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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.
A tenth part of the spoil was set apart for Apollo, and formed into a
golden tripod, supported by a brazen serpent with three heads. A great
statue of Jupiter was sent to Olympia, the pedestal adorned with the
names of all the cities which had sent men to the battle, and such
another of Neptune was set up on the Isthmus; while a temple to Athene,
adorned with pictures of the battle, was built on the spot near Plataea.
Pausanias received a sample of all that was best of the spoil. Among the
dead was found that one Spartan who had missed Thermopylae. He had been
miserable ever since, and only longed to die in battle, as now he had
done. The Plataeans were to be respected by all the other states of
Greece, so long as they yearly performed funeral rites in honour of the
brave men whose tombs were left in their charge.
[Picture: Tombs at Plataea]
On the same day as the battle of Plataea was fought, another great battle
was fought at Mykale, near Miletus, by the Ionian Greeks of Asia,
assisted by Athenians and Spartans. It set Miletus free from the
Persians, and was the first step backwards of their great power. The
Athenian fleet also gained back the Chersonesus, and brought home the
chains that had fastened together the bridge of boats, to be dedicated in
the temples of their own gods.
The Athenians were all coming home rejoicing. Even the very week after
Xerxes had burnt the Acropolis, the sacred olive which Pallas Athene was
said to have given them had shot out a long branch from the stump, and
now it was growing well, to their great joy and encouragement. Everyone
began building up his own house; and Themistocles, Aristides, and the
other statesmen prepared to build strong walls round the city, though the
Spartans sent messengers to persuade them that it was of no use to have
any fortified cities outside the Peloponnesus; but they knew this was
only because the Spartans wanted to be masters of Greece, and would not
attend to them. Athens stood about three miles from the coast, and in
the port there had hitherto been a village called Piraeus, and
Themistocles persuaded the citizens to make this as strong as possible,
with a wall of solid stone round it. These were grand days at Athens.
They had noble architects and sculptors; and AEschylus was writing the
grandest of his tragedies--especially one about the despair of the
Persian women--but only fragments of most of them have come down to our
time.
In 375 Aristides died, greatly honoured, though he was so poor that he
did not leave enough to pay his funeral expenses; but a monument was
raised to him by the State, and there is only one Athenian name as pure
and noble as his.
The two other men who shared with him the honours of the defeat of the
Persians met with very different fates, and by their own fault. When
Pausanias went back to Sparta, he found his life there too stern and full
of restraint, after what he had been used to in his campaign. He tried
to break down the power of the Ephors, and obtain something more like
royalty for the kings, and this he hoped to do by the help of Persia. He
used to meet the messenger of this traitorous correspondence in the
temple of Neptune, in the promontory of Taenarus. Some of the Ephors
were warned, hid themselves there, and heard his treason from his own
lips. They sent to arrest him as soon as he came back to Sparta; but he
took refuge in the temple of Pallas, whence he could not be dragged.
However, the Spartans were determined to have justice on him. They
walled up the temple, so that he could neither escape nor have food
brought to him; indeed it is said that, in horror at his treason, his
mother brought the first stone. When he was at the point of death he was
taken out, that the sanctuary might not be polluted, and he died just as
he was carried out. The Spartans buried him close to the temple, and
gave Pallas two statues of him, to make up for the suppliant she had
lost, but they were always reproached for the sacrilege.
Themistocles was a friend of Pausanias, and was suspected of being mixed
up in his plots. He was obliged to flee the country, and went to Epirus,
where he came to the house of King Admetus, where the queen, Phthia,
received him, and told him how to win her husband's protection, namely,
by sitting down on the hearth by the altar to the household gods, and
holding her little son in his arms.
When Admetus came in, Themistocles entreated him to have pity on his
defenceless state. The king raised him up and promised his protection,
and kept his word. Themistocles was taken by two guides safely across
the mountains to Pydna, where he found a merchant ship about to sail for
Asia. A storm drove it to the island of Naxos, which was besieged by an
Athenian fleet; and Themistocles must have fallen into the hands of his
fellow-citizens if he had landed, but he told the master of the ship that
it would be the ruin of all alike if he were found in the vessel, and
promised a large reward if he escaped. So the crew consented to beat
about a whole day and night, and in the morning landed safely near
Ephesus. He kept his word to the captain; for indeed he was very rich,
having taken bribes, while Aristides remained in honourable poverty. He
went to Susa, where Xerxes was dead; but the Persians had fancied his
message before the battle of Salamis was really meant to serve them, and
that he was suffering for his attachment to them, so the new king,
Artaxerxes, the "Long-armed," who had a great esteem for his cleverness,
was greatly delighted, offered up a sacrifice in his joy, and three times
cried out in his sleep, "I have got Themistocles the Athenian."
Themistocles had asked to wait a year before seeing the king, that he
might have time to learn the language. When he came, he put forward such
schemes for conquering Greece that Artaxerxes was delighted, and gave him
a Persian wife, and large estates on the banks of the Maeander, where he
spent the rest of his life, very rich, but despised by all honest Greeks.
All the history of the war with Xerxes was written by Herodotus, a Greek
of Caria, who travelled about to study the manners, customs, and
histories of different nations, and recorded them in the most lively and
spirited manner, so that he is often called the father of history.
AEschylus went on gaining prizes for his tragedies, till 468, when, after
being thirteen times first, he was excelled by another Athenian named
Sophocles, and was so much vexed that he withdrew to the Greek colonies
in Sicily. It is not clear whether he ever came back to Athens for a
time, but he certainly died in Sicily, and in an extraordinary way. He
was asleep on the sea-shore, when an eagle flew above him with a tortoise
in its claws. It is the custom of eagles to break the shells of these
creatures by letting them fall on rocks from a great height. The bird
took AEschylus' bald head for a stone, threw down the tortoise, broke his
skull, and killed him!
Sophocles did not write such grand lines, yearning for the truth, as
AEschylus, but his plays, of Ajax' madness, and especially of Antigone's
self-devotion, were more touching, and full of human feeling; and
Euripides, who was a little younger, wrote plays more like those of later
times, with more of story in them, and more characters, especially of
women. He even wrote one in which he represented Helen as never having
been unfaithful at all; Venus only made up a cloud-image to be run away
with by Paris, and Helen was carried away and hidden in Egypt, where
Menelaus found her, and took her home. The works of these three great
men have always been models. The Greeks knew their plays by heart almost
as perfectly as the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, and used to quote lines
wherever they applied.
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