Chapter 8

The whole Persian fleet, manned by Phoenician sailors, and a huge army, under the two satraps Datis and Artaphernes, were on the opposite side of the AEgean Sea, ready to overwhelm little Attica first, and then all Greece. Nobody had yet stood firm against those all-conquering Persians, and as they came from island to island the inhabitants fled or submitted. Attica was so small as to have only 9000 fighting men to meet this host. They sent to ask the aid of the Spartans, but though these would have fought bravely, an old rule forbade them to march during the week before the full moon, and in this week Athens might be utterly ruined. Nobody did come to their help but 600 men from the very small state of Plataea, and this little army, not numbering 10,000, were encamped around the temple of Hercules, looking down upon the bay of Marathon, where lay the ships which had just landed at least 200,000 men of all the Eastern nations, and among them many of the Greeks of Asia Minor. The hills slant back so as to make a sort of horse-shoe round the bay, with about five miles of clear flat ground between them and the sea, and on this open space lay the Persians.

It was the rule among the Athenians that the heads of their ten tribes should command by turns each for a day, but Aristides, the best and most high-minded of all of them, persuaded the rest to give up their turns to Miltiades, who was known to be the most skilful captain. He drew up his men in a line as broad as the whole front of the Persian army, though far less deep, and made them all come rushing down at them with even step, but at a run, shouting the war-cry, "Io paean! Io paean!" In the middle, where the best men of the Persians were, they stood too firm to be thus broken, but at the sides they gave way, and ran back towards the sea, or over the hills, and then Miltiades gave a signal to the two side divisions--wings, as they were called--to close up together, and crush the Persian centre. The enemy now thought of nothing but reaching their ships and putting out to sea, while the Athenians tried to seize their ships; Cynegyrus, one brave Greek, caught hold of the prow of one ship, and when the crew cut off his hand with an axe, he still clung with the other, till that too was cut off, and he sank and was drowned. The fleet still held many men, and the Athenians saw that, instead of crossing back to Asia Minor, it was sailing round the promontory of Sunium, as if to attack Athens. It was even said that a friend of Hippias had raised a shield, glittering in the sun, as a signal that all the men were away. However, Miltiades left Aristides, with his tribe of 1000 men, to guard the plain and bury the dead, and marched back over the hills with the rest to guard their homes, that same night; but the Persians must have been warned, or have changed their mind, for they sailed away for Asia; and Hippias, who seems to have been wounded in the battle, died at Lemnos. The Spartans came up just as all was over, and greatly praised the Athenians, for indeed it was the first time Greeks had beaten Persians, and it was the battle above all others that saved Europe from falling under the slavery of the East. The fleet was caught by a storm as it crossed the AEgean Sea again.

All the Athenians who had been slain were buried under one great mound, adorned with ten pillars bearing their names; the Plataeans had another honourable mound, and the Persians a third. All the treasure that was taken in the camp and ships was honourably brought to the city and divided. There was only one exception, namely, one Kallias, who wore long hair bound with a fillet, and was taken for a king by a poor Persian, who fell on his knees before him, and showed him a well where was a great deal of gold hidden. Kallias not only took the gold, but killed the poor stranger, and his family were ever after held as disgraced, and called by a nickname meaning, "Enriched by the Well."

The Plataeans were rewarded by being made freemen of Athens, as well as of their own city; and Miltiades, while all his countrymen were full of joy and exultation, asked of them a fleet of seventy ships, promising to bring them fame and riches. With it he sailed for the island of Faros, that which was specially famed for its white marble. He said he meant to punish the Parians for having joined the Persians, but it really was because of a quarrel of his own. He landed, and required the Parians to pay him a hundred talents, and when they refused he besieged the city, until a woman named Timo, who was priestess at a temple of Ceres near the gates, promised to tell him a way of taking the city if he would meet her at night in the temple, where no man was allowed to enter. He came, and leaped over the outer fence of the temple, but, brave as he was in battle, terror at treading on forbidden and sacred ground overpowered him, and, without seeing the priestess, he leaped back again, fell on the other side, and severely injured his thigh. The siege was given up, and he was carried back helpless to Athens, where there was no mercy to failures, and he was arraigned before the Areopagus assembly, by a man named Xanthippus, for having wasted the money of the State and deceived the people, and therefore being guilty of death.

It must have been a sad thing to see the great captain, who had saved his country in that great battle only a year or two before, lying on his couch, too ill to defend himself, while his brother spoke for him, and appealed to his former services. In consideration of these it was decided not to condemn him to die, but he was, instead, to pay fifty talents of silver, and before the sum could be raised, he died of his hurts. It was said that his son Kimon put himself into prison till the fine could be raised, so as to release his father's corpse, which was buried with all honour on the plain of Marathon, with a tomb recording his glory, and not his fall.

