CHAPTER I.--THE BATTLE OF MARATHON.

Produced by John Hill

THE FIFTEEN DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD FROM MARATHON TO WATERLOO

By Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

(Late Chief Justice of Ceylon) Author of 'The Rise and Progress of the

English Constitution'

Dedicated to ROBERT GORDON LATHAM, M.D., F.R.S. Late Fellow of King's

College Cambridge; Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London.

Member of the Ethnological Society, New York; Late Professor of the

English Language and Literature, in University College, London.

By his Friend THE AUTHOR.

Transcriber's Notes:

Capital letters have been used to replace text in italics in the printed

text. Accents have been omitted.

Footnotes have been inserted into the text enclosed in square '[]'

brackets, near the point where they were indicated by a suffix in the

text.

Greek words in the text have been crudely translated into Western

European capital letters. Sincere apologies to Greek scholars! Longer

passages in Greek have been omitted and where possible replaced with a

reference to the original from which they were taken.

PREFACE.

It is an honourable characteristic of the Spirit of this Age, that

projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civilized states

with gradually increasing aversion. The Universal Peace Society

certainly does not, and probably never will, enrol the majority of

statesmen among its members. But even those who look upon the Appeal

of Battle as occasionally unavoidable in international controversies,

concur in thinking it a deplorable necessity, only to be resorted to

when all peaceful modes of arrangement have been vainly tried; and when

the law of self-defence justifies a State, like an individual, in using

force to protect itself from imminent and serious injury. For a writer,

therefore, of the present day to choose battles for his favourite topic,

merely because they were battles, merely because so many myriads of

troops were arrayed in them, and so many hundreds or thousands of human

beings stabbed, hewed, or shot each other to death during them, would

argue strange weakness or depravity of mind. Yet it cannot be denied

that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of

carnage. There is undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and

in the love of honour, which make the combatants confront agony and

destruction. And the powers of the human intellect are rarely more

strongly displayed than they are in the Commander, who regulates,

arrays, and wields at his will these masses of armed disputants; who,

cool yet daring, in the midst of peril reflects on all, and provides for

all, ever ready with fresh resources and designs, as the vicissitudes of

the storm of slaughter require. But these qualities, however high they

may appear, are to be found in the basest as well as in the noblest of

mankind. Catiline was as brave a soldier as Leonidas, and a much better

officer. Alva surpassed the Prince of Orange in the field; and Suwarrow

was the military superior of Kosciusko. To adopt the emphatic words of

Byron:--

"'Tis the Cause makes all,

Degrades or hallows courage in its fall."

There are some battles, also, which claim our attention, independently

of the moral worth of the combatants, on account of their enduring

importance, and by reason of the practical influence on our own social

and political condition, which we can trace up to the results of those

engagements. They have for us an abiding and actual interest, both

while we investigate the chain of causes and effects, by which they have

helped to make us what we are; and also while we speculate on what we

probably should have been, if any one of those battles had come to

a different termination. Hallam has admirably expressed this in his

remarks on the victory gained by Charles Martel, between Tours and

Poictiers, over the invading Saracens.

He says of it, that "it may justly be reckoned among those few battles

of which a contrary event would have essentially varied the drama of the

world in all its subsequent scenes: with Marathon, Arbela, the Metaurus,

Chalons, and Leipsic." It was the perusal of this note of Hallam's that

first led me to the consideration of my present subject. I certainly

differ from that great historian as to the comparative importance of

some of the battles which he thus enumerates, and also of some which he

omits. It is probable, indeed, that no two historical inquirers would

entirely agree in their lists of the Decisive Battles of the World.

Different minds will naturally vary in the impressions which particular

events make on them; and in the degree of interest with which they

watch the career, and reflect on the importance, of different historical

personages. But our concurrence in our catalogues is of little moment,

provided we learn to look on these great historical events in the spirit

which Hallam's observations indicate. Those remarks should teach us

to watch how the interests of many states are often involved in the

collisions between a few; and how the effect of those collisions is not

limited to a single age, but may give an impulse which will sway the

fortunes of successive generations of mankind. Most valuable also is the

mental discipline which is thus acquired, and by which we are trained

not only to observe what has been, and what is, but also to ponder on

what might have been. [See Bolingbroke, On the Study and Use of History,

vol. ii. p. 497 of his collected works.]

We thus learn not to judge of the wisdom of measures too exclusively by

the results. We learn to apply the juster standard of seeing what the

circumstances and the probabilities were that surrounded a statesman or

a general at the time when he decided on his plan: we value him not by

his fortune, but by his PROAIRESIZ, to adopt the expressive Greek word,

for which our language gives no equivalent.

