or $100,000], on pain of entire destruction. His pretence for this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme to Datis for the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive, so Herodotus assures us, was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general Hydarnes against him. The Parians amused him at first with evasions, until they had procured a little delay to repair the defective portions of their wall, after which they set him at defiance; and Miltiades in vain prosecuted hostilities against them for the space of twenty-six days: he ravaged the island, but his attacks made no impression upon the town. Beginning to despair of success in his military operations, he entered into some negotiation--such at least was the tale of the Parians themselves--with a Parian woman named Timo, priestess or attendant in the temple of Demeter, near the town gates. This woman, promising to reveal to him a secret which would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the exterior fence, and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near, was seized with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his senses: on leaping the same fence to get back, he strained or bruised his thigh badly, and became utterly disabled. In this melancholy state he was placed on shipboard, the siege being raised, and the whole armament returning to Athens.

[Sidenote: [489 B.C.]]

Vehement was the indignation both of the armament and of the remaining Athenians against Miltiades on his return; and Xanthippus, father of the great Pericles, became the spokesman of this feeling. He impeached Miltiades before the popular judicature as having been guilty of deceiving the people, and as having deserved the penalty of death. The accused himself, disabled by his injured thigh, which even began to show symptoms of gangrene, was unable to stand, or to say a word in his own defence: he lay on his couch before the assembled judges, while his friends made the best case they could in his behalf. Defence, it appears, there was none; all they could do, was to appeal to his previous services: they reminded the people largely and emphatically of the inestimable exploit at Marathon, coming in addition to his previous conquest of Lemnos. The assembled dicasts, or jurors, showed their sense of these powerful appeals by rejecting the proposition of his accuser to condemn him to death: but they imposed on him the penalty of fifty talents [£10,000 or $50,000] “for his iniquity.”

Cornelius Nepos affirms that these fifty talents represented the expenses incurred by the state in fitting out the armament; but we may more probably believe, looking to the practice of the Athenian dicastery in criminal cases, that fifty talents was the minor penalty actually proposed by the defenders of Miltiades themselves, as a substitute for the punishment of death. In those penal cases at Athens, where the punishment was not fixed beforehand by the terms of the law, if the person accused was found guilty, it was customary to submit to the jurors, subsequently and separately, the question as to amount of punishment: first, the accuser named the penalty which he thought suitable; next, the accused person was called upon to name an amount of penalty for himself, and the jurors were constrained to take their choice between these two--no third gradation of penalty being admissible for consideration. Of course, under such circumstances, it was the interest of the accused party to name, even in his own case, some real and serious penalty--something which the jurors might be likely to deem not wholly inadequate to his crime just proved; for if he proposed some penalty only trifling, he drove them to prefer the heavier sentence recommended by his opponent. Accordingly, in the case of Miltiades, his friends, desirous of inducing the jurors to refuse their assent to the punishment of death, proposed a fine of fifty talents as the self-assessed penalty of the defendant; and perhaps they may have stated, as an argument in the case, that such a sum would suffice to defray the costs of the expedition. The fine was imposed, but Miltiades did not live to pay it: his injured limb mortified, and he died, leaving the fine to be paid by his son Cimon.

According to Cornelius Nepos, Diodorus, and Plutarch, he was put in prison, after having been fined, and there died. But Herodotus does not mention this imprisonment, and the fact appears improbable: he would hardly have omitted to notice it, had it come to his knowledge.

Thus closed the life of the conqueror of Marathon. The last act of it produces an impression so mournful, and even shocking--his descent from the pinnacle of glory to defeat, mean tampering with a temple-servant, mortal bodily hurt, undefended ignominy, and death under a sentence of heavy fine, is so abrupt and unprepared--that readers, ancient and modern, have not been satisfied without finding some one to blame for it: we must except Herodotus, our original authority, who recounts the transaction without dropping a single hint of blame against any one. To speak ill of the people, as Machiavelli has long ago observed, is a strain in which every one at all times, even under a democratical government, indulges with impunity and without provoking any opponent to reply; and in this instance, the hard fate of Miltiades has been imputed to the vices of the Athenians and their democracy--it has been cited in proof, partly of their fickleness, partly of their ingratitude. But however such blame may serve to lighten the mental sadness arising from a series of painful facts, it will not be found justified if we apply to those facts a reasonable criticism.

What is called the fickleness of the Athenians on this occasion is nothing more than a rapid and decisive change in their estimation of Miltiades; unbounded admiration passing at once into extreme wrath. To censure them for fickleness is here an abuse of terms; such a change in their opinion was the unavoidable result of his conduct. His behaviour in the expedition of Paros was as reprehensible as at Marathon it had been meritorious, and the one succeeded immediately after the other: what else could ensue except an entire revolution in the Athenian feelings? He had employed his prodigious ascendency over their minds to induce them to follow him without knowing whither, in the confidence of an unknown booty; he had exposed their lives and wasted their substance in wreaking a private grudge; in addition to the shame of an unprincipled project, comes the constructive shame of not having succeeded in it. Without doubt, such behaviour, coming from a man whom they admired to excess, must have produced a violent and painful revulsion in the feelings of his countrymen. The idea of having lavished praise and confidence upon a person who forthwith turns it to an unworthy purpose, is one of the greatest torments of the human bosom; and we may well understand that the intensity of the subsequent displeasure would be aggravated by this reactionary sentiment, without accusing the Athenians of fickleness.

In regard to the charge of ingratitude against the Athenians, this last-mentioned point--sufficiency of reason--stands tacitly admitted. It is conceded that Miltiades deserved punishment for his conduct in reference to the Parian expedition, but it is nevertheless maintained that gratitude for his previous services at Marathon ought to have exempted him from punishment. But the sentiment upon which, after all, this exculpation rests, will not bear to be drawn out and stated in the form of a cogent or justifying reason. For will any one really contend, that a man who has rendered great services to the public, is to receive in return a license of unpunished misconduct for the future? Is the general, who has earned applause by eminent skill and important victories, to be recompensed by being allowed the liberty of betraying his trust afterwards, and exposing his country to peril, without censure or penalty? This is what no one intends to vindicate deliberately; yet a man must be prepared to vindicate it, when he blames the Athenians for ingratitude towards Miltiades. It will be recollected that the death of Miltiades arose neither from his trial nor his fine, but from the hurt in his thigh.

The charge of ingratitude against the Athenian popular juries really amounts to this--that, in trying a person accused of present crime or fault, they were apt to confine themselves too strictly and exclusively to the particular matter of charge, either forgetting or making too little account of past services which he might have rendered. Whoever imagines that such was the habit of Athenian dicasts, must have studied the orators to very little purpose. Their real defect was the very opposite: they were too much disposed to wander from the special issue before them, and to be affected by appeals to previous services and conduct.

This defect is one which we should naturally expect from a body of private, non-professional citizens assembled for the occasion, and which belongs more or less to the system of jury-trial everywhere; but it is the direct reverse of that ingratitude, or habitual insensibility to prior services, for which they have been so often denounced.

The fate of Miltiades, then, so far from illustrating either the fickleness or the ingratitude of his countrymen, attests their just appreciation of deserts. It also illustrates another moral, of no small importance to the right comprehension of Grecian affairs; it teaches us the painful lesson, how perfectly maddening were the effects of a copious draught of glory on the temperament of an enterprising and ambitious Greek. There can be no doubt, that the rapid transition, in the course of about one week, from Athenian terror before the battle to Athenian exultation after it, must have produced demonstrations towards Miltiades such as were never paid towards any other man in the whole history of the commonwealth. Such unmeasured admiration unseated his rational judgment, so that his mind became abandoned to the reckless impulses of insolence, and antipathy, and rapacity--that distempered state, for which (according to Grecian morality) the retributive Nemesis was ever on the watch, and which, in his case, she visited with a judgment startling in its rapidity, as well as terrible in its amount. Had Miltiades been the same man before the battle of Marathon as he became after it, the battle might probably have turned out a defeat instead of a victory. We shall presently be called upon to observe the same tendency in the case of the Spartan Pausanias, and even in that of the Athenian Themistocles.

It is, indeed, fortunate that the reckless aspirations of Miltiades did not take a turn more noxious to Athens than the comparatively unimportant enterprise against Paros. For had he sought to acquire dominion and gratify antipathies against enemies at home, instead of directing his blow against a Parian enemy, the peace and security of his country might have been seriously endangered.

Of the despots who gained power in Greece, a considerable proportion began by popular conduct, and by rendering good service to their fellow-citizens: having first earned public gratitude, they abused it for purposes of their own ambition. There was far greater danger, in a Grecian community, of dangerous excess of gratitude towards a victorious soldier, than of deficiency in that sentiment: hence the person thus exalted acquired a position such that the community found it difficult afterwards to shake him off. Now there is a disposition almost universal among writers and readers to side with an individual, especially an eminent individual, against the multitude; and accordingly those who under such circumstances suspect the probable abuse of an exalted position, are denounced as if they harboured an unworthy jealousy of superior abilities. But the truth is, that the largest analogies of the Grecian character justified that suspicion, and required the community to take precautions against the corrupting effects of their own enthusiasm. There is no feature which more largely pervades the impressible Grecian character, than a liability to be intoxicated and demoralised by success: there was no fault from which so few eminent Greeks were free: there was hardly any danger, against which it was at once so necessary and so difficult for the Grecian governments to take security--especially the democracies, where the manifestations of enthusiasm were always the loudest. Such is the real explanation of those charges which have been urged against the Grecian democracies, that they came to hate and ill-treat previous benefactors; and the history of Miltiades illustrates it in a manner no less pointed than painful.

If we are to predicate any attribute of the multitude, it will rather be that of undue tenacity than undue fickleness; and there will occur nothing in the course of this history to prove that the Athenian people changed their opinions on insufficient grounds more frequently than an unresponsible one or few would have changed.

But there were two circumstances in the working of the Athenian democracy which imparted to it an appearance of greater fickleness, without the reality: First, that the manifestations and changes of opinion were all open, undisguised, and noisy: the people gave utterance to their present impression, whatever it was, with perfect frankness; if their opinions were really changed, they had no shame or scruple in avowing it. Secondly,--and this is a point of capital importance in the working of democracy generally,--the present impression, whatever it might be, was not merely undisguised in its manifestations, but also had a tendency to be exaggerated in its intensity. This arose from their habit of treating public affairs in multitudinous assemblages, the well-known effect of which is, to inflame sentiment in every man’s bosom by mere contact with a sympathising circle of neighbours. Whatever the sentiment might be,--fear, ambition, cupidity, wrath, compassion, piety, patriotic devotion, etc.,--and whether well-founded or ill-founded, it was constantly influenced more or less by such intensifying cause. This is a defect which of course belongs in a certain degree to all exercise of power by numerous bodies, even though they be representative bodies, especially when the character of the people, instead of being comparatively sedate and slow to move, like the English, is quick, impressible, and fiery, like Greeks or Italians; but it operated far more powerfully on the self-acting Demos assembled in the Pnyx. It was in fact the constitutional malady of the democracy, of which the people were themselves perfectly sensible,--as we shall show hereafter from the securities which they tried to provide against it,--but which no securities could ever wholly eradicate. Frequency of public assemblies, far from aggravating the evil, had a tendency to lighten it. The people thus became accustomed to hear and balance many different views as a preliminary to ultimate judgment; they contracted personal interest and esteem for a numerous class of dissentient speakers; and they even acquired a certain practical consciousness of their own liability to error.

These two attributes, then, belonged to the Athenian democracy; first, their sentiments of every kind were manifested loudly and openly; next, their sentiments tended to a pitch of great present intensity. Of course, therefore, when they changed, the change of sentiment stood prominent, and forced itself upon every one’s notice--being a transition from one strong sentiment past to another strong sentiment present. And it was because such alterations, when they did take place, stood out so palpably to remark, that the Athenian people have drawn upon themselves the imputation of fickleness: for it is not at all true that changes of sentiment were more frequently produced in them by frivolous or insufficient causes, than changes of sentiment in other governments.[b]

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XVII. THE PLANS OF XERXES

What follows is one of the most interesting parts of Herodotus. It exhibits the most circumstantial detail of the expedition of Xerxes against Greece, by a writer almost contemporary. It is also impressed with the character of authenticity, for it was recited to a multitude of Greeks assembled at Olympia, among whom doubtless there were many who had fought both at Salamis and Platæa.[f]

When the news of the battle of Marathon was communicated to Darius, he, who was before incensed against the Athenians, on account of their invasion of Sardis, became still more exasperated, and more inclined to invade Greece. He instantly therefore sent emissaries to the different cities under his power, to provide a still greater number of transports, horses, corn, and provisions. In the interval which this business employed, Asia experienced three years of confusion; her most able men being enrolled for the Greek expedition, and making preparation for it. In the fourth, the Egyptians, who had been reduced by Cambyses, revolted from the Persians: but this only induced Darius to accelerate his preparations against both nations. At this juncture there arose a violent dispute among the sons of Darius, concerning the succession to the throne, the Persian customs forbidding the sovereign to undertake any expedition without naming his heir. Darius had three sons before he ascended the throne, by the daughter of Gobryas; he had four afterwards by Atossa, daughter of Cyrus: Artabazanes was the eldest of the former, Xerxes of the latter. Not being of the same mother, a dispute arose between them; Artabazanes asserted his pretensions from being the eldest of all his father’s sons, a claim which mankind in general consent to acknowledge. Xerxes claimed the throne because he was the grandson of Cyrus, to whom the Persians were indebted for their liberties.