The two chief citizens who were left were Aristides and Themistocles, both very able men; but Aristides was perfectly high-minded, unselfish, and upright, while Themistocles cared for his own greatness more than anything else. Themistocles was so clever that his tutor had said to him when he was a child, "Boy, thou wilt never be an ordinary person; thou wilt either be a mighty blessing or a mighty curse to thy country." When he grew up he used his powers of leading the multitude for his own advantage, and that of his party. "The gods forbid," he said, "that I should sit on any tribunal where my friends should not have more advantage than strangers." While, on the other hand, Aristides was so impartial and single-hearted that he got the name of Aristides the Just. He cared most for the higher class, the _aristoi_, and thought they could govern best, while Themistocles sought after the favour of the people; and they both led the minds of the Athenians so completely while they were speaking, that, after a meeting where they had both made a speech, Aristides said, "Athens will never be safe till Themistocles and I are both in prison," meaning that either of them could easily make himself tyrant.

However, Aristides, though of high family, was very poor, and men said it was by the fault of his cousin Kallias, the "Enriched by the Well;" and Themistocles contrived to turn people's minds against him, so as to have him ostracised. One day he met a man in the street, with a shell in his hand, who asked him to write the name of Aristides on it, as he could not write himself. "Pray," said Aristides, "what harm has this person done you, that you wish to banish him?"

"No harm at all," said the man; "only I am sick of always hearing him called the Just."

Aristides had no more to say, but wrote his own name; and six thousand shells having been counted up against him, he was obliged to go into exile for ten years.

Cynegyrus, the man whose hands had been cut off in the bay of Marathon, had a very famous brother named AEschylus--quite as brave a soldier, and a poet besides. The Athenians had come to worshipping Bacchus, but not in the horrid, mad, drunken manner of the first orgies. They had songs and dances by persons with their heads wreathed in vine and ivy leaves, and a goat was sacrificed in the midst. The Greek word for a goat is _tragos_, and the dances came to be called tragedies. Then came in the custom of having poetical speeches in the midst of the dances, made in the person of some old hero or god, and these always took place in a curve in the side of a hill, so worked out by art that the rock was cut into galleries, for half-circles of spectators to sit one above the other, while the dancers and speakers were on the flat space at the bottom. Thespis, whom Solon reproved for falsehoods, was the first person who made the dancers and singers, who were called the chorus, so answer one another and the speakers that the tragedy became a play, representing some great action of old. The actors had to wear brazen masks and tall buskins, or no one could have well seen or heard them. AEschylus, when a little boy, was set to watch the grapes in his father's vineyard. He fell asleep, and dreamt that Bacchus appeared to him, and bade him make his festivals noble with tragedies; and this he certainly did, for the poetry he wrote for them is some of the grandest that man ever sung, and shows us how these great Greeks were longing and feeling after the truth, like blind men groping in the dark. The custom was to have three grave plays or tragedies on the same subject on three successive days, and then to finish with a droll one, or comedy, as it was called, in honour of the god Comus. There is one trilogy of AEschylus still preserved to us, where we have the death of Agamemnon, the vengeance of Orestes, and his expiation when pursued by the Furies, but the comedy belonging to them is lost.

Almost all the greatest and best Greeks of this time believed in part in the philosophy of Pythagoras, who had lived in the former century, and taught that the whole universe was one great divine musical instrument, as it were, in which stars, sun, winds, and earth did their part, and that man ought to join himself into the same sweet harmony. He thought that if a man did ill his spirit went into some animal, and had a fresh trial to purify it, but it does not seem as if many others believed this notion.

[Picture: View in the vicinity of Athens]

CHAP. XVII.--THE EXPEDITION OF XERXES. B.C. 480.

[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]

The Athenians had not a long breathing-time. Darius, indeed, died five years after the battle of Marathon; but his son Xerxes was far more fiery and ambitious, and was no sooner on the throne than he began to call together all the vast powers of the East, not to crush Athens alone, but all the Greeks. He was five years gathering them together, but in the spring of 480 he set out from Sardis to march to the Hellespont, where he had a bridge of ships chained together, made to enable his army to cross the strait on foot. Xerxes was a hot-tempered man, not used to resistance, and it was said that when a storm broke part of his bridge he caused the waves to be scourged and fetters to be thrown in, to show that he was going to bind it to his will. He sat on a throne to watch his armies pass by. It is said that there were two million six hundred thousand men, of every speech and dress in Asia and Egypt, with all sorts of weapons; and as the "Great King" watched the endless number pass by, he burst into tears to think how soon all this mighty host would be dead men!