The reasons why each of the following Fifteen Battles has been selected

will, I trust, appear when it is described. But it may be well to

premise a few remarks on the negative tests which have led me to

reject others, which at first sight may appear equal in magnitude and

importance to the chosen Fifteen.

I need hardly remark that it is not the number of killed and wounded in

a battle that determines its general historical importance. It is not

because only a few hundreds fell in the battle by which Joan of Arc

captured the Tourelles and raised the siege of Orleans, that the effect

of that crisis is to be judged: nor would a full belief in the largest

number which Eastern historians state to have been slaughtered in any

of the numerous conflicts between Asiatic rulers, make me regard the

engagement in which they fell as one of paramount importance to mankind.

But, besides battles of this kind, there are many of great consequence,

and attended with circumstances which powerfully excite our feelings,

and rivet our attention, and yet which appear to me of mere secondary

rank, inasmuch as either their effects were limited in area, or they

themselves merely confirmed some great tendency or bias which an earlier

battle had originated. For example, the encounters between the Greeks

and Persians, which followed Marathon, seem to me not to have been

phenomena of primary impulse. Greek superiority had been already

asserted, Asiatic ambition had already been checked, before Salamis and

Platea confirmed the superiority of European free states over Oriental

despotism. So, AEgos-Potamos, which finally crushed the maritime

power of Athens, seems to me inferior in interest to the defeat before

Syracuse, where Athens received her first fatal check, and after which

she only struggled to retard her downfall. I think similarly of Zama

with respect to Carthage, as compared with the Metaurus: and, on the

same principle, the subsequent great battles of the Revolutionary

war appear to me inferior in their importance to Valmy, which first

determined the military character and career of the French Revolution.

I am aware that a little activity of imagination, and a slight exercise

of metaphysical ingenuity, may amuse us, by showing how the chain of

circumstances is so linked together, that the smallest skirmish, or the

slightest occurrence of any kind, that ever occurred, may be said to

have been essential, in its actual termination, to the whole order of

subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of

the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of

remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the

other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those,

who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country,

recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena,

which follow inevitably one upon the other. But when, in this work,

I speak of probabilities, I speak of human probabilities only. When I

speak of Cause and Effect, I speak of those general laws only, by which

we perceive the sequence of human affairs to be usually regulated; and

in which we recognise emphatically the wisdom and power of the Supreme

Lawgiver, the design of The Designer.

MITRE COURT CHAMBERS, TEMPLE, June 26, 1851.

CONTENTS.

CHAP. I.

THE BATTLE OF MARATHON

Explanatory Remarks on some of the circumstances of the Battle of

Marathon.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Marathon, B.C. 490, and the

Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse, B.C. 413.

CHAP. II.

DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS AT SYRACUSE, B.C. 413.

Synopsis of Events between the Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse and

the Battle of Arbela.

CHAP. III.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA, B.C. 331.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Arbela and the Battle of the

Metaurus.

CHAP. IV.

THE BATTLE OF THE METAURUS, B.C. 207.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of the Metaurus, B.C. 207, and

Arminius's Victory over the Roman Legions under Varus. A.D. 9.

CHAP. V.

VICTORY OF ARMINIUS OVER THE ROMAN LEGIONS UNDER VARUS, A.D. 9.

Arminius. Synopsis of Events between Arminius's Victory over Varus and

the Battle of Chalons.

CHAP. VI.

THE BATTLE OF CHALONS, A.D. 451.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Chalons, A.D. 451, and the

Battle of Tours, 732.

CHAP. VII.

THE BATTLE OF TOURS, A.D. 732.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Tours, A.D. 732 and the Battle

of Hastings, 1066.

CHAP. VIII.

THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS, A.D. 1066.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Hastings, A.D. 1066, and Joan

of Arc's Victory at Orleans, 1429.

CHAP. IX.

JOAN OF ARC'S VICTORY OVER THE ENGLISH AT ORLEANS, A.D. 1429.

Synopsis of Events between Joan of Arc's Victory at Orleans, A.D. 1429,

and the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588.

CHAP. X.

THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA, A.D. 1588.

Synopsis of events between the Defeat of the Spanish Armada A.D. 1588,

and the Battle of Blenheim, 1704.

CHAP. XI.

THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM, A.D. 1704.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Blenheim, 1704, and the Battle

of Pultowa, 1709.

CHAP. XII.

THE BATTLE OF PULTOWA, A.D. 1709.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Pultowa, 1709, and the Defeat

of Burgoyne at Saratoga, 1777.

CHAP. XIII.

VICTORY OF THE AMERICANS OVER BURGOYNE AT SARATOGA, A.D. 1777.