Darius having declared Xerxes his heir, prepared to march; but in the year which succeeded the Egyptian revolt, he died; having reigned thirty-six years, without being able to gratify his resentment against the Egyptians and Athenians who had opposed his power. On his death, Xerxes immediately succeeded to the throne, and from the first, seemed wholly inclined to the Egyptian rather than the Athenian War. But Mardonius, who was his cousin, being the son of Gobryas, by a sister of Darius, thus addressed him:

“I should think, Sir, that the Athenians, who have so grievously injured the Persians, ought not to escape with impunity. I would nevertheless have you execute what you immediately propose; but when you shall have chastised the insolence of Egypt, resume the expedition against Athens. Thus will your reputation be established, and others in future be deterred from molesting your dominions.” What he said was further enforced by representing the beauties of Europe, that it was exceedingly fertile, abounded with all kinds of trees, and deserved to be possessed by the king alone.

[Sidenote: [485-484 B.C.]]

Mardonius said this, being desirous of new enterprises, and ambitious of the government of Greece. Xerxes at length acceded to his counsel, to which he was also urged by other considerations. Some messengers came from Thessaly on the part of the Aleuadæ, imploring the king to invade Greece; to accomplish which, they used the most earnest endeavours. These Aleuadæ were the princes of Thessaly: their solicitations were strengthened by the Pisistratidæ, who had taken refuge at Susa, and who to the arguments before adduced, added others. They had among them Onomacritus, an Athenian, a famous priest, who sold the oracles of Musæus; with him they had been reconciled previous to their arrival at Susa. This man had been formerly banished from Athens by the son of Pisistratus; for Lasus of Hermione had detected him in the fact of introducing a pretended oracle, among the verses of Musæus, intimating that the islands contiguous to Lemnos should be overwhelmed in the ocean. Hipparchus for this expelled him, though he had been very intimate with him before. He accompanied the Pisistratidæ to Susa, who always spoke of him in terms highly honourable; upon which account, whenever he appeared in the royal presence, he recited certain oracular verses. He omitted whatever predicted anything unfortunate to the barbarians, selecting only what promised them auspiciously; among other things he said the fates decreed that a Persian should throw a bridge over the Hellespont.

Thus was the mind of Xerxes assailed by the predictions of the priest, and the opinions of the Pisistratidæ. In the year which followed the death of Darius, he determined on an expedition against Greece, but commenced hostilities with those who had revolted from the Persians. These being subdued, and the whole of Egypt more effectually reduced than it had been by Darius, he confided the government of it to Achæmenes, his own brother, son of Darius. Achæmenes was afterwards slain by Inarus, a Libyan, the son of Psammetichus. After the subjection of Egypt, Xerxes prepared to lead an army against Athens, but first of all he called an assembly of the principal Persians, to hear their sentiments, and to deliver, without reserve, his own. He addressed them to the following purport:

“You will remember, O Persians, that I am not about to execute any new project of my own; I only pursue the path which has been previously marked out for me. I have learned from my ancestors, that ever since we recovered this empire from the Medes, after the depression of Astyages by Cyrus, we have never been in a state of inactivity. A deity is our guide, and auspiciously conducts us to prosperity. It must be unnecessary for me to relate the exploits of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius, and the nations they added to our empire. For my own part, ever since my accession to the throne, it has been my careful endeavour not to reflect any disgrace upon my forefathers, by suffering the Persian power to diminish. My deliberations on this matter have presented me with a prospect full of glory; they have pointed out to me a region not inferior to our own in extent, and far exceeding it in fertility, which incitements are further promoted by the expectation of honourable revenge; I have therefore assembled you to explain what I intend:

“I have resolved, by throwing a bridge over the Hellespont, to lead my forces through Europe into Greece, and to inflict vengeance on the Athenians for the injuries offered to my father and Persia. You well know that this war was intended by Darius, though death deprived him of the means of vengeance. Considering what is due to him and to Persia, it is my determination not to remit my exertions, till Athens shall be taken and burned. The Athenians, unprovoked, first insulted me and my father; under the conduct of Aristagoras of Miletus, our dependent and slave, they attacked Sardis, and consumed with fire our groves and temples. What they perpetrated against you, when, led by Datis and Artaphernes, you penetrated into their country, you know by fatal experience. Such are my inducements to proceed against them: but I have also additional motives.

“If we reduce these and their neighbours who inhabit the country of Pelops the Phrygian, to our power, the Persian empire will be limited by the heavens alone; the sun will illuminate no country contiguous to ours; I shall overrun all Europe, and with your assistance possess unlimited dominion. For if I am properly informed, there exists no race of men, nor can any city or nation be found, which if these be reduced, can possibly resist our arms: we shall thus subject, as well those who have, as those who have not, injured us. I call therefore for your assistance, which I shall thankfully accept and acknowledge; I trust that with cheerfulness and activity you will all assemble at the place I shall appoint. To him who shall appear with the greatest number of well-provided troops, I will present those gifts which in our country are thought to confer the highest honour. That I may not appear to dictate my own wishes in an arbitrary manner, I commit the matter to your reflection, permitting every one to deliver his sentiments with freedom.”

When Xerxes had finished, Mardonius made the following reply:

“Sir, you are not only the most illustrious of all the Persians who have hitherto appeared, but you may securely defy the competition of posterity. Among other things which you have advanced, alike excellent and just, you are entitled to our particular admiration for not suffering the people of Ionia, contemptible as they are, to insult us with impunity. It would indeed be preposterous, if after reducing to our power the Sacæ, the Indians, the Ethiopians, and the Assyrians, with many other great and illustrious nations, not in revenge of injuries received, but solely from the honourable desire of dominion, we should not inflict vengeance on these Greeks who, without provocation, have molested us.

“There can be nothing to excite our alarm; no multitude of troops, no extraordinary wealth; we have tried their mode of fighting, and know their weakness. Their descendants, who under the names of Ionians, Æolians, and Dorians, reside within our dominions, we first subdued, and now govern. Their prowess I myself have known, when at the command of your father I prosecuted a war against them. I penetrated Macedonia, advanced almost to Athens, and found no enemy to encounter.

“Beside this, I am informed that in all their military undertakings, the Greeks betray the extremest ignorance and folly. As soon as they commence hostilities among themselves, their first care is to find a large and beautiful plain,[20] where they appear and give battle: the consequence is, that even the victors suffer severe loss; of the vanquished I say nothing, for they are totally destroyed. As they use one common language, they ought in policy to terminate all disputes by the mediation of ambassadors, and above all things to avoid a war among themselves: or, if this should prove unavoidable, they should mutually endeavour to find a place of great natural strength, and then try the issue of a battle. By pursuing as absurd a conduct as I have described, the Greeks suffered me to advance as far as Macedonia without resistance. But who, Sir, shall oppose you, at the head of the forces and the fleet of Asia? The Greeks, I think, never can be so audacious. If however I should be deceived, and they shall be so mad as to engage us, they will soon find to their cost that in the art of war we are the first of mankind. Let us however adopt various modes of proceeding, for perfection and success can only be the result of frequent experiment.”

In this manner, Mardonius seconded the speech of Xerxes.

A total silence prevailed in the assembly, no one daring to oppose what had been said; till at length Artabanus, son of Hystaspes, and uncle to Xerxes, deriving confidence from his relationship, thus delivered his sentiments: “Unless, O King, different sentiments be submitted to the judgment, no alternative of choice remains, the one introduced is of necessity adopted. The purity of gold cannot be ascertained by a single specimen; it is known and approved by comparing it with others. It was my advice to Darius, your father and my brother, that he should by no means undertake an expedition against the Scythians, a people without towns and cities. Allured by his hopes of subduing them, he disregarded my admonitions; and proceeding to execute his purpose was obliged to return, having lost numbers of his best troops. The men, O King, whom you are preparing to attack, are far superior to the Scythians, and alike formidable by land and sea. I deem it therefore my duty to forewarn you of the dangers you will have to encounter.

“You say that, throwing a bridge over the Hellespont, you will lead your forces through Europe into Greece; but it may possibly happen, that either on land or by sea, or perhaps by both, you may sustain a defeat, for our enemies are reported to be valiant. Of this indeed we have had sufficient testimony; for if the Athenians by themselves routed the numerous armies of Datis and Artaphernes, it proves that we are not, either by land or sea, perfectly invincible. If, preparing their fleet, they shall be victorious by sea, and afterwards sailing to the Hellespont, shall destroy your bridge, we may dread all that is bad. I do not argue in this respect from my own private conjecture; we can all of us remember how very narrowly we escaped destruction, when your father, throwing bridges over the Thracian Bosporus and the Ister, passed into Scythia. The guard of this pass was entrusted to the Ionians, whom the Scythians urged to break it down, by the most earnest importunity. If at this period Histiæus of Miletus had not opposed the sentiments of the rest, there would have been an end of the Persian name.

“It is painful to repeat, and afflicting to remember, that the safety of our prince and his dominions depended on a single man. Listen therefore to my advice, and where no necessity demands it, do not involve yourself in danger. For the present, dismiss this meeting; revolve the matter more seriously in your mind, and at a future and seasonable time make known your determination. For my own part, I have found from experience, that deliberation produces the happiest effects. In such a case, if the event does not answer our wishes, we still merit the praise of discretion, and fortune is alone to be blamed. He who is rash and inconsiderate, although fortune may be kind, and anticipate his desires, is not the less to be censured for temerity. You may have observed how the thunderbolt of heaven chastises the insolence of the more enormous animals, whilst it passes over without injury the weak and insignificant: before these weapons of the gods you must have seen how the proudest palaces and the loftiest trees fall and perish. The most conspicuous things are those which are chiefly singled out as objects of the divine displeasure. From the same principle it is that a mighty army is sometimes overthrown by one that is contemptible: for the Deity in his anger sends his terrors among them, and makes them perish in a manner unworthy of their former glory. Perfect wisdom is the prerogative of Heaven alone, and every measure undertaken with temerity is liable to be perplexed with error, and punished by misfortune. Discreet caution, on the contrary, has many and peculiar advantages, which if not apparent at the moment, reveal themselves in time.

“Such, O King, is my advice; and little does it become you, O son of Gobryas, to speak of the Greeks in a language foolish as well as false. By calumniating Greece, you excite your sovereign to war, the great object of all your zeal: but I entreat you to forbear. Calumny is a restless vice, where it is indulged there are always two who offer injury. The calumniator himself is injurious, because he traduces an absent person; he is also injurious who suffers himself to be persuaded without investigating the truth. The person traduced is doubly injured, first by him who propagates, and secondly by him who receives the calumny. If this war be a measure of necessity, let it be prosecuted; but let the king remain at home with his subjects. Suffer the children of us two to remain in his power, as the test of our different opinions; and do you, Mardonius, conduct the war with whatever forces you shall think expedient. If, agreeably to your representations, the designs of the king shall be successful, let me and my children perish; but if what I predict shall be accomplished, let your children die, and yourself too, in case you shall return. If you refuse these conditions, and are still resolved to lead an army into Greece, I do not hesitate to declare, that all those who shall be left behind will hear that Mardonius, after having involved the Persians in some conspicuous calamity, became a prey to dogs and ravenous birds, in the territories either of Athens or Lacedæmon, or probably during his march thither. Thus you will know, by fatal experience, what those men are, against whom you endeavour to persuade the king to prosecute a war.”

When Artabanus had finished, Xerxes thus angrily replied: “Artabanus, you are my father’s brother, which alone prevents your receiving the chastisement due to your foolish speech. This mark of ignominy shall however adhere to you--as you are so dastardly and mean, you shall not accompany me to Greece, but remain at home, the companion of our women. Without your assistance, I shall proceed in the accomplishment of my designs; for I should ill deserve to be esteemed the son of Darius, who was the son of Hystaspes, and reckoned among his ancestors Arsames, Ariaramnes, Teispes, Cyrus, Cambyses, Teispes, and Achæmenes, if I did not gratify my revenge upon the Athenians. I am well assured, that if we on our parts were tranquil, they would not be, but would invade and ravage our country. This we may reasonably conclude from their burning of Sardis, and their incursions into Asia. Neither party can therefore recede; we must advance to the attack of the Greeks, or we must prepare to sustain theirs; we must either submit to them, or they to us; in enmities like these there can be no medium. Injured as we have been, it becomes us to seek for revenge; for I am determined to know what evil is to be dreaded from those whom Pelops the Phrygian, the slave of my ancestors, so effectually subdued, that even to this day they, as well as their country, are distinguished by his name.”

On the approach of evening the sentiments of Artabanus gave great disquietude to Xerxes, and after more serious deliberation with himself in the night, he found himself still less inclined to the Grecian war. Having decided on the subject, he fell asleep, when, as the Persians relate, the following vision appeared to him:--He dreamed that he saw before him a man of unusual size and beauty, who thus addressed him: “Are you then determined, O Persian, contrary to your former resolutions, not to lead an army against Greece, although you have ordered your subjects to prepare their forces? This change in your sentiments is absurd in itself, and will certainly be censured by the world. Resume therefore, and persist in what you had resolved by day.” Having said this, the vision disappeared.

The impression made by the vision vanished with the morning. Xerxes a second time convoked the former meeting, and again addressed them:

“Men of Persia,” said he, “you will forgive me, if my former sentiments are changed. I am not yet arrived at the full maturity of my judgment; and they who wish me to prosecute the measures which I before seemed to approve, do not remit their importunities. When I first heard the opinion of Artabanus, I yielded to the emotions of youth, and expressed myself more petulantly than was becoming, to a man of his years. To prove that I see my indiscretion, I am resolved to follow his advice. It is not my intention to undertake an expedition against Greece; remain therefore in tranquillity.”