Xerxes had a huge fleet besides, manned by Phoenicians and Greeks of Asia Minor, and this did not venture straight across the AEgean, because of his father's disaster, but went creeping round the northern coast. Mount Athos, standing out far and steep into the sea, stood in the way, and it was dangerous to go round it; so Xerxes thought it would be an undertaking worthy of him to have a canal dug across the neck that joins the mountain to the land, and the Greeks declared that he wrote a letter to the mountain god, bidding him not to put rocks in the way of the workmen of the "Great King." Traces of this canal can still be found in the ravine behind Mount Athos.

All the Greeks knew their danger now, and a council from every city met at the Isthmus of Corinth to consider what was to be done. All their ships, 271 in number, were gathered in a bay on the north of the great island of Euboea. There the Spartan captain of the whole watched and waited, till beacons from height to height announced that the Persians were coming, and then he thought it safer to retreat within the Euripus, the channel between the island and the mainland, which is so narrow that a very few ships could stop the way of a whole fleet. However, just as they were within shelter, a terrible storm arose, which broke up and wrecked a great number of Persian ships, though the number that were left still was far beyond that of the Greeks. On two days the Greeks ventured out, and always gained the victory over such ships as they encountered, but were so much damaged themselves, without destroying anything like the whole fleet, that such fighting was hopeless work.

In the meantime Xerxes, with his monstrous land army, was marching on, and the only place where it seemed to the council at the Isthmus that he could be met and stopped was at a place in Thessaly, where the mountains of OEta rose up like a steep wall, leaving no opening but towards the sea, where a narrow road wound round the foot of the cliff, and between it and the sea was a marsh that men and horses could never cross. The springs that made this bog were hot, so that it was called Thermopylae, or the Hot Gates.

The council at the Isthmus determined to send an army to stop the enemy there, if possible. There were 300 Spartans, and various troops from other cities, all under the command of one of the Spartan kings, Leonidas, who had married Gorgo, the girl whose word had kept her father faithful. They built up a stone wall in front of them, and waited for the enemy, and by-and-by the Persians came, spreading over an immense space in the rear, but in this narrow road only a few could fight at once, so that numbers were of little use. Xerxes sent to desire the Spartans to give up their arms. Leonidas only answered, "Come and take them." The Persian messenger reported that the Greeks were sitting on the wall combing their hair, while others were playing at warlike games. Xerxes thought they were mad, but a traitor Spartan whom he had in his camp said it was always the fashion of his countrymen before any very perilous battle. Xerxes made so sure of victory over such a handful of men, that he bade his captains bring them all alive to him; but day after day his best troops fell beaten back from the wall, and hardly a Greek was slain.

[Picture: Pass of Thermopylae]

But, alas! there was a mountain path through the chestnut woods above. Leonidas had put a guard of Phocian soldiers to watch it, and the Persians did not know of it till a wretch, for the sake of reward, came and offered to show them the way, so that they might fall on the defenders of the pass from behind. In the stillness of the early dawn, the Phocians heard the trampling of a multitude on the dry chestnut leaves. They stood to arms, but as soon as the Persians shot their arrows at them they fled away and left the path open. Soon it was known in the camp that the foe were on the hills above. There was still time to retreat, and Leonidas sent off all the allies to save their lives; but he himself and his 300 Spartans, with 700 Thespians, would not leave their post, meaning to sell their lives as dearly as possible. The Delphic oracle had said that either Sparta or a king of Sparta must perish, and he was ready to give himself for his country. Two young cousins of the line of Hercules he tried to save, by telling them to bear his messages home; but one answered that he had come to fight, not carry letters, and the other that they would fight first, and then take home the news. Two more Spartans, whose eyes were diseased, were at the hot baths near. One went back with the allies, the other caused his Helot to lead him to the camp, where, in the evening, all made ready to die, and Leonidas sat down to his last meal, telling his friends that on the morrow they should sup with Pluto. One of these Thespians had answered, when he was told that the Persian arrows came so thickly as to hide the sky, "So much the better; we shall fight in the shade."

The Persians were by this time so much afraid of these brave men that they could only be driven against them by whips. Leonidas and his thousand burst out on them beyond the wall, and there fought the whole day, till everyone of them was slain, but with heaps upon heaps of dead Persians round them, so that, when Xerxes looked at the spot, he asked in horror whether all the Greeks were like these, and how many more Spartans there were. Like a barbarian, he had Leonidas' body hung on a cross; but in after times the brave king's bones were buried on the spot, and a mound raised over the other warriors, with the words engraven--

"Go, passer-by, at Sparta tell, Obedient to her law, we fell."

There was nothing now between the Persians and the temple at Delphi. The priests asked the oracle if they should bury the treasures. "No," the answer was; "the god will protect his own." And just as a party of Persians were climbing up the heights to the magnificent temple there was a tremendous storm; rocks, struck by lightning, rolled down, and the Persians fled in dismay; but it is said Xerxes sent one man to insult the heathen god, and that he was a Jew, and therefore had no fears, and came back safe.