Synopsis of Events between the Defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga, 1777, and

the Battle of Valmy, 1792.

CHAP. XIV.

THE BATTLE OF VALMY.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Valmy, 1792, and the Battle of

Waterloo, 1815.

CHAP. XV.

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO, 1815.

THE FIFTEEN DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD.

CHAPTER I.--THE BATTLE OF MARATHON.

"Quibus actus uterque

Europae atque Asiae fatis concurrerit orbis."

Two thousand three hundred and forty years ago, a council of Athenian

officers was summoned on the slope of one of the mountains that

look over the plain of Marathon, on the eastern coast of Attica. The

immediate subject of their meeting was to consider whether they should

give battle to an enemy that lay encamped on the shore beneath them; but

on the result of their deliberations depended not merely the fate of two

armies, but the whole future progress of human civilization.

There were eleven members of that council of war. Ten were the generals,

who were then annually elected at Athens, one for each of the local

tribes into which the Athenians were divided. Each general led the men

of his own tribe, and each was invested with equal military authority.

One also of the Archons was associated with them in the joint command

of the collective force. This magistrate was termed the Polemarch or

War-Ruler: he had the privilege of leading the right wing of the army

in battle, and of taking part in all councils of war. A noble Athenian,

named Callimachus, was the War-Ruler of this year; and as such, stood

listening to the earnest discussion of the ten generals. They had,

indeed, deep matter for anxiety, though little aware how momentous to

mankind were the votes they were about to give, or how the generations

to come would read with interest that record of their debate. They saw

before them the invading forces of a mighty empire, which had in the

last fifty years shattered and enslaved nearly all the kingdoms and

principalities of the then known world. They knew that all the resources

of their own country were comprised in the little army entrusted to

their guidance. They saw before them a chosen host of the Great King

sent to wreak his special wrath on that country, and on the other

insolent little Greek community, which had dared to aid his rebels

and burn the capital of one of his provinces. That victorious host

had already fulfilled half its mission of vengeance. Eretria, the

confederate of Athens in the bold march against Sardis nine years

before, had fallen in the last few days; and the Athenian generals could

discern from the heights the island of AEgilia, in which the Persians

had deposited their Eretrian prisoners, whom they had reserved to be led

away captives into Upper Asia, there to hear their doom from the lips of

King Darius himself. Moreover, the men of Athens knew that in the camp

before them was their own banished tyrant, Hippias, who was seeking to

be reinstated by foreign scimitars in despotic sway over any remnant of

his countrymen that might survive the sack of their town, and might be

left behind as too worthless for leading away into Median bondage.

The numerical disparity between the force which the Athenian commanders

had under them, and that which they were called on to encounter, was

fearfully apparent to some of the council. The historians who wrote

nearest to the time of the battle do not pretend to give any detailed

statements of the numbers engaged, but there are sufficient data for

our making a general estimate. Every free Greek was trained to military

duty: and, from the incessant border wars between the different states,

few Greeks reached the age of manhood without having seen some service.

But the muster-roll of free Athenian citizens of an age fit for military

duty never exceeded thirty thousand, and at this epoch probably did not

amount to two-thirds of that number. Moreover, the poorer portion

of these were unprovided with the equipments, and untrained to the

operations of the regular infantry. Some detachments of the best armed

troops would be required to garrison the city itself, and man the

various fortified posts in the territory; so that it is impossible to

reckon the fully equipped force that marched from Athens to Marathon,

when the news of the Persian landing arrived, at higher than ten

thousand men. [The historians who lived long after the time of the

battle, such as Justin, Plutarch and others, give ten thousand as the

number of the Athenian army. Not much reliance could be placed on their

authority, if unsupported by other evidence; but a calculation made from

the number of the Athenian free population remarkably confirms it. For

the data of this, see Boeck's "Public Economy of Athens," vol. i. p. 45.

Some METOIKOI probably served as Hoplites at Marathon, but the number of

resident aliens at Athens cannot have been large at this period.]

With one exception, the other Greeks held back from aiding them. Sparta

had promised assistance; but the Persians had landed on the sixth day

of the moon, and a religious scruple delayed the march of Spartan troops

till the moon should have reached its full. From one quarter only, and

that a most unexpected one, did Athens receive aid at the moment of her

great peril.