The Persians hearing these sentiments, prostrated themselves with joy before the king. On the following night the same phantom appeared a second time to Xerxes in his sleep, and spake to him as follows: “Son of Darius, disregarding my admonitions as of no weight or value, you have publicly renounced all thoughts of war. Hear what I say: unless you immediately undertake that which I recommend, the same short period of time which has seen you great and powerful, shall behold you reduced and abject.”

Terrified at the vision, the king leaped from his couch, and sent for Artabanus. As soon as he approached, “Artabanus,” exclaimed Xerxes, “in return for your salutary counsel, I reproached and insulted you; but as soon as I became master of myself I endeavoured to prove my repentance by adopting what you proposed. This however, whatever may be my wishes, I am unable to do. As soon as my former determinations were changed, I beheld in my sleep a vision, which first endeavoured to dissuade me, and has this moment left me with threats. If what I have seen proceed from the interference of some deity, who is solicitous that I should make war on Greece, it will doubtless appear to you, and give you a similar mandate. This will I think be the case, if you will assume my habit, and after sitting on my throne retire to rest in my apartment.”

Artabanus was at first unwilling to comply, alleging that he was not worthy to sit on the throne of the king. But being urged, he finally acquiesced, after thus expressing his sentiments: “I am of opinion, O King, that to think well, and to follow what is well-advised, is alike commendable: both these qualities are yours; but the artifice of evil counsellors misleads you. Thus, the ocean is of itself most useful to mankind, but the stormy winds render it injurious, by disturbing its natural surface. Your reproaches gave me less uneasiness than to see that when two opinions were submitted to public deliberation, the one aiming to restrain, the other to countenance the pride of Persia, you preferred that which was full of danger to yourself and your country, rejecting the wiser counsel, which pointed out the evil tendency of ambition. Now that you have changed your resolution with respect to Greece, a phantom has appeared, and, as you say, by some divine interposition, has forbidden your present purpose of dismissing your forces. But, my son, I dispute the divinity of this interposition, for of the fallacy of dreams I, who am more experienced than yourself, can produce sufficient testimonies. Dreams in general originate from those incidents which have most occupied the thoughts during the day. Two days since, you will remember that this expedition was the object of much warm discussion: but if this vision be really sent from heaven, your reasoning upon it is just, and it will certainly appear to me as it has done to you, expressing itself to a similar effect; but it will not show itself to me dressed in your robes, and reclining on your couch, sooner than if I were in my own habit and my own apartment. No change of dress will induce the phantom, if it does appear, to mistake me for you. If it shall hold me in contempt, it will not appear to me, however I may be clothed. It unquestionably however merits attention; its repeated appearance I myself must acknowledge to be a proof of its divinity. If you are determined in your purpose, I am ready to go to rest in your apartment: but till I see the phantom myself I shall retain my former opinions.”

Artabanus, expecting to find the king’s dream of no importance, did as he was ordered. He accordingly put on the robe of Xerxes, seated himself on the royal throne, and afterward retired to the king’s apartment. The same phantom which had disturbed Xerxes appeared to him,[21] and thus addressed him: “Art thou the man who, pretending to watch over the conduct of Xerxes, art endeavouring to restrain his designs against Greece? Your perverseness shall be punished both now and in future; and as for Xerxes himself, he has been forewarned of the evils he will suffer, if disobedient to my will.”

Such were the threats which Artabanus heard from the spectre, which at the same time made an effort to burn out his eyes with a hot iron. Alarmed at his danger, Artabanus leaped from his couch, and uttering a loud cry, went instantly to Xerxes. After relating his vision, he thus spake to him: “Being a man, O King, of much experience, and having seen the undertakings of the powerful foiled by the efforts of the weak, I was unwilling that you should indulge the fervour of your age. Of the ill effects of inordinate ambition, I had seen a fatal proof, in the expedition which Cyrus undertook against the Massagetæ; I knew also what became of the army of Cambyses in their attack of Ethiopia; and lastly, I myself witnessed the misfortunes of Darius, in his hostilities with the Scythians. The remembrance of these incidents induced me to believe that if you continued a peaceful reign, you would beyond all men deserve the character of happy: but as your present inclination seems directed by some supernatural influence, and as the Greeks seem marked out by heaven for destruction, I acknowledge that my sentiments are changed; do you therefore make known to the Persians the extraordinary intimations you have received, and direct your dependents to hasten the preparations you had before commanded. Be careful, in what relates to yourself, to second the intentions of the gods.”

The vision indeed had so powerfully impressed the minds of both, that as soon as the morning appeared, Xerxes communicated his intentions to the Persians; which Artabanus, in opposition to his former sentiments, now openly and warmly approved.

[Sidenote: [484-480 B.C.]]

Whilst everything was making ready for his departure, Xerxes saw a third vision. The magi to whom it was related were of opinion that it portended to Xerxes unlimited and universal empire. The king conceived himself to be crowned with the wreath of an olive tree, whose branches covered all the earth, but that this wreath suddenly and totally disappeared. After the above interpretation of the magi had been made known in the national assembly of the Persians, the governors departed to their several provinces, eager to execute the commands they had received, in expectation of the promised reward. Xerxes was so anxious to complete his levies that no part of the continent was left without being ransacked for this purpose. After the reduction of Egypt, four entire years were employed in assembling the army and collecting provisions; but in the beginning of the fifth he began his march with an immense body of forces.[b]

Darius was three years in preparing for an expedition against Greece; in the fourth Egypt revolted, and in the following year Darius died; this therefore was the fifth year after the battle of Marathon. Xerxes employed four years in making preparations for the same purpose; in the fifth he began his march, he advanced to Sardis, and there wintered; in the beginning of the following spring he entered Greece. This therefore was in the eleventh year after the battle of Marathon; which account agrees with that given by Thucydides.[f]

Of all the military expeditions, the fame of which has come down to us, this was far the greatest, much exceeding that which Darius undertook against Scythia, as well as the incursion made by the Scythians, who, pursuing the Cimmerians, entered Media, and made themselves entire masters of almost all the higher parts of Asia; an incursion which afforded Darius the pretence for his attack on Scythia. It surpasses also the famous expedition of the sons of Atreus against Troy, as well as that of the Mysians and Teucrians before the Trojan War. These nations, passing over the Bosporus into Europe, reduced all the inhabitants of Thrace, advancing to the Ionian Sea, and thence as far as the southern part of the river Peneus.

[Sidenote: [483 B.C.]]

None of the expeditions already mentioned, nor indeed any other, may at all be compared with this of Xerxes. It would be difficult to specify any nation of Asia, which did not accompany the Persian monarch against Greece, or any waters, except great rivers, which were not exhausted by his armies. Some supplied ships, some a body of infantry, others of horse; some provided transports for the cavalry and the troops; others brought long ships to serve as bridges; many also brought vessels laden with corn, all which preparations were made for three years, to guard against a repetition of the calamities which the Persian fleet had formerly sustained, in their attempts to double the promontory of Mount Athos. The place of rendezvous for the triremes was at Elæus of the Chersonesus, from whence detachments from the army were sent, and by force of blows compelled to dig a passage through Mount Athos, with orders to relieve each other at certain regular intervals. The undertaking was assisted by those who inhabited the mountain, and the conduct of the work was confided to Bubares, the son of Megabazus, and Antachæus, son of Artæus, both of whom were Persians.[b]

This incident Richardson conceives to be utterly incredible. The promontory was, as he justly remarks, no more than two hundred miles from Athens, and yet Xerxes is said to have employed a number of men, three years before his crossing the Hellespont, to separate it from the continent, and make a canal for his shipping. Themistocles, also, who from the time of the battle of Marathon had been incessantly alarming the Athenians with another Persian invasion, never endeavoured to support his opinion by any allusion to this canal, the very digging of which must have filled all Greece with astonishment, and been the subject of every public conversation. Pococke, who visited Mount Athos, also deems the event highly improbable, and says that he could not perceive the smallest vestige of any such undertaking.[f]

Bury thinks that the canal was actually dug, the reason being not that which Herodotus later suggests, a mere desire for display, but an obedience to the axiom of Persian strategy that the army and the fleet should not lose touch with each other. But leaving the riddle unsolved, as needs we must, let us proceed with the narrative, Herodotus acting as guide.[a]

Athos is a large and noble mountain projecting into the sea, and inhabited; where it terminates on the land side, it has the appearance of a peninsula, and forms an isthmus of about twelve stadia in breadth: the surface of this is interspersed with several small hills, reaching from the Acanthian Sea to that of Torone, which is opposite. Where Mount Athos terminates, stands a Grecian city, called Sane; in the interior parts, betwixt Sane and the elevation of Athos, are situated the towns of Dium, Olophyxus, Acrothoum, Thyssus, and Cleonæ, inhabited by Greeks. It was the object of the Persians to detach these from the continent.

They proceeded to dig in this manner: the barbarians marked out the ground in the vicinity of Sane with a rope, assigning to each nation their particular station; then sinking a deep trench, whilst they at the bottom continued digging, the nearest to them handed the earth to others standing immediately above them upon ladders; it was thus progressively elevated, till it came to the summit, where they who stood received and carried it away. The brink of the trench giving way, except in that part where the Phœnicians were employed, occasioned a double labour; and this, as the trench was no wider at top than at bottom, was unavoidable. But in this, as in other instances, the Phœnicians discovered their superior sagacity, for in the part allotted to them they commenced by making the breadth of the trench twice as large as was necessary; and thus proceeding in an inclined direction, they made their work at the bottom of the prescribed dimensions. In this part was a meadow, which was their public place for business and for commerce, and where a vast quantity of corn was imported from Asia.[b]

Plutarch, in his treatise De Ira cohibenda, has preserved a ridiculous letter, supposed to have been written by Xerxes to Mount Athos. It was to this effect: “O thou miserable Athos, whose top now reaches to the heavens, I give thee in charge not to throw any great stones in my way, which may impede my work; if thou shalt do this, I will cut thee in pieces and cast thee into the sea.” This threat to the mountain is however at least as sensible as the chastisement inflicted upon the Hellespont; so that if one anecdote be true, the other may also obtain credit.[f]

The motive of Xerxes in this work was, as far as we are able to conjecture, the vain desire of exhibiting his power, and of leaving a monument to posterity. When with very little trouble he might have transported his vessels over the isthmus, he chose rather to unite the two seas by a canal, of sufficient diameter to admit two triremes abreast. Those employed in this business were also ordered to throw bridges over the river Strymon.

For these bridges Xerxes provided cordage made of the bark of the biblos, and of white flax. The care of transporting provisions for the army was committed jointly to the Egyptians and Phœnicians, that the troops, as well as the beasts of burden, in this expedition to Greece, might not suffer from famine. After examining into the nature of the country, he directed stores to be deposited in every convenient situation, which were supplied by transports and vessels of burden, from the different parts of Asia. Of these, the greater number were carried to that part of Thrace which is called the “White Coast”; others to Tyrodiza of the Perinthians; the remainder were severally distributed at Doriscus, at Eion on the banks of the Strymon, and in Macedonia.

[Sidenote: [483-480 B.C.]]

Whilst these things were carrying on, Xerxes, at the head of all his land forces, left Critalla in Cappadocia, and marched towards Sardis: it was at Critalla that all those troops were appointed to assemble who were to attend the king by land; who the commander was, that received from the king the promised gifts, on account of the number and goodness of his troops, we are unable to decide, nor indeed can we say whether there was any competition on the subject. Passing the river Halys, they came to Phrygia, and continuing to advance, arrived at Celænæ, where are the fountains of the Mæander, as well as those of another river of equal size with the Mæander, called Catarrhactes, which rising in the public square of Celænæ, empties itself into the Mæander. In the forum of this city is suspended the skin of Marsyas, which the Phrygians say was placed there after he had been flayed by Apollo.

In this city lived a man named Pythius, son of Atys, a native of Lydia, who entertained Xerxes and all his army with great magnificence: he further engaged to supply the king with money for the war. Xerxes was on this induced to inquire of his Persian attendants who this Pythius was, and what were the resources which enabled him to make these offers: “It is the same,” they replied, “who presented your father Darius with a plane-tree and a vine of gold, and who, next to yourself, is the richest of mankind.”[22]

These last words filled Xerxes with astonishment; and he could not refrain from asking Pythius himself the amount of his wealth: “Sir,” he replied, “I conceal nothing from you, nor affect ignorance; but as I am able I will fairly tell you.--As soon as I heard of your approach to the Grecian sea, I was desirous of giving you money for the war; on examining into the state of my affairs, I found that I was possessed of two thousand talents of silver, and four millions, wanting only seven thousand, of gold staters of Darius; all this I give you--my slaves and my farms will be sufficient to maintain me.”

“My Lydian friend,” returned Xerxes, much delighted, “since I first left Persia, you are the only person who has treated my army with hospitality, or who, appearing in my presence, has voluntarily offered me a supply for the war; you have done both; in acknowledgment for which I offer you my friendship; you shall be my host, and I will give you the seven thousand staters, which are wanting to make your sum of four millions complete.--Retain, therefore, and enjoy your property; persevere in your present mode of conduct, which will invariably operate to your happiness.”

Xerxes having performed what he promised, proceeded on his march; passing by a Phrygian city, called Anava, and a lake from which salt is made, he came to Colossæ. This also is a city of Phrygia, and of considerable eminence; here the Lycus disappears, entering abruptly a chasm in the earth, but at the distance of seven stadia it again emerges, and continues its course to the Mæander. The Persian army, advancing from Colossæ, came to Cydrara, a place on the confines of Phrygia and Lydia; here a pillar had been erected by Crœsus, with an inscription defining the boundaries of the two countries.

