[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]
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]