For some years before this time, the little state of Plataea in Boeotia,

being hard pressed by her powerful neighbour, Thebes, had asked the

protection of Athens, and had owed to an Athenian army the rescue of her

independence. Now when it was noised over Greece that the Mede had

come from the uttermost parts of the earth to destroy Athens, the brave

Plataeans, unsolicited, marched with their whole force to assist in the

defence, and to share the fortunes of their benefactors. The general

levy of the Plataeans only amounted to a thousand men: and this little

column, marching from their city along the southern ridge of Mount

Cithaeron, and thence across the Attic territory, joined the Athenian

forces above Marathon almost immediately before the battle. The

reinforcement was numerically small; but the gallant spirit of the men

who composed it must have made it of tenfold value to the Athenians: and

its presence must have gone far to dispel the cheerless feeling of being

deserted and friendless, which the delay of the Spartan succours was

calculated to create among the Athenian ranks.

This generous daring of their weak but true-hearted ally was never

forgotten at Athens. The Plataeans were made the fellow-countrymen

of the Athenians, except the right of exercising certain political

functions; and from that time forth in the solemn sacrifices at Athens,

the public prayers were offered up for a joint blessing from Heaven upon

the Athenians, and the Plataeans also. [Mr. Grote observes (vol. iv. p.

484), that "this volunteer march of the whole Plataean force to Marathon

is one of the most affecting incidents of all Grecian history." In

truth, the whole career of Plataea, and the friendship, strong even unto

death, between her and Athens, form one of the most affecting episodes

in the history of antiquity. In the Peloponnesian War the Plataeans

again were true to the Athenians against all risks and all calculation

of self-interest; and the destruction of Plataea was the consequence.

There are few nobler passages in the classics than the speech in which

the Plataean prisoners of war, after the memorable siege of their city,

justify before their Spartan executioners their loyal adherence to

Athens. (See Thucydides, lib. iii. secs. 53-60.)]

After the junction of the column from Plataea, the Athenians commanders

must have had under them about eleven thousand fully-armed and

disciplined infantry, and probably a larger number of irregular

light-armed troops; as, besides the poorer citizens who went to

the field armed with javelins, cutlasses, and targets, each regular

heavy-armed soldier was attended in the camp by one or more slaves, who

were armed like the inferior freemen. [At the battle of Plataea, eleven

years after Marathon, each of the eight thousand Athenian regular

infantry who served there, was attended by a light-armed slave. (Herod.

lib. viii. c. 28,29.)] Cavalry or archers the Athenians (on this

occasion) had none: and the use in the field of military engines was not

at that period introduced into ancient warfare.

Contrasted with their own scanty forces, the Greek commanders saw

stretched before them, along the shores of the winding bay, the tents

and shipping of the varied nations that marched to do the bidding of the

King of the Eastern world. The difficulty of finding transports and

of securing provisions would form the only limit to the numbers of a

Persian army. Nor is there any reason to suppose the estimate of Justin

exaggerated, who rates at a hundred thousand the force which on this

occasion had sailed, under the satraps Datis and Artaphernes, from the

Cilician shores, against the devoted coasts of Euboea and Attica.

And after largely deducting from this total, so as to allow for mere

mariners and camp followers, there must still have remained fearful odds

against the national levies of the Athenians. Nor could Greek generals

then feel that confidence in the superior quality of their troops which

ever since the battle of Marathon has animated Europeans in conflicts

with Asiatics; as, for instance, in the after struggles between Greece

and Persia, or when the Roman legions encountered the myriads of

Mithridates and Tigranes, or as is the case in the Indian campaigns of

our own regiments. On the contrary, up to the day of Marathon the Medes

and Persians were reputed invincible. They had more than once met Greek

troops in Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in Egypt, and had invariably beaten

them. Nothing can be stronger than the expressions used by the early

Creek writers respecting the terror which the name of the Medes

inspired, and the prostration of men's spirits before the apparently

resistless career of the Persian arms. It is therefore, little to be

wondered at, that five of the ten Athenian generals shrank from the

prospect of fighting a pitched battle against an enemy so superior in

numbers, and so formidable in military renown. Their own position on the

heights was strong, and offered great advantages to a small defending

force against assailing masses. They deemed it mere foolhardiness

to descend into the plain to be trampled down by the Asiatic horse,

overwhelmed with the archery, or cut to pieces by the invincible

veterans of Cambyses and Cyrus. Moreover, Sparta, the great war-state of

Greece, had been applied to, and had promised succour to Athens, though

the religious observance which the Dorians paid to certain times and

seasons had for the present delayed their march. Was it not wise, at

any rate, to wait till the Spartans came up, and to have the help of the

best troops in Greece, before they exposed themselves to the shock of

the dreaded Medes?

Specious as these reasons might appear, the other five generals were for

speedier and bolder operations. And, fortunately for Athens and for the

world, one of them was a man, not only of the highest military genius,

but also of that energetic character which impresses its own type and

ideas upon spirits feebler in conception.