On entering Lydia from Phrygia they came to a place where two roads met, the one on the left leading to Caria, the other on the right to Sardis: to those who go by the latter it is necessary to cross the Mæander, and to pass Callatebus, a city where honey is made of the tamarisk and wheat. Xerxes here found a plane tree, so very beautiful, that he adorned it with chains of gold, and assigned the guard of it to one of the immortal band; the next day he came to the principal city of the Lydians.

When arrived at Sardis, his first step was to send heralds into Greece, demanding earth and water, and commanding that preparations should be made to entertain him. He did not, however, send either to Athens or Lacedæmon: his motive for repeating the demand to the other cities, was the expectation that they who had before refused earth and water to Darius would, from their alarm at his approach, send it now; this he wished positively to know.

XERXES BRIDGES THE HELLESPONT

[Sidenote: [481 B.C.]]

Whilst he was preparing to go to Abydos, numbers were employed in throwing a bridge over the Hellespont, from Asia to Europe; betwixt Sestos and Madytus, in the Chersonesus of the Hellespont, the coast toward the sea from Abydos is rough and woody. After this period, and at no remote interval of time, Xanthippus, son of Ariphron, and commander of the Athenians, in this place took Antayctes, a Persian, and governor of Sestos, prisoner; he was crucified alive: he had formerly carried some females to the temple of Protesilaus in Elæus, and perpetrated what is detestable.

They on whom the office was imposed proceeded in the work of the bridge, commencing at the side next Abydos. The Phœnicians used a cordage made of linen, the Egyptians the bark of the biblos: from Abydos to the opposite continent is a space of seven stadia. The bridge was no sooner completed, than a great tempest arose, which tore in pieces and destroyed the whole of their labour.

When Xerxes heard of what had happened, he was so enraged, that he ordered three hundred lashes to be inflicted on the Hellespont, and a pair of fetters to be thrown into the sea. We are told that he even sent some executioners to brand the Hellespont with marks of ignominy; but it is certain, that he ordered those who inflicted the lashes to use these barbarous and mad expressions: “Thou ungracious water, thy master condemns thee to this punishment for having injured him without provocation. Xerxes the king will pass over thee, whether thou consentest or not: just is it that no man honours thee with sacrifice, for thou art insidious, and of an ungrateful flavour.” After thus treating the sea, the king commanded those who presided over the construction of the bridge to be beheaded.

These commands were executed by those on whom that unpleasing office was conferred. A bridge was then constructed by a different set of architects, who performed it in the following manner: they connected together ships of different kinds, some long vessels of fifty oars, others three-banked galleys, to the number of three hundred and sixty on the side towards the Euxine Sea, and three hundred and thirteen on that of the Hellespont.[23]

When these vessels were firmly connected to each other, they were secured on each side by anchors of great length; on the upper side, because of the winds which set in from the Euxine; on the lower, toward the Ægean Sea, on account of the south and southeast winds. They left however openings in three places, sufficient to afford a passage for light vessels, which might have occasion to sail into the Euxine or from it: having performed this, they extended cables from the shore, stretching them upon large capstans of wood; for this purpose they did not employ a number of separate cables, but united two of white flax with four of biblos. These were alike in thickness, and apparently so in goodness, but those of flax were in proportion much the more solid, weighing not less than a talent to every cubit. When the pass was thus secured, they sawed out rafters of wood, making their length equal to the space required for the bridge; these they laid in order across upon the extended cables, and then bound them fast together. They next brought unwrought wood, which they placed very regularly upon the rafters; over all they threw earth, which they raised to a proper height, and finished all by a fence on each side, that the horses and other beasts of burden might not be terrified by looking down upon the sea.

[Sidenote: [481-480 B.C.]]

The bridges were at length completed, and the work at Mount Athos finished: to prevent the canal at this last place being choked up by the flow of the tides, deep trenches were sunk at its mouth. The army had wintered at Sardis, but on receiving intelligence of the above, they marched at the commencement of the spring for Abydos. At the moment of their departure, the sun, which before gave his full light, in a bright unclouded atmosphere, withdrew his beams, and the darkest night succeeded. Xerxes, alarmed at this incident, consulted the magi upon what it might portend. They replied, that the protection of Heaven was withdrawn from the Greeks; the sun, they observed, was the tutelar divinity of Greece, as the moon was of Persia. The answer was so satisfactory to Xerxes, that he proceeded with increased alacrity. During the march, Pythius the Lydian, who was much intimidated by the prodigy which had appeared, went to the king; deriving confidence from the liberality he had shown and received, he thus addressed him: “Sir, I entreat a favour no less trifling to you, than important to myself.”

Xerxes, not imagining what he was about to ask, promised to grant it, and desired to know what he would have. Pythius on this became still more bold: “Sir,” he returned, “I have five sons, who are all with you in this Grecian expedition; I would entreat you to pity my age, and dispense with the presence of the eldest. Take with you the four others, but leave one to manage my affairs; so may you return in safety, after the accomplishment of your wishes.”

Xerxes, in great indignation, made this reply: “Infamous man! you see me embark my all in this Grecian war; myself, my children, my brothers, my domestics, and my friends, how dare you then presume to mention your son, you who are my slave, and whose duty it is to accompany me on this occasion, with all your family, and even your wife? Remember this, the spirit of a man resides in his ears; when he hears what is agreeable to him, the pleasure diffuses itself over all his body; but when the contrary happens, he is anxious and uneasy. If your former conduct was good, and your promises yet better, you still cannot boast of having surpassed the king in liberality. Although your present behaviour is base and insolent, you shall be punished less severely than you deserve: your former hospitality preserves yourself and four of your children; the fifth, whom you most regard, shall pay the penalty of your crime.”

As soon as he had finished, the king commanded the proper officers to find the eldest son of Pythius, and divide his body in two; he then ordered one part of the body thrown on the right side of the road, the other on the left, whilst the army continued their march betwixt them.

HOW THE HOST MARCHED

[Sidenote: [480 B.C.]]

The march was conducted in the following order: first of all went those who had the care of the baggage; they were followed by a promiscuous body of strangers of all nations, without any regularity, but to the amount of more than half the army; after these was a considerable interval, for these did not join the troops where the king was; next came a thousand horse, the flower of the Persian army, who were followed by the same number of spear-men, in like manner selected, trailing their pikes upon the ground; behind these were ten sacred horses called Nisæan, with very superb trappings (they take their name from a certain district in Media, called Nisæus, remarkable for producing horses of an extraordinary size); the sacred car of Jupiter was next in the procession, it was drawn by eight white horses, behind which, on foot, was the charioteer, with the reins in his hands, for no mortal is permitted to sit in this car; then came Xerxes himself, in a chariot drawn by Nisæan horses; by his side sat his charioteer, whose name was Patiramphes, son of Otanes the Persian.

Such was the order in which Xerxes departed from Sardis; but as often as occasion required, he left his chariot for a common carriage. A thousand of the first and noblest Persians attended his person, bearing their spears according to the custom of their country; and a thousand horse, selected like the former, immediately succeeded. A body of ten thousand chosen infantry came next; a thousand of these had at the extremity of their spears a pomegranate of gold, the remaining nine thousand, whom the former enclosed, had in the same manner pomegranates of silver. They who preceded Xerxes, and trailed their spears, had their arms decorated with gold: they who followed him had, as we have described, golden pomegranates: these ten thousand foot were followed by an equal number of Persian cavalry; at an interval of about two furlongs, followed a numerous, irregular, and promiscuous multitude.

From Lydia the army continued its march along the banks of the Caicus, to Mysia, and leaving Mount Canæ on the left, proceeded through Atarnis to the city Carina. Moving hence over the plains of Thebe, and passing by Adramyttium and Antandros, a Pelasgian city, they left Mount Ida to the left, and entered the district of Ilium. In the very first night which they passed under Ida, a furious storm of thunder and lightning arose, which destroyed numbers of the troops. From hence they advanced to the Scamander; this river first of all, after their departure from Sardis, failed in supplying them with a quantity of water sufficient for their troops and beasts of burden. On his arrival at this river, Xerxes ascended the citadel of Priam, desirous of examining the place. Having surveyed it attentively, and satisfied himself concerning it, he ordered a thousand oxen to be sacrificed to the Trojan Minerva, at the same time the magi directed libations to be offered to the manes of the heroes; when this was done, a panic spread itself in the night through the army. At the dawn of morning they moved forwards, leaving to the left the towns of Rhœteum, Ophryneum, and Dardanus, which last is very near Abydos: the Gergithæ and Teucri were to their right.

On their arrival at Abydos, Xerxes desired to take a survey of all his army: the inhabitants had, at his previous desire, constructed for him, on an eminence, a seat of white marble; upon this he sat, and directing his eyes to the shore, beheld at one view, his land and sea forces. He next wished to see a naval combat; one was accordingly exhibited before him, in which the Phœnicians of Sidon were victorious. The view of this contest, as well as of the number of his forces, delighted Xerxes exceedingly.

When the king beheld all the Hellespont crowded with ships, and all the shore, with the plains of Abydos, covered with his troops, he at first congratulated himself as happy, but he afterward burst into tears.

Artabanus, the uncle of Xerxes, who with so much freedom had at first opposed the expedition against Greece, observed the king’s emotion: “How different, Sir,” said he, addressing him, “is your present behaviour, from what it was a few minutes since! you then esteemed yourself happy, you now are dissolved in tears.”

“My reflection,” answered Xerxes, “on the transitory period of human life, excited my compassion for this vast multitude, not one of whom will complete the term of an hundred years! But tell me, has the vision which you saw impressed full conviction on your mind, or do your former sentiments incline you to dissuade me from this Grecian war?--speak without reserve.”

“May the vision, O King,” replied Artabanus, “which we have mutually seen, succeed to both our wishes! For my own part I am still so full of apprehensions, as not at all to be master of myself: after reflecting seriously on the subject, I discern two important things, exceedingly hostile to your views.”

“What, my good friend, can these two things possibly be?” replied Xerxes; “do you think unfavourably of our land army, as not being sufficiently numerous? Do you imagine the Greeks will be able to collect one more powerful? Can you conceive our fleet inferior to that of our enemies?--or do both these considerations together distress you? If our force does not seem to you sufficiently effective, reinforcements may soon be provided.”

“No one, Sir,” answered Artabanus, “in his proper senses, could object either to your army, or to the multitude of your fleet: should you increase their number, the more hostile would the two things be of which I speak; I allude to the land and the sea. In case of any sudden tempest, you will find no harbour, as I conjecture, sufficiently capacious or convenient for the protection of your fleet; no one port would answer this purpose, you must have the whole extent of the continent; your being without a resource of this kind, should induce you to remember that fortune commands men, and not men fortune. This is one of the calamities which threaten you; I will now explain the other. The land is also your enemy; your meeting with no resistance will render it more so, as you will be thus seduced imperceptibly to advance; it is the nature of man, never to be satisfied with success: thus, having no enemy to encounter every moment of time, and addition to your progress, will be gradually introductive of famine. He, therefore, who is truly wise, will as carefully deliberate about the possible event of things, as he will be bold and intrepid in action.”

Xerxes made this reply: “What you allege, Artabanus, is certainly reasonable; but you should not so much give way to fear, as to see everything in the worst point of view: if in consulting upon any matter we were to be influenced by the consideration of every possible contingency, we should execute nothing. It is better to submit to half of the evil which may be the result of any measure, than to remain in inactivity from the fear of what may eventually occur. You are sensible to what a height the power of Persia has arrived, which would never have been the case, if my predecessors had either been biassed by such sentiments as yours, or listened to such advisers: it was their contempt of danger which promoted their country’s glory, for great exploits are always attended with proportionable danger. We, therefore, emulous of their reputation, have selected the best season of the year for our enterprise; and having effectually conquered Europe, we shall return without experience of famine or any other calamity: we have with us abundance of provisions, and the nations among which we arrive will supply us with corn, for they against whom we advance are not shepherds, but husbandmen.”

“Since, Sir,” returned Artabanus, “you will suffer no mention to be made of fear, at least listen to my advice: where a number of things are to be discussed, prolixity is unavoidable. Cyrus, son of Cambyses, made all Ionia tributary to Persia, Athens excepted; do not, therefore, I entreat you, lead these men against those from whom they are immediately descended: without the Ionians, we are more than a sufficient match for our opponents. They must either be most base, by assisting to reduce the principal city of their country; or, by contributing to its freedom, will do what is most just. If they shall prove the former, they can render us no material service; if the latter, they may bring destruction on your army. Remember, therefore, the truth of the ancient proverb, When we commence a thing we cannot always tell how it will end.”

“Artabanus,” interrupted Xerxes, “your suspicions of the fidelity of the Ionians must be false and injurious; we have had sufficient testimony of their constancy, as you yourself must be convinced, as well as all those who served under Darius against the Scythians. It was in their power to save or to destroy all the forces of Persia, but they preserved their faith, their honour, and their gratitude; add to this, they have left their wives, their children, and their wealth, in our dominions, and therefore dare not meditate anything against us. Indulge, therefore, no apprehensions, but cheerfully watch over my family and preserve my authority: to you, I commit the exercise of my power.”

Xerxes after this interview dismissed Artabanus to Susa, and a second time called an assembly of the most illustrious Persians. As soon as they were met, he thus addressed them: “My motive, Persians, for thus convoking you, is to entreat you to behave like men, and not dishonour the many great exploits of our ancestors: let us individually and collectively exert ourselves. We are engaged in a common cause; and I the rather call upon you to display your valour, because I understand we are advancing against a warlike people, whom if we overcome, no one will in future dare oppose us. Let us, therefore, proceed, having first implored the aid of the gods of Persia.”

On the same day they prepared to pass the bridge: the next morning, whilst they waited for the rising of the sun, they burned on the bridge all manner of perfumes, and strewed the way with branches of myrtle. When the sun appeared, Xerxes poured into the sea a libation from a golden vessel, and then addressing the sun, he implored him to avert from the Persians every calamity, till they should totally have vanquished Europe, arriving at its extremest limits.