Now that Thermopylae was lost, there was no place fit to guard short of the Isthmus of Corinth, and the council decided to build a wall across that, and defend it, so as to save the Peloponnesus. This left Attica outside, and the Athenians held anxious council what was to become of them. Before the way to Delphi was stopped, they had asked the oracle what they were to do, and the answer had been, "Pallas had prayed for her city, but it was doomed; yet a wooden wall should save her people, and at Salamis should women be made childless, at seed-time or harvest."

[Picture: Salamis]

Themistocles said the wooden walls meant the ships, and that the Athenians were all to sail away and leave the city. Others would have it that the wooden walls were the old thorn fence of the Acropolis, and these, being mostly old people, chose to stay, while all the rest went away; and while the wives and children were kindly sheltered by their friends in the Peloponnesus, the men all joined the fleet, which lay off Salamis, and was now 366 in number. The Persians overran the whole country, overcame the few who held out the Acropolis, and set Athens on fire. All the hope of Greece was now in the fleet, which lay in the strait between Attica and the isle of Salamis. Eurybiades, the Spartan commander, still wanted not to fight, but Themistocles was resolved on the battle. Eurybiades did all he could to silence him. "Those who begin a race before the signal are scourged," said the Spartan. "True," said Themistocles; "but the laggards never win a crown." Eurybiades raised his leading staff as if to give him a blow. "Strike, but hear me," said Themistocles; and then he showed such good reason for there meeting the battle that Eurybiades gave way. Six days later the Persian fleet, in all its grandeur, came up, and Xerxes caused his throne to be set on Mount AEgaleos, above the strait, that he might see the battle. The doubts of the Peloponnesians revived. They wanted to sail away and guard their own shores, but Themistocles was so resolved that they should fight that he sent a slave with a message to Xerxes, pretending to be a traitor, and advising him to send ships to stop up the other end of the strait, to cut off their retreat. This was done, to the horror of honest Aristides, who, still exiled, was in AEgina, watching what to do for his countrymen. In a little boat he made his way at night to the ship where council was being held, and begged that Themistocles might be called out. "Let us be rivals still," he said; "but let our strife be which can serve our country best. I come to say that your retreat is cut off. We are surrounded, and must fight." Themistocles said it was the best thing that could happen, and led him into the council with his tidings.

They did fight. Ship was dashed against ship as fast as oars could bring them, their pointed beaks bearing one another down. The women who were made childless were Persian women. Two hundred Persian ships were sunk, and only forty Greek ones; an immense number were taken; and Xerxes, from his throne, saw such utter ruin of all his hopes and plans, that he gave up all thought of anything but getting his land army back to the Hellespont as fast as possible, for his fleet was gone!

[Picture: Xerxes]

CHAP. XVIII.--THE BATTLE OF PLATAEA. B.C. 479-460.

[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]

After being thus beaten by sea, and having learnt what Greeks were by land, Xerxes himself, with a broken, sick, and distressed army, went back to Sardis; but he left a satrap named Mardonius behind him, with his best troops, in Thessaly, to see whether anything could still be done for his cause. He did try whether the Athenians could be persuaded to desert the other Greeks, and become allies of Persia, but they made a noble answer--"So long as the sun held his course, the Athenians would never be friends to Xerxes. Great as might be his power, Athens trusted to the aid of the gods and heroes, whose temple he had burnt."

[Picture: Persian soldier] After this answer, Mardonius marched again into Attica, and took possession of it; but as the Athenians were now all safe in Salamis, or among their friends, he could not do them much harm; and while he was finishing the ruin he had begun ten months before, the Spartans had raised their army, under the command of their king, Pausanias, nephew to Leonidas, and all the best soldiers from the other Greek cities. They came up with the Persians near the city of Plataea. Though a Spartan, Pausanias had rather not have fought; but when at last the battle began, it was a grand victory, and was gained in a wonderfully short time. The Spartans killed Mardonius, and put the best Persian troops, called the Immortals, to flight; and the Athenians, under Aristides, fought with the Thebans, who had joined the Persian army. The whole Persian camp was sacked. The Helots were sent to collect the spoil, and put it all together. They stole a good deal of the gold, which they took for brass, and sold it as such. Waggon-loads of silver and gold vessels were to be seen; collars, bracelets, and rich armour; and the manger of Xerxes' horses, which he had left behind, and which was of finely-worked brass. Pausanias bade the slaves of Mardonius to prepare such a feast as their master was used to, and then called his friends to see how useless were all the carpets, cushions, curtains, gold and silver, and the dainties upon them, and how absurd it was to set out on a conquering expedition thus encumbered.