Miltiades was the head of one of the noblest houses at Athens: he ranked

the AEacidae among his ancestry, and the blood of Achilles flowed in

the veins of the hero of Marathon. One of his immediate ancestors had

acquired the dominion of the Thracian Chersonese, and thus the family

became at the same time Athenian citizens and Thracian princes. This

occurred at the time when Pisistratus was tyrant of Athens. Two of the

relatives of Miltiades--an uncle of the same name, and a brother named

Stesagoras--had ruled the Chersonese before Miltiades became its prince.

He had been brought up at Athens in the house of his father Cimon,

[Herodotus, lib. vi. c. 102] who was renowned throughout Greece for his

victories in the Olympic chariot-races, and who must have been possessed

of great wealth. The sons of Pisistratus, who succeeded their father in

the tyranny at Athens, caused Cimon to be assassinated, but they treated

the young Miltiades with favour and kindness; and when his brother

Stesagoras died in the Chersonese, they sent him out there as lord of

the principality. This was about twenty-eight years before the battle

of Marathon, and it is with his arrival in the Chersonese that our first

knowledge of the career and character of Miltiades commences. We

find, in the first act recorded of him, proof of the same resolute and

unscrupulous spirit that marked his mature age. His brother's authority

in the principality had been shaken by war and revolt: Miltiades

determined to rule more securely. On his arrival he kept close within

his house, as if he was mourning for his brother. The principal men

of the Chersonese, hearing of this, assembled from all the towns and

districts, and went together to the house of Miltiades on a visit of

condolence. As soon as he had thus got them in his power, he made

them all prisoners. He then asserted and maintained his own absolute

authority in the peninsula, taking into his pay a body of five hundred

regular troops, and strengthening his interest by marrying the daughter

of the king of the neighbouring Thracians.

When the Persian power was extended to the Hellespont and its

neighbourhood, Miltiades, as prince of the Chersonese, submitted to King

Darius; and he was one of the numerous tributary rulers who led their

contingents of men to serve in the Persian army in the expedition

against Scythia. Miltiades and the vassal Greeks of Asia Minor were left

by the Persian king in charge of the bridge across the Danube, when

the invading army crossed that river, and plunged into the wilds of

the country that now is Russia, in vain pursuit of the ancestors of the

modern Cossacks. On learning the reverses that Darius met with in the

Scythian wilderness, Miltiades proposed to his companions that they

should break the bridge down, and leave the Persian king and his army

to perish by famine and the Scythian arrows. The rulers of the Asiatic

Greek cities whom Miltiades addressed, shrank from this bold and

ruthless stroke against the Persian power, and Darius returned in

safety. But it was known what advice Miltiades had given; and the

vengeance of Darius was thenceforth specially directed against the man

who had counselled such a deadly blow against his empire and his person.

The occupation of the Persian arms in other quarters left Miltiades

for some years after this in possession of the Chersonese; but it

was precarious and interrupted. He, however, availed himself of the

opportunity which his position gave him of conciliating the goodwill

of his fellow-countrymen at Athens, by conquering and placing under

Athenian authority the islands of Lemnos and Imbros, to which Athens had

ancient claims, but which she had never previously been able to

bring into complete subjection. At length, in 494 B.C., the complete

suppression of the Ionian revolt by the Persians left their armies and

fleets at liberty to act against the enemies of the Great King to the

west of the Hellespont. A strong squadron of Phoenician galleys was sent

against the Chersonese. Miltiades knew that resistance was hopeless; and

while the Phoenicians were at Tenedos, he loaded five galleys with all

the treasure that he could collect, and sailed away for Athens. The

Phoenicians fell in with him, and chased him hard along the north of

the AEgean. One of his galleys, on board of which was his eldest son,

Metiochus, was actually captured; but Miltiades, with the other four,

succeeded in reaching the friendly coast of Imbros in safety. Thence

he afterwards proceeded to Athens, and resumed his station as a free

citizen of the Athenian commonwealth.

The Athenians at this time had recently expelled Hippias, the son of

Pisistratus, the last of their tyrants. They were in the full glow

of their newly-recovered liberty and equality; and the constitutional

changes of Cleisthenes had inflamed their republican zeal to the utmost.