Xerxes then threw the cup into the Hellespont, together with a golden goblet, and a Persian scimitar. We are not able to determine whether the king, by throwing these things into the Hellespont, intended to make an offering to the sun, or whether he wished thus to make compensation to the sea, for having formerly chastised it.

When this was done, all the infantry and the horse were made to pass over that part of the bridge which was toward the Euxine; over that to the Ægean, went the servants of the camp, and the beasts of burden. They were preceded by ten thousand Persians, having garlands on their heads; and these were followed by a promiscuous multitude of all nations--these passed on the first day. The first who went over the next day were the knights, and they who trailed their spears; these also had garlands on their heads: next came the sacred horses, and the sacred car; afterwards Xerxes himself, who was followed by a body of spear-men, and a thousand horse. The remainder of the army closed the procession, and at the same time the fleet moved to the opposite shore: it is said that the king himself was the last who passed the bridge.

As soon as Xerxes had set foot in Europe, he saw his troops driven over the bridge by the force of blows; and seven whole days and as many nights were consumed in the passage of his army. [Later authorities than Herodotus say that the crossing took two days and that the term seven days and nights was based first on the greatly exaggerated estimate of Xerxes’ host, and secondly on the peculiar sanctity of the number seven.]

When Xerxes had passed the Hellespont, an inhabitant of the country is said to have exclaimed: “Why, O Jupiter, under the appearance of a Persian, and for the name of Jupiter taking that of Xerxes, art thou come to distract and persecute Greece? or why bring so vast a multitude, when able to accomplish thy purpose without them?”

When all were gone over, and were proceeding on their march, a wonderful prodigy appeared, which, though disregarded by Xerxes, had an obvious meaning--a mare brought forth a hare[24]: from this it might have been inferred, that Xerxes, who had led an army into Greece with much ostentation and insolence, should be involved in personal danger, and compelled to return with dishonour. Whilst yet at Sardis, he had seen another prodigy--a mule produced a young one, which had the marks of both sexes those of the male being beneath.

Neither of these incidents made any impression on his mind, and he continued to advance with his army by land, whilst his fleet, passing beyond the Hellespont, coasted along the shore in an opposite direction. The latter sailed toward the west, to the promontory of Sarpedon, where they were commanded to remain; the former proceeded eastward through the Chersonesus, having on their right the tomb of Helle, the daughter of Athamas; on their left the city of Cardia. Moving onward, through the midst of a city called Agora, they turned aside to the Gulf of Melas, and a river of the same name, the waters of which were not sufficient for the troops. Having passed this river, which gives its name to the above-mentioned gulf, they directed their march westward, and passing Ænos, a city of Æolis, and the lake Stentoris, they came to Doriscus.

Doriscus is on the coast, and is a spacious plain of Thrace, through which the great river Hebrus flows. Here was a royal fort called Doriscus, in which Darius, in his expedition against Scythia, had placed a Persian garrison. This appearing a proper place for the purpose, Xerxes gave orders to have his army here marshalled and numbered. The fleet being all arrived off the shore near Doriscus, their officers arranged them in order near where Sale, a Samothracian town, and Zone are situated. At the extremity of this shore is the celebrated promontory of Serrhium, which formerly belonged to the Ciconians. The crews having brought their vessels to shore, enjoyed an interval of repose, whilst Xerxes was drawing up his troops on the plain of Doriscus.[b]

THE SIZE OF XERXES’ ARMY

A curious instance of extreme critical scepticism is the opinion of the English lexicographer, Charles Richardson: “I remain still in doubt,” says he, “whether any such expedition was ever undertaken by the paramount sovereign of Persia. Disguised in name by some Greek corruption, Xerxes may possibly have been a feudatory prince or viceroy of the western districts; and that an invasion of Greece may have possibly taken place under this prince, I shall readily believe, but upon a scale I must also believe infinitely narrower than the least exaggerated description of the Greek historians.”

In Herodotus the reputed followers of Xerxes amount to 5,283,220; Isocrates, in his Panathenaicos, estimates the land army in round numbers at five million. And with them Plutarch in general agrees; but such myriads appeared to Diodorus, Pliny, Ælianus, and other later writers, so much stretched beyond all belief, that they at once cut off about four-fifths, to bring them within the line of possibility. Yet what is this, but a singular and very unauthorised liberty in one of the most consequential points of the expedition? What circumstance in the whole narration is more explicit in Herodotus, or by its frequent repetition, not in figures, but in words at length, seems less liable to the mistake of copiers?

Upon this subject, Larcher[d], who probably had never seen Richardson’s book, writes as follows:

“This immense army astonishes the imagination, but still is not incredible. All the people dependent on Persia were slaves; they were compelled to march, without distinction of birth or profession. Extreme youth or advanced age were probably the only reasons which excused them from bearing arms. The only reasonable objection to be made to this recital of Herodotus is that which Voltaire has omitted to make--where were provisions to be had for so numerous an army? But Herodotus has anticipated this objection: ‘We have with us,’ says Xerxes, ‘abundance of provisions, and all the nations among which we shall come, not being shepherds, but husbandmen, we shall find corn in their country, which we shall appropriate to our own use.’ Subsequent writers have, it is true, differed from Herodotus, and diminished the number of the army of Xerxes; but Herodotus, who was in some measure a contemporary, and who recited his history to Greeks assembled at Olympia, where were many who fought at Salamis and Platæa, is more deserving of credit than later historians.”

The truth perhaps may lie betwixt the two different opinions of Richardson and Larcher. It is not likely, as there were many exiles from Greece at the court of Persia, that Xerxes should be ignorant of the numbers and resources of Greece. To lead there so many millions seems at first sight not only unnecessary but preposterous. Admitting that so vast an army had marched against Greece, no one of common-sense would have thought of making an attack by the way of Thermopylæ, where the passage must have been so tedious, and any resistance, as so few in proportion could possibly be brought to act, might be made almost on equal terms: whilst, on the contrary, to make a descent, they had the whole range of coast before them. With respect to provisions, the difficulty appears still greater, and almost insurmountable. We cannot think, with Larcher, that the numbers recorded by Herodotus are consistent with probability.

Rennell[e] says, that the Persians may be compared, in respect to the rest of the army of Xerxes, with the Europeans in a British army in India, composed chiefly of sepoys and native troops.

Probably Xerxes had not many more actual soldiers than the Greeks; the rest were desultory hordes fit only for plunder, and four-fifths of the whole were followers of the camp with rice, provisions, etc. The army that marched under Lord Cornwallis at the siege of Seringapatam, in the first campaign, consisted of twenty thousand troops, but the followers were more than one hundred thousand. This is the case in all Eastern countries.[f]

But let us hear what Herodotus has to say concerning the size of Xerxes’ horde, for after all the modern critics have only his account as a basis:

We are not able to specify what number of men each nation supplied, as no one has recorded it. The whole amount of the land forces was seventeen hundred thousand. Their mode of ascertaining the number was this: they drew up in one place a body of ten thousand men; making these stand together as compactly as possible, they drew a circle round them. Dismissing these, they enclosed the circle with a wall breast high; into this they introduced another and another ten thousand, till they thus obtained the precise number of the whole. They afterwards ranged each nation apart.

The generals in chief of all the infantry were Mardonius, son of Gobryas; Tritantæchmes, son of Artabanus, who had given his opinion against the Grecian war; and Smerdomenes, son of Otanes, which last two were sons of two brothers of Darius, the uncles of Xerxes. To the above may be added Masistes, son of Darius by Atossa; Gergis, son of Arinus; and Megabyzus, son of Zopyrus.

These were the commanders of all the infantry, except of the ten thousand chosen Persians, who were led by Hydarnes, son of Hydarnes. These were called the Immortal Band, and for this reason, if any of them died in battle, or by any disease, his place was immediately supplied. They were thus never more nor less than ten thousand. The Persians surpassed all the rest of the army, not only in magnificence but valour; they were also remarkable for the quantity of gold which adorned them: they had with them carriages for their women, and a vast number of attendants splendidly provided. They had also camels and beasts of burden to carry their provisions, beside those for the common occasions of the army. The Persian horse, except a small number, whose casques were ornamented with brass and iron, were habited like the infantry.

There appeared of the Sagartii a body of eight thousand horse. These people lead a pastoral life, were originally of Persian descent, and used the Persian language: their dress is something betwixt the Persian and the Pactyan; they have no offensive weapons, either of iron or brass, except their daggers: their principal dependence in action is upon cords made of twisted leather, which they use in this manner: when they engage an enemy they throw out these cords, having a noose at the extremity; if they entangle in them either horse or man, they without difficulty put them to death. These forces were embodied with the Persians. The cavalry of the Medes, and also of the Cissians, are accoutred like their infantry. The Indian horse likewise were armed like their foot; but beside led horses they had chariots of war, drawn by horses and wild asses. The armour of the Bactrian and Caspian horse and foot were alike. This was also the case with the Africans, only it is to be observed that these last all fought from chariots. The Paricanian horse were also equipped like their foot, as were the Arabians, all of whom had camels, by no means inferior to the horse in swiftness.

These were the cavalry, who formed a body of eighty thousand, exclusive of camels and chariots. They were drawn up in regular order, and the Arabians were disposed in the rear, that the horses might not be terrified, as a horse cannot endure a camel. Harmamithres and Tithæus, the sons of Datis, commanded the cavalry; they had shared this command with Pharnuches, but he had been left at Sardis indisposed. As the troops were marching from Sardis he met with an unfortunate accident: a dog ran under the feet of his horse, which being terrified reared up and threw his rider. Pharnuches was in consequence seized with a vomiting of blood, which finally terminated in a consumption. His servants, in compliance with the orders of their master, led the horse to the place where the accident happened, and there cut off his legs at the knees. Thus was Pharnuches deprived of his command.[b]

We give the account of the Persian fleet as stated by Herodotus, that the reader may compare it with that which follows of Diodorus Siculus:

Phœnicians 300 Egyptians 200 Cyprians 150 Cilicians 100 Pamphylians 30 Lycians 50 Dorians 30 Carians 70 Ionians 100 Islanders 17 Æolians 60 People of the Hellespont 100 ---- 1207 ----

According to Diodorus Siculus,

Dorians 40 Æolians 40 Ionians 100 Hellespontians 80 Islanders 50 Egyptians 200 Phœnicians 300 Cilicians 80 Carians 80 Pamphylians 40 Lycians 40 Cyprians 150 ---- 1200[f] ----

The commanders-in-chief of the sea forces were Ariabignes, son of Darius, Prexaspes, son of Aspathines, and Megabazus, son of Megabates, together with Achæmenes, another son of Darius. The other leaders we forbear to specify, it not appearing necessary; but it is impossible not to speak, and with admiration, of Artemisia, who, though a female, served in this Grecian expedition. On the death of her husband she enjoyed the supreme authority, for her son was not yet grown up, and her great spirit and vigour of mind alone induced her to exert herself on this occasion. She was the daughter of Lygdamis, by her father’s side of Halicarnassus, by her mother of Cretan descent. She had the conduct of those of Halicarnassus, Cos, Nisyros, and Calynda. She furnished five ships, which next to those of the Sidonians, were the best in the fleet. She was also distinguished among all the allies for the salutary counsels which she gave the king. Such were the maritime forces.[b] Leaving this vast armament on its prosperous course towards Greece, let us see what has been happening meanwhile in that busy little nation.

FOOTNOTES

[20] [The Romans, in attacking an enemy, so disposed their army, as to be able to rally three different times. This has been thought by many as the great secret of the Roman discipline; because fortune must have failed their efforts three different times before they could be possibly defeated. The Greeks drew up their forces in one extended line, and therefore depended upon the effect of the first charge.[f]]

[21] [Larcher[d] reasonably supposes that this was a plot of Mardonius to impose on Xerxes; and that some person, dressed and disguised for the purpose, acted the part of the ghost.]

[22] [Many wonderful anecdotes are related of the riches of individuals in more ancient times; among which this does not seem to be the least marvellous. The sum of which Pythius is said to have been possessed amounted to five millions and a half of sterling money [$27,500,000]; this is according to the estimate of Prideaux; that given by Montfaucon differs essentially. “The denii,” says this last writer, “weighed eight modern louis-d’ors; therefore Pythius possessed thirty-two millions of louis-d’ors” [£25,600,000, $128,000,000].

Montfaucon, relating the story of Pythius, adds these reflections:

“‘A man might in those days safely be rich, provided he obtained his riches honestly; and how great must have been the circulation in commerce, if a private man could amass so prodigious a sum!’ The wealth which the Roman Crassus possessed was not much inferior; when he had consecrated a tenth of his property to Hercules, and at ten thousand tables feasted all the people of Rome, beside giving as much corn to every citizen as was sufficient to last him three months, he found himself still possessed of seventy-one hundred Roman talents, equivalent to a million and a half of our money. The gold which Solomon employed in overlaying the sanctum sanctorum of the Temple, which was no more than thirty feet square and thirty feet high, amounted to four millions three hundred and twenty thousand pounds sterling. The gold which he had in one year from Ophir was equal to three millions two hundred and forty thousand pounds.”[f]]

[23] [It seems a matter of certainty that Herodotus’ numbers must be erroneous. Vessels placed transversely must reach to a much greater extent than the same number placed side by side; yet here the greater number of ships is stated to have been on the side where they were arranged transversely, that is, across the channel, with their broadsides to the stream. What the true numbers were it is vain to conjecture, it is sufficient to have pointed out that the present must be wrong.[f]

Since the Hellespont, in the neighbourhood of Abydos, has a very considerable bend in its course, first running northward from Abydos towards Sestos, and then taking a pretty sharp turn to the eastward, may it not have been, that the two lines of ships were disposed on different sides of the angle just mentioned, by which it might truly be said, that the ships in one line presented their heads to the Euxine, the other their sides, although the heads of both were presented to the current? The different numbers in the two lines certainly indicate different breadths of the strait, which can only be accounted for by their being at some distance from each other: for it cannot be supposed that the line was placed obliquely across the strait.

The cables extended from each shore appear to have been for the sole purpose of supporting the bridgeways. The ships were kept in their places by anchors ahead and astern; by the lateral pressure of each other, and by side-fastening.[e]]

[24] [This story will probably excite a smile from the English reader, whom it will remind of Mary Tofts and her rabbits.--BELOE.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XVIII. PROCEEDINGS IN GREECE FROM MARATHON TO THERMOPYLÆ

O Land of Solon, Plato, and of men Whose glorious like earth ne’er shall see again!

--NICHOLAS MICHELL.

Our information respecting the affairs of Greece immediately after the repulse of the Persians from Marathon, is very scanty.

Cleomenes and Leotychides, the two kings of Sparta (the former belonging to the elder or Eurysthenid, the latter to the younger or the Proclid, race), had conspired for the purpose of dethroning the former Proclid king Demaratus: and Cleomenes had even gone so far as to tamper with the Delphian priestess for this purpose. His manœuvre being betrayed shortly afterwards, he was so alarmed at the displeasure of the Spartans, that he retired into Thessaly, and from thence into Arcadia, where he employed the powerful influence of his regal character and heroic lineage to arm the Arcadian people against his country. The Spartans, alarmed in their turn, voluntarily invited him back with a promise of amnesty. But his renewed lease did not last long: his habitual violence of character became aggravated into decided insanity, insomuch that he struck with his stick whomsoever he met; and his relatives were forced to confine him in chains under a helot sentinel. By severe menaces, he one day constrained this man to give him his sword, with which he mangled himself dreadfully and perished.

But what surprises us most is, to hear that the Spartans, usually more disposed than other Greeks to refer every striking phenomenon to divine agency, recognised on this occasion nothing but a vulgar physical cause: Cleomenes had gone mad (they affirmed) through habits of intoxication, learnt from some Scythian envoys who had come to Sparta.

The general course of the war with Ægina, and especially the failure of the enterprise concerted with Nicodromus in consequence of delay in borrowing ships from Corinth, were well calculated to impress upon the Athenians the necessity of enlarging their naval force. And it is from the present time that we trace among them the first growth of that decided tendency towards maritime activity which coincided so happily with the expansion of their democracy, and opened a new phase in Grecian history as well as a new career for themselves.

The exciting effect produced upon them by the repulse of the Persians at Marathon has been dwelt upon. Miltiades, the victor in that field, having been removed from the scene under circumstances already described, Aristides and Themistocles became the chief men at Athens: and the former was chosen archon during the succeeding year. His exemplary uprightness in magisterial functions ensured to him lofty esteem from the general public, not without a certain proportion of active enemies, some of them sufferers by his justice. These enemies naturally became partisans of his rival Themistocles, who had all the talents necessary for bringing them into co-operation: and the rivalry between the two chiefs became so bitter and menacing, that even Aristides himself is reported to have said, “If the Athenians were wise, they would cast both of us into the barathrum.”

THEMISTOCLES AND ARISTIDES

[Sidenote: [489-481 B.C.]]

Of the particular points on which their rivalry turned, we are unfortunately little informed. But it is highly probable that one of them was the important change of policy above alluded to,--the conversion of Athens from a land-power into a sea-power; the development of this new and stirring element in the minds of the people. By all authorities, this change of policy is ascribed principally and specially to Themistocles. On that account, if for no other reason, Aristides would probably be found opposed to it: but it was moreover a change not in harmony with that old-fashioned Hellenism, undisturbed uniformity of life, and narrow range of active duty and experience which Aristides seems to have approved in common with the subsequent philosophers. The seaman was naturally more of a wanderer and cosmopolite than the heavy-armed soldier: the modern Greek seaman even at this moment is so to a remarkable degree, distinguished for the variety of his ideas, and the quickness of his intelligence: the land-service was a type of steadiness and inflexible ranks, the sea-service that of mutability and adventure. Such was the idea strongly entertained by Plato and other philosophers: though we may remark that they do not render justice to the Athenian seaman, whose training was far more perfect and laborious, and his habits of obedience far more complete, than that of the Athenian hoplite or horseman: a training beginning with Themistocles, and reaching its full perfection about the commencement of the Peloponnesian War.

In recommending extraordinary efforts to create a navy as well as to acquire nautical practice, Themistocles displayed all that sagacious appreciation of the circumstances and dangers of the time for which Thucydides gives him credit: and there can be no doubt that Aristides, though the honester politician of the two, was at this particular crisis the less essential to his country. Not only was there the struggle with Ægina, a maritime power equal or more than equal, and within sight of the Athenian harbour, but there was also in the distance a still more formidable contingency to guard against. The Persian armament had been driven with disgrace from Attica back to Asia; but the Persian monarch still remained with undiminished means of aggression as well as increased thirst for revenge; and Themistocles knew well that the danger from that quarter would recur greater than ever. He believed that it would recur again in the same way, by an expedition across the Ægean like that of Datis to Marathon; against which the best defence would be found in a numerous and well-trained fleet. Nor could the large preparations of Darius for renewing the attack remain unknown to a vigilant observer, extending as they did over so many Greeks subject to the Persian empire. Such positive warning was more than enough to stimulate the active genius of Themistocles, who now prevailed upon his countrymen to begin with energy the work of maritime preparation, as well against Ægina as against Persia. Not only were two hundred new ships built, and citizens trained as seamen, but the important work was commenced, during the year when Themistocles was either archon or general, of forming and fortifying a new harbour for Athens at Piræus, instead of the ancient open bay of Phalerum. The latter was indeed somewhat nearer to the city, but Piræus with its three separate natural ports, admitting of being closed and fortified, was incomparably superior in safety as well as in convenience. It is not too much to say with Herodotus, that the Æginetan war was “the salvation of Greece, by constraining the Athenians to make themselves a maritime power.” The whole efficiency of the resistance subsequently made to Xerxes turned upon this new movement in the organisation of Athens, allowed as it was to attain tolerable completeness through a fortunate concurrence of accidents; for the important delay of ten years between the defeat of Marathon and the fresh invasion by which it was to be avenged was, in truth, the result of accident. First, the revolt of Egypt; next, the death of Darius; thirdly, the indifference of Xerxes at his first accession towards Hellenic matters--postponing until 480 B.C., an invasion which would naturally have been undertaken in 487 or 486 B.C., and which would have found Athens at that time without her wooden walls--the great engine of her subsequent salvation.

Another accidental help, without which the new fleet could not have been built--a considerable amount of public money--was also by good fortune now available to the Athenians. It is first in an emphatic passage of the poet Æschylus, and next from Herodotus on the present occasion, that we hear of the silver mines of Laurium in Attica, and the valuable produce which they rendered to the state. At what time they first began to be worked, we have no information; but it seems hardly possible that they could have been worked with any spirit or profitable result, until after the expulsion of Hippias and the establishment of the democratical constitution of Clisthenes. Neither the strong local factions, by which different portions of Attica were set against each other before the time of Pisistratus--nor the rule of that despot succeeded by his two sons--were likely to afford confidence and encouragement. But when the democracy of Clisthenes first brought Attica into one systematic and comprehensive whole, with equal rights assigned to each part, and with a common centre at Athens--the power of that central government over the mineral wealth of the country, and its means of binding the whole people to respect agreements concluded with individual undertakers, would give a new stimulus to private speculation in the district of Laurium. It was the practice of the Athenian government either to sell, or to let for a long term of years, particular districts of this productive region to individuals or companies; on consideration partly of a sum or fine paid down, partly of a reserved rent equal to one twenty-fourth part of the gross produce.

We are told by Herodotus that there was in the Athenian treasury, at the time when Themistocles made his proposition to enlarge the naval force, a great sum arising from the Laurian mines, out of which a distribution was on the point of being made among the citizens--ten drachmæ [about 8 shillings or $2] to each man. Themistocles availed himself of this precious opportunity--set forth the necessities of the war with Ægina, and the still more formidable menace from the great enemy in Asia--and prevailed upon the people to forego the promised distribution for the purpose of obtaining an efficient navy. One cannot doubt that there must have been many speakers who would try to make themselves popular by opposing this proposition and supporting the distribution; insomuch that the power of the people generally to feel the force of a distant motive as predominant over a present gain, deserves notice as an earnest of their approaching greatness.

Immense indeed was the recompense reaped for this self-denial, not merely by Athens but by Greece generally, when the preparations of Xerxes came to be matured, and his armament was understood to be approaching. The orders for equipment of ships and laying in of provisions, issued by the Great King to his subject Greeks in Asia, the Ægean, and Thrace, would of course become known throughout Greece proper; especially the vast labour bestowed on the canal of Mount Athos, which would be the theme of wondering talk with every Thasian or Acanthian citizen who visited the festival games in the Peloponnesus. All these premonitory evidences were public enough, without any need of that elaborate stratagem whereby the exiled Demaratus is alleged to have secretly transmitted, from Susa to Sparta, intelligence of the approaching expedition. The formal announcements of Xerxes all designated Athens as the special object of his wrath and vengeance. Other Grecian cities might thus hope to escape without mischief: so that the prospect of the great invasion did not at first provoke among them any unanimous disposition to resist. Accordingly, when the first heralds despatched by Xerxes from Sardis in the autumn of 481 B.C., a little before his march to the Hellespont, addressed themselves to the different cities with demand of earth and water, many were disposed to comply. Neither to Athens, nor to Sparta, were any heralds sent; and these two cities were thus from the beginning identified in interest and in the necessity of defence. Both of them sent, in this trying moment, to consult the Delphian oracle; while both at the same time joined to convene a Panhellenic congress at the Isthmus of Corinth, for the purpose of organising resistance against the expected invader.

CONGRESS AT CORINTH

[Sidenote: [481 B.C.]]

We have pointed out the various steps whereby the separate states of Greece were gradually brought, even against their own natural instincts, into something approaching more nearly to political union. The present congress, assembled under the influence of common fear from Persia, has more of a Panhellenic character than any political event which has yet occurred in Grecian history. It extends far beyond the range of those Peloponnesian states which constitute the immediate allies of Sparta: it comprehends Athens, and is even summoned in part by her strenuous instigation: moreover it seeks to combine every city of Hellenic race and language, however distant, which can be induced to take part in it--even the Cretans, Corcyræans, and Sicilians. It is true that all these states do not actually come, but earnest efforts are made to induce them to come: the dispersed brethren of the Hellenic family are entreated to marshal themselves in the same ranks for a joint political purpose--the defence of the common hearth and metropolis of the race. This is a new fact in Grecian history, opening scenes and ideas unlike to anything which has gone before--enlarging prodigiously the functions and duties connected with that headship of Greece which had hitherto been in the hands of Sparta, but which is about to become too comprehensive for her to manage--and thus introducing increased habits of co-operation among the subordinate states, as well as rival hopes of aggrandisement among the leaders. The congress at the Isthmus of Corinth marks such further advance in the centralising tendencies of Greece, and seems at first to promise an onward march in the same direction: but the promise will not be found realised.

Its first step was indeed one of inestimable value. While most of the deputies present came prepared, in the name of their respective cities, to swear reciprocal fidelity and brotherhood, they also addressed all their efforts to appease the feuds and dissensions which reigned among particular members of their own meeting. Of these the most prominent, as well as the most dangerous, was the war still subsisting between Athens and Ægina. The latter was not exempt, even now, from suspicions of medising (i.e., embracing the cause of the Persians), which had been raised by her giving earth and water ten years before to Darius. But her present conduct afforded no countenance to such suspicions: she took earnest part in the congress as well as in the joint measures of defence, and willingly consented to accommodate her difference with Athens. In this work of reconciling feuds, so essential to the safety of Greece, the Athenian Themistocles took a prominent part, as well as Cheileus of Tegea in Arcadia. The congress proceeded to send envoys and solicit co-operation from such cities as were yet either equivocal or indifferent, especially Argos, Corcyra, and the Cretan and Sicilian Greeks; and at the same time to despatch spies across to Sardis, for the purpose of learning the state and prospects of the assembled army.

These spies presently returned, having been detected, and condemned to death by the Persian generals, but released by express order of Xerxes, who directed that the full strength of his assembled armament should be shown to them, in order that the terror of the Greeks might be thus magnified. The step was well calculated for such a purpose: but the discouragement throughout Greece was already extreme, at this critical period when the storm was about to burst upon them. Even to intelligent and well-meaning Greeks, much more to the careless, the timid, or the treacherous--Xerxes with his countless host appeared irresistible, and indeed something more than human. Of course such an impression would be encouraged by the large number of Greeks already his tributaries: and we may even trace the manifestation of a wish to get rid of the Athenians altogether, as the chief objects of Persian vengeance and chief hindrance to tranquil submission. This despair of the very continuance of Hellenic life and autonomy breaks forth even from the sanctuary of Hellenic religion, the Delphian temple; when the Athenians, in their distress and uncertainty, sent to consult the oracle. Hardly had their two envoys performed the customary sacrifices, and sat down in the inner chamber near the priestess Aristonice, when she at once exclaimed: “Wretched men, why sit ye there? Quit your land and city, and flee afar! Head, body, feet, and hands are alike rotten: fire and sword, in the train of the Syrian chariot, shall overwhelm you: nor only your city, but other cities also, as well as many even of the temples of the gods--which are now sweating and trembling with fear, and foreshadow, by drops of blood on their roofs, the hard calamities impending. Get ye away from the sanctuary, with your souls steeped in sorrow.”