Miltiades had enemies at Athens; and these, availing themselves of the

state of popular feeling, brought him to trial for his life for having

been tyrant of the Chersonese. The charge did not necessarily import any

acts of cruelty or wrong to individuals: it was founded on so specific

law; but it was based on the horror with which the Greeks of that age

regarded every man who made himself compulsory master of his fellow-men,

and exercised irresponsible dominion over them. The fact of Miltiades

having so ruled in the Chersonese was undeniable; but the question which

the Athenians, assembled in judgment, must have tried, was, whether

Miltiades, by becoming tyrant of the Chersonese, deserved punishment as

an Athenian citizen. The eminent service that he had done the state in

conquering Lemnos and Imbros for it, pleaded strongly in his favour. The

people refused to convict him. He stood high in public opinion; and when

the coming invasion of the Persians was known, the people wisely elected

him one of their generals for the year.

Two other men of signal eminence in history, though their renown was

achieved at a later period than that of Miltiades, were also among the

ten Athenian generals at Marathon. One was Themistocles, the future

founder of the Athenian navy and the destined victor of Salamis: the

other was Aristides, who afterwards led the Athenian troops at Plataea,

and whose integrity and just popularity acquired for his country, when

the Persians had finally been repulsed, the advantageous pre-eminence of

being acknowledged by half of the Greeks as their impartial leader and

protector. It is not recorded what part either Themistocles or Aristides

took in the debate of the council of war at Marathon. But from the

character of Themistocles, his boldness, and his intuitive genius for

extemporizing the best measures in every emergency (a quality which the

greatest of historians ascribes to him beyond all his contemporaries),

we may well believe that the vote of Themistocles was for prompt and

decisive action. [See the character of Themistocles in the 138th section

of the first book of Thucydides, especially the last sentence.] On

the vote of Aristides it may be more difficult to speculate. His

predilection for the Spartans may have made him wish to wait till they

came up; but, though circumspect, he was neither timid as a soldier

nor as a politician; and the bold advice of Miltiades may probably have

found in Aristides a willing, most assuredly it found in him a candid,

hearer.

Miltiades felt no hesitation as to the course which the Athenian

army ought to pursue: and earnestly did he press his opinion on his

brother-generals. Practically acquainted with the organization of the

Persian armies, Miltiades was convinced of the superiority of the Greek

troops, if properly handled: he saw with the military eye of a great

general the advantage which the position of the forces gave him for

a sudden attack, and as a profound politician he felt the perils of

remaining inactive, and of giving treachery time to ruin the Athenian

cause.

One officer in the council of war had not yet voted. This was

Callimachus, the War-Ruler. The votes of the generals were five and

five, so that the voice of Callimachus would be decisive.

On that vote, in all human probability, the destiny of all the nations

of the world depended. Miltiades turned to him, and in simple soldierly

eloquence, the substance of which we may read faithfully reported in

Herodotus, who had conversed with the veterans of Marathon, the great

Athenian thus adjured his countryman to vote for giving battle:--

"It now rests with you, Callimachus, either to enslave Athens, or, by

assuring her freedom, to win yourself an immortality of fame, such as

not even Harmodius and Aristogeiton have acquired. For never, since the

Athenians were a people, were they in such danger as they are in at this

moment. If they bow the knee to these Medes, they are to be given up to

Hippias, and you know what they then will have to suffer. But if Athens

comes victorious out of this contest, she has it in her to become the

first city of Greece. Your vote is to decide whether we are to join

battle or not. If we do not bring on a battle presently, some factious

intrigue will disunite the Athenians, and the city will be betrayed to

the Medes. But if we fight, before there is anything rotten in the state

of Athens, I believe that, provided the Gods will give fair play and

no favour, we are able to get the best of it in the engagement."

[Herodotus, lib. vi. sec. 209. The 116th section is to my mind clear

proof that Herodotus had personally conversed with Epizelus, one of the

veterans of Marathon. The substance of the speech of Miltiades would

naturally become known by the report of some of his colleagues.]

The vote of the brave War-Ruler was gained; the council determined

to give battle; and such was the ascendancy and military eminence of

Miltiades, that his brother-generals, one and all, gave up their days of

command to him, and cheerfully acted under his orders. Fearful, however,

of creating any jealousy, and of so failing to obtain the co-operation

of all parts of his small army, Miltiades waited till the day when the

chief command would have come round to him in regular rotation, before

he led the troops against the enemy.

The inaction of the Asiatic commanders, during this interval, appears

strange at first sight; but Hippias was with them, and they and he were

aware of their chance of a bloodless conquest through the machinations

of his partisans among the Athenians. The nature of the ground also

explains, in many points, the tactics of the opposite generals

before the battle, as well as the operations of the troops during the

engagement.

The plain of Marathon, which is about twenty-two miles distant from

Athens, lies along the bay of the same name on the north-eastern coast

of Attica. The plain is nearly in the form of a crescent, and about six

miles in length. It is about two miles broad in the centre, where the

space between the mountains and the sea is greatest, but it narrows

towards either extremity, the mountains coming close down to the water

at the horns of the bay. There is a valley trending inwards from the

middle of the plain, and a ravine comes down to it to the southward.

Elsewhere it, is closely girt round on the land side by rugged limestone

mountains, which are thickly studded with pines, olive-trees, and

cedars, and overgrown with the myrtle, arbutus, and the other low

odoriferous shrubs that everywhere perfume the Attic air. The level of

the ground is now varied by the mound raised over those who fell in the

battle, but it was an unbroken plain when the Persians encamped on it.

There are marshes at each end, which are dry in spring and summer, and

then offer no obstruction to the horseman, but are commonly flooded with

rain, and so rendered impracticable for cavalry, in the autumn, the time

of year at which the action took place.

The Greeks, lying encamped on the mountains, could watch every movement

of the Persians on the plain below, while they were enabled completely

to mask their own. Miltiades also had, from his position, the power of

giving battle whenever he pleased, or of delaying it at his discretion,

unless Datis were to attempt the perilous operation of storming the

heights.

If we turn to the map of the old world, to test the comparative

territorial resources of the two states whose armies were now about to

come into conflict, the immense preponderance of the material power of

the Persian king over that of the Athenian republic is more striking

than any similar contrast which history can supply. It has been truly

remarked, that, in estimating mere areas, Attica, containing on

its whole surface only seven hundred square miles, shrinks into

insignificance if compared with many a baronial fief of the Middle

Ages, or many a colonial allotment of modern times. Its antagonist, the

Persian empire, comprised the whole of modern Asiatic and much of modern

European Turkey, the modern kingdom of Persia, and the countries of

modern Georgia, Armenia, Balkh, the Punjaub, Affghanistan, Beloochistan,

Egypt, and Tripoli.

Nor could a European, in the beginning of the fifth century before our

era, look upon this huge accumulation of power beneath the sceptre of a

single Asiatic ruler, with the indifference with which we now observe on

the map the extensive dominions of modern Oriental sovereigns. For, as

has been already remarked, before Marathon was fought, the prestige

of success and of supposed superiority of race was on the side of

the Asiatic against the European. Asia was the original seat of human

societies and long before any trace can be found of the inhabitants of

the rest of the world having emerged from the rudest barbarism, we can

perceive that mighty and brilliant empires flourished in the Asiatic

continent. They appear before us through the twilight of primeval

history, dim and indistinct, but massive and majestic, like mountains in

the early dawn.

Instead, however, of the infinite variety and restless change which

have characterised the institutions and fortunes of European states

ever since the commencement of the civilization of our continent, a

monotonous uniformity pervades the histories of nearly all Oriental

empires, from the most ancient down to the most recent times. They are

characterised by the rapidity of their early conquests; by the immense

extent of the dominions comprised in them; by the establishment of a

satrap or pacha system of governing the provinces; by an invariable

and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate

nurslings of the seraglio succeeding to the warrior-sovereigns reared in

the camp; and by the internal anarchy and insurrections, which indicate

and accelerate the decline and fall of those unwieldy and ill-organized

fabrics of power. It is also a striking fact that the governments of all

the great Asiatic empires have in all ages been absolute despotisms.

And Heeren is right in connecting this with another great fact, which is

important from its influence both on the political and the social life

of Asiatics. "Among all the considerable nations of Inner Asia, the

paternal government of every household was corrupted by polygamy; where

that custom exists, a good political constitution is impossible. Fathers

being converted into domestic despots, are ready to pay the same abject

obedience to their sovereign which they exact from their family and

dependants in their domestic economy." We should bear in mind also the

inseparable connexion between the state religion and all legislation,

which has always prevailed in the East, and the constant existence of a

powerful sacerdotal body, exercising some check, though precarious and

irregular, over the throne itself, grasping at all civil administration,

claiming the supreme control of education, stereotyping the lines in

which literature and science must move, and limiting the extent to which

it shall be lawful for the human mind to prosecute its inquiries.

With these general characteristics rightly felt and understood, it

becomes a comparatively easy task to investigate and appreciate the

origin, progress, and principles of Oriental empires in general, as well

as of the Persian monarchy in particular. And we are thus better enabled

to appreciate the repulse which Greece gave to the arms of the East,

and to judge of the probable consequences to human civilization, if the

Persians had succeeded in bringing Europe under their yoke, as they had

already subjugated the fairest portions of the rest of the then known

world.