So terrific a reply had rarely escaped from the lips of the priestess. The envoys were struck to the earth by it, and durst not carry it back to Athens. In their sorrow they were encouraged yet to hope by an influential Delphian citizen named Timon (we trace here as elsewhere the underhand working of these leading Delphians on the priestess), who advised them to provide themselves with the characteristic marks of supplication, and to approach the oracle a second time in that imploring guise: “O lord, we pray thee (they said), have compassion on these boughs of supplication, and deliver to us something more comfortable concerning our country; else we quit not thy sanctuary, but remain here until death.” Upon which the priestess replied: “Athene with all her prayers and all her sagacity cannot propitiate Olympian Zeus. But this assurance I will give you, firm as adamant. When everything else in the land of Cecrops shall be taken, Zeus grants to Athene that the wooden wall alone shall remain unconquered, to defend you and your children. Stand not to await the assailing horse and foot from the continent, but turn your backs and retire: you shall yet live to fight another day. O divine Salamis, thou too shalt destroy the children of women, either at the seed-time or at the harvest.”

This second answer was a sensible mitigation of the first. It left open some hope of escape, though faint, dark, and unintelligible: and the envoys wrote it down to carry back to Athens, not concealing probably the terrific sentence which had preceded it. When read to the people, the obscurity of the meaning provoked many different interpretations. What was meant by “the wooden wall”? Some supposed that the Acropolis itself, which had originally been surrounded with a wooden palisade, was the refuge pointed out; but the greater number, and among them most of those who were by profession expositors of prophecy, maintained that the wooden wall indicated the fleet. But these professional expositors, while declaring that the god bade them go on shipboard, deprecated all idea of a naval battle, and insisted on the necessity of abandoning Attica forever: the last lines of the oracle, wherein it was said that Salamis would destroy the children of women, appeared to them to portend nothing but disaster in the event of a naval combat. Such was the opinion of those who passed for the best expositors of the divine will. It harmonised completely with the despairing temper then prevalent, heightened by the terrible sentence pronounced in the first oracle; and emigration to some foreign land presented itself as the only hope of safety even for their persons. The fate of Athens--and of Greece generally, which would have been helpless without Athens--now hung upon a thread, when Themistocles, the great originator of the fleet, interposed with equal steadfastness of heart and ingenuity, to insure the proper use of it. He contended that if the god had intended to designate Salamis as the scene of a naval disaster to the Greeks, that island would have been called in the oracle by some such epithet as “wretched Salamis:” but the fact that it was termed “divine Salamis,” indicated that the parties, destined to perish there, were the enemies of Greece, not the Greeks themselves. He encouraged his countrymen therefore to abandon their city and country, and to trust themselves to the fleet as the wooden wall recommended by the god, but with full determination to fight and conquer on board. Great indeed were the consequences which turned upon this bold stretch of exegetical conjecture. Unless the Athenians had been persuaded, by some plausible show of interpretation, that the sense of the oracle encouraged instead of forbidding a naval combat, they would in their existing depression have abandoned all thought of resistance.

Even with the help of an encouraging interpretation, however, nothing less than the most unconquerable resolution and patriotism could have enabled the Athenians to bear up against such terrific denunciations from the Delphian god, and persist in resistance in place of seeking safety by emigration. Herodotus emphatically impresses this truth upon his readers: nay, he even steps out of his way to do so, proclaiming Athens as the real saviour of Greece. Writing as he did about the beginning of the Peloponnesian War--at a time when Athens, having attained the maximum of her empire, was alike feared, hated, and admired, by most of the Grecian states--he knows that the opinion which he is giving will be unpopular with his hearers generally, and he apologises for it as something wrung from him against his will by the force of the evidence. Nor was it only that the Athenians dared to stay and fight against immense odds: they, and they alone, threw into the cause that energy and forwardness whereby it was enabled to succeed, as will appear further in the sequel.

But there was also a third way, not less deserving of notice, in which they contributed to the result. As soon as the congress of deputies met at the Isthmus of Corinth, it became essential to recognise some one commanding state: and with regard to the land-force, no one dreamt of contesting the pre-eminence of Sparta. But in respect to the fleet, her pretensions were more disputable, since she furnished at most only sixteen ships, and little or no nautical skill; while Athens brought two-thirds of the entire naval force, with the best ships and seamen. Upon these grounds the idea was at first started, that Athens should command at sea and Sparta on land: but the majority of the allies manifested a decided repugnance, announcing that they would follow no one but a Spartan. To the honour of the Athenians, they at once waived their pretensions, as soon as they saw that the unity of the confederate force at this moment of peril would be compromised. To appreciate this generous abnegation of a claim in itself so reasonable, we must recollect that the love of pre-eminence was among the most prominent attributes of the Hellenic character; a prolific source of their greatness and excellence, but producing also no small amount both of their follies and their crimes. To renounce at the call of public obligation a claim to personal honour and glory, is perhaps the rarest of all virtues in a son of Hellen.

[Sidenote: [481-480 B.C.]]

We find thus the Athenians nerved up to the pitch of resistance, prepared to see their country wasted, and to live as well as to fight on shipboard, when the necessity should arrive; furnishing two-thirds of the whole fleet, and yet prosecuting the building of fresh ships until the last moment; sending forth the ablest and most forward leader in the common cause, while content themselves to serve like other states under the leadership of Sparta. During the winter preceding the march of Xerxes from Sardis, the congress at the isthmus was trying, with little success, to bring the Grecian cities into united action. Among the cities north of Attica and the Peloponnesus, the greater number were either inclined to submit, like Thebes and the greater part of Bœotia, or were at least lukewarm in the cause of independence: so rare at this trying moment (to use the language of the unfortunate Platæans fifty-three years afterwards) was the exertion of resolute Hellenic patriotism against the invader. Even in the interior of the Peloponnesus, the powerful Argos maintained an ambiguous neutrality. It was one of the first steps of the congress to send special envoys to Argos, setting forth the common danger and soliciting co-operation. The result is certain, that no co-operation was obtained--the Argives did nothing throughout the struggle; but as to their real position, or the grounds of their refusal, contradictory statements had reached the ears of Herodotus. They themselves affirmed that they were ready to have joined the Hellenic cause, in spite of dissuasion from the Delphian oracle--exacting only as conditions that the Spartans should conclude a truce with them for thirty years, and should equally divide the honours of headship with Argos.

Such was the story told by the Argives themselves, but seemingly not credited either by any other Greeks, or by Herodotus himself. The prevalent opinion was, that the Argives had a secret understanding with Xerxes, and some even affirmed that they had been the parties who invited him into Greece, as a means both of protection and of vengeance to themselves against Sparta after their defeat by Cleomenes. And Herodotus himself evidently believed that they medised, though he is half afraid to say so, and disguises his opinion in a cloud of words which betray the angry polemics going on about the matter, even fifty years afterwards. It is certain that in act the Argives were neutral.

The Cretans declined to take any part, on the ground of prohibitory injunctions from the oracle; the Corcyræans promised without performing, and even without any intention to perform. Their neutrality was a serious loss to the Greeks, since they could fit out a naval force of sixty triremes, second only to that of Athens. With this important contingent they engaged to join the Grecian fleet, and actually set sail from Corcyra; but they took care not to sail round Cape Malea, or to reach the scene of action.

The envoys who visited Corcyra proceeded onward on their mission to Gelo the despot of Syracuse. Of that potentate, regarded by Herodotus as more powerful than any state in Greece, we shall speak more fully in a subsequent chapter: it is sufficient to mention now, that he rendered no aid against Xerxes. Nor was it in his power to do so, whatever might have been his inclinations; for the same year which brought the Persian monarch against Greece, was also selected by the Carthaginians for a formidable invasion of Sicily, which kept the Sicilian Greeks to the defence of their own island. It seems even probable that this simultaneous invasion had been concerted between the Persians and Carthaginians.

The endeavours of the deputies of Greeks at the isthmus had thus produced no other reinforcement to their cause except some fair words from the Corcyræans. It was about the time when Xerxes was about to pass the Hellespont, in the beginning of 480 B.C., that the first actual step for resistance was taken, at the instigation of the Thessalians. Though the great Thessalian family of the Aleuadæ were among the companions of Xerxes, and the most forward in inviting him into Greece, with every promise of ready submission from their countrymen--yet it seems that these promises were in reality unwarranted. The Aleuadæ were at the head only of a minority, and perhaps were even in exile, like the Pisistratidæ: while most of the Thessalians were disposed to resist Xerxes--for which purpose they now sent envoys to the isthmus, intimating the necessity of guarding the passes of Olympus, the northernmost entrance of Greece. They offered their own cordial aid in this defence, adding that they should be under the necessity of making their own separate submission, if this demand were not complied with. Accordingly a body of ten thousand Grecian heavy-armed infantry, under the command of the Spartan Euænetus and the Athenian Themistocles, were despatched by sea to Alus in Achaia Phthiotis, where they disembarked and marched by land across Achaia and Thessaly. Being joined by the Thessalian horse, they occupied the defile of Tempe, through which the river Peneus makes its way to the sea, by a cleft between the mountains Olympus and Ossa.

THE VALE OF TEMPE

The long, narrow, and winding defile of Tempe formed then, and forms still, the single entrance, open throughout winter as well as summer, from lower or maritime Macedonia into Thessaly. The lofty mountain precipices approach so closely as to leave hardly room enough in some places for a road: it is thus eminently defensible, and a few resolute men would be sufficient to arrest in it the progress of the most numerous host. But the Greeks soon discovered that the position was such as they could not hold--first, because the powerful fleet of Xerxes would be able to land troops in their rear; secondly, because there was also a second entrance passable in summer, from upper Macedonia into Thessaly, by the mountain passes over the range of Olympus. It was in fact by this second pass, evading the insurmountable difficulties of Tempe, that the advancing march of the Persians was destined to be made, under the auspices of Alexander, king of Macedon, tributary to them and active in their service. That prince sent a communication of the fact to the Greeks at Tempe, admonishing them that they would be trodden under foot by the countless host approaching, and urging them to renounce their hopeless position. He passed for a friend, and probably believed himself to be acting as such, in dissuading the Greeks from unavailing resistance to Persia: but he was in reality a very dangerous mediator; and as such the Spartans had good reason to dread him, in a second intervention of which we shall hear more hereafter. On the present occasion, the Grecian commanders were quite ignorant of the existence of any other entrance into Thessaly, besides Tempe, until their arrival in that region. Perhaps it might have been possible to defend both entrances at once, and considering the immense importance of arresting the march of the Persians at the frontiers of Hellas, the attempt would have been worth some risk. So great was the alarm, however, produced by the unexpected discovery, justifying or seeming to justify the friendly advice of Alexander, that they remained only a few days at Tempe, then at once retired back to their ships, and returned by sea to the Isthmus of Corinth--about the time when Xerxes was crossing the Hellespont.

This precipitate retreat produced consequences highly disastrous and discouraging. It appeared to leave all Hellas north of Mount Cithæron and of the Megarid territory without defence, and it served either as reason or pretext for the majority of the Grecian states, north of that boundary, to make their submission to Xerxes, which some of them had already begun to do before. When Xerxes in the course of his march reached the Thermaic Gulf, within sight of Olympus and Ossa, the heralds whom he had sent from Sardis brought him tokens of submission from a third portion of the Hellenic name--the Thessalians, Dolopes, Ænianes, Perrhæbians, Magnetes, Locrians, Dorians, Melians, Phthiotic Achæans, and Bœotians. Among the latter is included Thebes, but not Thespiæ or Platæa. The Thessalians, especially, not only submitted, but manifested active zeal and rendered much service in the cause of Xerxes, under the stimulus of the Aleuadæ, whose party now became predominant: they were probably indignant at the hasty retreat of those who had come to defend them.

Had the Greeks been able to maintain the passes of Olympus and Ossa, all this northern fraction might probably have been induced to partake in the resistance instead of becoming auxiliaries to the invader. During the six weeks or two months which elapsed between the retreat of the Greeks from Tempe and the arrival of Xerxes at Therma, no new plan of defence was yet thoroughly organised; for it was not until that arrival became known at the isthmus, that the Greek army and fleet made its forward movement to occupy Thermopylæ and Artemisium.[b]

XERXES REVIEWS HIS HOST

Xerxes having ranged and numbered his armament, was desirous to take a survey of them all. Mounted in his car, he examined each nation in its turn. To all of them he proposed certain questions, the replies to which were noted down by his secretaries. In this manner he proceeded from first to last through all the ranks, both of horse and foot. When this was done, the fleet also was pushed off from land, whilst the monarch, exchanging his chariot for a Sidonian vessel, on the deck of which he sat beneath a golden canopy, passed slowly the heads of the ships, proposing in like manner questions to each, and noting down the answers. The commanders had severally moored their vessels at about four plethra from shore, in one uniform line, with their sterns out to sea, and their crews under arms, as if prepared for battle. Xerxes viewed them, passing betwixt their prows and the shore.

When he had finished his survey, he went on shore; and sending for Demaratus, the son of Ariston, who accompanied him in this expedition against Greece, he thus addressed him: “From you, Demaratus, who are a Greek, and, as I understand from yourself and others, of no mean or contemptible city, I am desirous of obtaining information: do you think that the Greeks will presume to make any resistance against me? For my own part, not to mention their want of unanimity, I cannot think that all the Greeks, joined to all the inhabitants of the west, would be able to withstand my power: what is your opinion on this subject?” “Sir,” said Demaratus, in reply, “shall I say what is true, or only what is agreeable?” Xerxes commanded him to speak the truth.

“Since,” answered Demaratus, “you command me to speak the truth, it shall be my care to deliver myself in such a manner that no one hereafter, speaking as I do, shall be convicted of falsehood. Greece has ever been the child of poverty; for its virtue it is indebted to the severe wisdom and discipline, by which it has tempered its poverty, and repelled its oppressors. To this praise all the Dorian Greeks are entitled; but I shall now speak of the Lacedæmonians only. You may depend upon it that your propositions, which threaten Greece with servitude, will be rejected; and if all the other Greeks side with you against them, the Lacedæmonians will engage you in battle. Make no inquiries as to their number, for if they shall have but a thousand men, or even fewer, they will fight you.”

“What, Demaratus,” answered Xerxes, smiling, “think you that a thousand men will engage so vast a host? Tell me, you who, as you say, have been their prince, would you now willingly engage with ten opponents? If your countrymen be what you describe them, according to your own principles you, who are their prince, should be equal to two of them. If, therefore, one of them be able to contend with ten of my soldiers, you may be reasonably expected to contend with twenty: such ought to be the test of your assertions. But if your countrymen really resemble in form and size you, and such other Greeks as appear in my presence, it should seem that what you say is dictated by pride and insolence; for how can it be shown that a thousand, or ten thousand, or even fifty thousand men, all equally free, and not subject to the will of an individual, could oppose so great an army? Granting them to have five thousand men, we have still a majority of a thousand to one; they who like us are under the command of one person, from the fear of their leader, and under the immediate impression of the lash, are animated with a spirit contrary to their nature, and are made to attack a number greater than their own; but they who are urged by no constraint will not do this. If these Greeks were even equal to us in number, I cannot think they would dare to encounter Persians. The virtue to which you allude, is to be found among ourselves, though the examples are certainly not numerous; there are of my Persian guards men who will singly contend with three Greeks. The preposterous language which you use can only, therefore, proceed from your ignorance.”

“I knew, my lord, from the first,” returned Demaratus, “that by speaking truth I should offend you. I was induced to give you this representation of the Spartans, from your urging me to speak without reserve. You may judge, sir, what my attachment must be to those who, not content with depriving me of my paternal dignities, drove me ignominiously into exile. Your father received, protected, and supported me: no prudent man will treat with ingratitude the kindness of his benefactor. I will never presume to engage in fight with ten men, nor even with two, nor indeed willingly with one; but if necessity demanded, or danger provoked me, I would not hesitate to fight with any one of those, who is said to be a match for three Greeks. The Lacedæmonians, when they engage in single combat, are certainly not inferior to other men, but in a body they are not to be equalled. Although free, they are not so without some reserve; the law is their superior, of which they stand in greater awe than your subjects do of you: they are obedient to what it commands, and it commands them always not to fly from the field of battle, whatever may be the number of their adversaries. It is their duty to preserve their ranks, to conquer or to die. If what I say seem to you absurd, I am willing in future to be silent. I have spoken what I think, because the king commanded me, to whom may all he desires be accomplished.”

Xerxes smiled at these words of Demaratus, whom he dismissed without anger, civilly from his presence. After the above conference, he removed from Doriscus the governor who had been placed there by Darius, and promoted in his room Mascames, son of Megadostes. He then passed through Thrace with his army, towards Greece.

To this Mascames, as to the bravest of all the governors appointed either by himself or by Darius, Xerxes sent presents every year, and Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes continued to do the same to his descendants. Before this expedition against Greece, there had constantly been governors both in Thrace and the Hellespont, all of whom, except Mascames, the Greeks afterwards expelled: he alone retained Doriscus in his subjection, in defiance of the many and repeated exertions made to remove him. It was in remembrance of these services, that he and all his descendants received presents from the kings of Persia.

The only one of all those expelled by the Greeks, who enjoyed the good opinion of Xerxes, was Boges, the governor of Eion; he always mentioned this man in terms of esteem, and all his descendants were honourably regarded in Persia. Boges was not undeserving his great reputation: when he was besieged by the Athenians, under the conduct of Cimon, son of Miltiades, he might, if he had thought proper, have retired into Asia; this he refused, and defended himself to the last extremity, from apprehensions that the king might ascribe his conduct to fear. When no provisions were left, he caused a large pile to be raised; he then slew his children, his wife, his concubines, and all his family and threw them into the fire; he next cast all the gold and silver of the place from the walls into the Strymon; lastly, he leaped himself into the flames. This man is, therefore, very deservedly extolled by the Persians.

Xerxes, in his progress from Doriscus to Greece, compelled all the people among whom he came to join his army. All this tract of country, as far as Thessaly, as we have before remarked, had been made tributary to the king, first by Megabazus, and finally by Mardonius.

Xerxes having passed the exhausted bed of the Lissus, continued his march beyond the Grecian cities of Maronea, Dicæa, and Abdera. He proceeded onward through the more midland cities, in one of which is a lake almost of thirty stadia in circumference, full of fish, but remarkably salt: the waters of this proved only sufficient for the beasts of burden. The name of the city is Pistyrus. These Grecian and maritime cities were to the left of Xerxes as he passed them.

The nations of Thrace, through which he marched are these: the Pæti, Cicones, Bistones, Sapæi, Dersæi, Edoni, and the Satræ. The inhabitants of the maritime towns followed by sea; those inland were, except the Satræ, compelled to accompany the army by land. The Satræ, as far as we know, never were subdued.

Xerxes continued to advance, and passed by two Pierian cities, one called Phagra, the other Pergamus; to his right he left the mountain Pangæus, keeping a westward direction, till he came to the river Strymon. To this river the magi offered a sacrifice of white horses. After performing these and many other religious rites to the Strymon, they proceeded through the Edonian district of the Nine Ways, to where they found bridges thrown over the Strymon: when they heard that this place was named the Nine Ways, they buried there alive nine youths and as many virgins, natives of the country. This custom of burying alive was common in Persia; and Amestris, the wife of Xerxes, when she was of an advanced age, commanded fourteen Persian children of illustrious birth to be interred alive in honour of that deity, who, as they suppose, exists under the earth.

On his arrival at Acanthus, the Persian monarch interchanged the rites of hospitality with the people, and presented each with a Median vest: he was prompted to this conduct by the particular zeal which they discovered towards the war, and from their having completed the work of the canal.

As soon as the royal will was made known by the heralds, the inhabitants of the several cities divided the corn which they possessed, and employed many months in reducing it to meal and flour. Some there were, who purchased at a great price the finest cattle they could procure, for the purpose of fattening them: others, with the same view of entertaining the army, provided birds both of the land and the water, which they preserved in cages and in ponds. Many employed themselves in making cups and goblets of gold and silver, with other utensils of the table: these last-mentioned articles were intended only for the king himself, and his more immediate attendants; with respect to the army in general, it was thought sufficient to furnish them with provision. On the approach of the main body, a pavilion was erected, and properly prepared for the residence of the monarch, the rest of the troops remained in the open air. From the commencement of the feast to its conclusion, the fatigue of those who provided it is hardly to be expressed. The guests, after satisfying their appetite, passed the night on the place; the next morning, after tearing up the pavilion, and plundering its contents, they departed, without leaving anything behind them.

Upon this occasion the witty remark of Megacreon of Abdera, has been handed down to posterity. If the Abderites, he observed, had been required to furnish a dinner as well as a supper, they must either have prevented the visit of the king by flight, or have been the most miserable of human beings.

These people, severe as was the burden, fulfilled what had been enjoined them. From Acanthus, Xerxes dismissed the commanders of his fleet, requiring them to wait his orders at Therma. Therma is situated near the Thermæan Gulf, to which it gives its name. He had been taught to suppose this the most convenient road; by the command of Xerxes, the army had marched from Doriscus to Acanthus, in three separate bodies: one went by the seacoast, moving with the fleet, and was commanded by Mardonius and Masistes; a second proceeded through the midst of the continent, under the conduct of Tritantæchmes and Gergis; betwixt these went the third detachment, with whom was Xerxes himself, and who were led by Smerdomenes and Megabyzus.

As soon as the royal mandate was issued, the navy entered the canal which had been cut at Mount Athos, and which was continued to the gulf. Taking on board a supply of troops from these places, the fleet advanced towards the Thermæan Gulf, and doubling the Toronean promontory of Ampelos, they proceeded by a short cut to the Canastrean cape, the point, which of all the districts of Pallene, projects farthest into the sea. Coasting onward to the station appointed, they supplied themselves with troops from the cities in the vicinity of Pallene, and the Thermæan Gulf. From Ænea the fleet went in a straight direction to the Thermæan Gulf, and the coast of Mygdonia; it ultimately arrived at Therma, where they waited for the king. Directing his march this way, Xerxes, with all his forces, left Acanthus, and proceeded over the continent through Pæonia and Crestonia. In the course of this march, the camels, which carried the provisions, were attacked by lions: in the darkness of the night they left their accustomed abode, and without molesting man or beast, fell upon the camels only. That the lions should attack the camels alone, animals they had never been known before to devour, or even by mistake to have seen, is a fact which we are totally unable to explain.

On his arrival at Therma, Xerxes halted with his army, which occupied the whole of the coast from Therma and Mygdonia, as far as the rivers Lydias and Haliacmon, which forming the limits of Bottiæis and Macedonia, meet at last in the same channel. Here the barbarians encamped. Xerxes, viewing from Therma, Olympus and Ossa, Thessalian mountains of an extraordinary height, betwixt which was a narrow passage where the Peneus poured its stream, and where was an entrance to Thessaly, he was desirous of sailing to the mouth of this river. For the way he had determined to march as the safest was through the high country of Macedonia, by the Perrhæbi, and the town of Gonnus. He instantly however set about the accomplishment of his wish. He accordingly went on board a Sidonian vessel, for on such occasions he always preferred the ships of that country; leaving here his land forces, he gave the signal for all the fleet to prepare to set sail. Arriving at the mouth of the Peneus, he observed it with particular admiration, and desired to know of his guides if it would not be possible to turn the stream, and make it empty itself into the sea in some other place.

Thessaly is said to have been formerly a marsh, on all sides surrounded by lofty mountains[25]; to the east by Pelion and Ossa, whose bases meet each other; to the north by Olympus, to the west by Pindus; to the south by Othrys. The space betwixt these is Thessaly, into which depressed region many rivers pour their waters.

Xerxes inquiring of his guides whether the Peneus might be conducted to the sea by any other channel, received from them, who were well acquainted with the situation of the country, this reply: “As Thessaly, O King, is on every side encircled by mountains, the Peneus can have no other communication with the sea.” “The Thessalians,” Xerxes is said to have answered, “are a sagacious people. They have been careful to decline a contest for many reasons, and particularly as they must have discerned that their country would afford an easy conquest to an invader. All that would be necessary to deluge the whole of Thessaly, except the mountainous parts, would be to stop up the mouth of the river, and thus throw back its waters upon the country.” This observation referred to the sons of Aleuas, who were Thessalians, and the first Greeks who submitted to the king. He presumed that their conduct declared the general sentiments of the nation in his favour. After surveying the place he returned to Therma.

He remained a few days in the neighbourhood of Pieria, during which interval a detachment of the third of his army was employed in clearing the Macedonian mountain, to facilitate the passage of the troops into the country of the Perrhæbi. The messengers who had been sent to require earth and water of the Greeks returned, some with and some without it. Xerxes sent no messengers either to Athens or to Sparta, for when Darius had before sent to these places, the Athenians threw his people into their pit of punishment, the Lacedæmonians into wells, telling them to get the earth and water thence, and carry it to their king. A long time after the incident we have related, the entrails of the victims continued at Sparta to bear an unfavourable appearance, till the people, reduced to despondency, called a general assembly, in which they inquired by their heralds, if any Lacedæmonian would die for his country. Upon this Sperthies, son of Aneristus, and Bulis, son of Nicolaus, Spartans of great accomplishments and distinction, offered themselves to undergo whatever punishment Xerxes the son of Darius should think proper to inflict on account of the murder of his ambassadors. These men therefore the Spartans sent to the Medes, as to certain death.

The magnanimity of these two men, as well as the words which they used, deserve admiration. On their way to Susa they came to Hydarnes, a native of Persia, and governor of the vanquished places in Asia near the sea: he entertained them with much liberality and kindness, and addressed them as follows: “Why, O Lacedæmonians, will you reject the friendship of the king? From me, and from my condition, you may learn how well he knows to reward merit. He already thinks highly of your virtue, and if you will but enter into his service, he will doubtless assign to each of you some government in Greece.” “Hydarnes,” they replied, “your advice with respect to us is inconsistent: you speak from the experience of your own but with an entire ignorance of our situation. To you servitude is familiar; but how sweet a thing liberty is, you have never known, if you had, you yourself would have advised us to make all possible exertions to preserve it.”

When introduced, on their arrival at Susa, to the royal presence, they were first ordered by the guards to fall prostrate, and adore the king, and some force was used to compel them. But this they refused to do, even if they should dash their heads against the ground. They were not, they said, accustomed to adore a man, nor was it for this purpose that they came. After persevering in such conduct, they addressed Xerxes himself in these and similar expressions: “King of the Medes, we are sent by our countrymen to make atonement for those ambassadors who perished at Sparta.” Xerxes with great magnanimity said he would not imitate the example of the Lacedæmonians. They in killing his ambassadors had violated the laws of nations; he would not be guilty of that with which he reproached them, nor, by destroying their messengers, indirectly justify their crime.[c]

FOOTNOTES

[25] [Rennell[d] remarks that this description of Thessaly and that of the Straits of Thermopylæ prove how well Herodotus had considered the scenes of particular actions.[f]]

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