The Greeks, from their geographical position, formed the natural

vanguard of European liberty against Persian ambition; and they

pre-eminently displayed the salient points of distinctive national

character, which have rendered European civilization so far superior

to Asiatic. The nations that dwelt in ancient times around and near

the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, were the first in our

continent to receive from the East the rudiments of art and literature,

and the germs of social and political organization. Of these nations,

the Greeks, through their vicinity to Asia Minor, Phoenicia, and Egypt,

were among the very foremost in acquiring the principles and habits of

civilized life; and they also at once imparted a new and wholly original

stamp on all which they received. Thus, in their religion they received

from foreign settlers the names of all their deities and many of their

rites, but they discarded the loathsome monstrosities of the Nile, the

Orontes, and the Ganges;--they nationalized their creed; and their

own poets created their beautiful mythology. No sacerdotal caste ever

existed in Greece. So, in their governments they lived long under

hereditary kings, but never endured the permanent establishment of

absolute monarchy. Their early kings were constitutional rulers,

governing with defined prerogatives. And long before the Persian

invasion the kingly form of government had given way in almost all the

Greek states to republican institutions, presenting infinite varieties

of the balancing or the alternate predominance of the oligarchical and

democratical principles. In literature and science the Greek intellect

followed no beaten track, and acknowledged no limitary rules. The Greeks

thought their subjects boldly out; and the novelty of a speculation

invested it in their minds with interest, and not with criminality.

Versatile, restless, enterprising and self-confident, the Greeks

presented the most striking contrast to the habitual quietude and

submissiveness of the Orientals. And, of all the Greeks, the Athenians

exhibited these national characteristics in the strongest degree. This

spirit of activity and daring, joined to a generous sympathy for the

fate of their fellow-Greeks in Asia, had led them to join in the last

Ionian war; and now, mingling with their abhorrence of the usurping

family of their own citizens, which for a period had forcibly seized on

and exercised despotic power at Athens, it nerved them to defy the wrath

of King Darius, and to refuse to receive back at his bidding the tyrant

whom they had some years before driven from their land.

The enterprise and genius of an Englishman have lately confirmed by

fresh evidence, and invested with fresh interest, the might of the

Persian monarch, who sent his troops to combat at Marathon. Inscriptions

in a character termed the Arrow-headed, or Cuneiform, had long been

known to exist on the marble monuments at Persepolis, near the site of

the ancient Susa, and on the faces of rocks in other places formerly

ruled over by the early Persian kings. But for thousands of years

they had been mere unintelligible enigmas to the curious but baffled

beholder: and they were often referred to as instances of the folly of

human pride, which could indeed write its own praises in the solid rock,

but only for the rock to outlive the language as well as the memory of

the vain-glorious inscribers. The elder Niebuhr, Grotefend, and Lassen

had made some guesses at the meaning of the Cuneiform letters; but Major

Rawlinson, of the East India Company's service, after years of labour,

has at last accomplished the glorious achievement of fully revealing

the alphabet and the grammar of this long unknown tongue. He has, in

particular, fully deciphered and expounded the inscriptions on the

sacred rock of Behistun, on the western frontiers of Media. These

records of the Achaemenidae have at length found their interpreter; and

Darius himself speaks to us from the consecrated mountain, and tells

us the names of the nations that obeyed him, the revolts that he

suppressed, his victories, his piety, and his glory. [See the tenth

volume of the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society."]

Kings who thus seek the admiration of posterity are little likely to

dim the record of their successes by the mention of their occasional

defeats; and it throws no suspicion on the narrative of the Greek

historians, that we find these inscriptions silent respecting the

overthrow of Datis and Artaphernes, as well as respecting the reverses

which Darius sustained in person during his Scythian campaigns. But

these indisputable monuments of Persian fame confirm, and even increase,

the opinion with which Herodotus inspires us, of the vast power which

Cyrus founded and Cambyses increased; which Darius augmented by Indian

and Arabian conquests, and seemed likely, when he directed his arms

against Europe, to make the predominant monarchy of the world.

With the exception of the Chinese empire, in which, throughout all ages

down to the last few years, one-third of the human race has dwelt almost

unconnected with the other portions, all the great kingdoms which we

know to have existed in Ancient Asia, were, in Darius's time, blended

with the Persian. The northern Indians, the Assyrians, the Syrians, the

Babylonians, the Chaldees, the Phoenicians, the nations of Palestine,

the Armenians, the Bactrians, the Lydians, the Phrygians, the Parthians,

and the Medes,--all obeyed the sceptre of the Great King: the Medes

standing next to the native Persians in honour, and the empire being

frequently spoken of as that of the Medes, or as that of the Medes and

Persians. Egypt and Cyrene were Persian provinces; the Greek colonists

in Asia Minor and the islands of the AEgean were Darius's subjects; and

their gallant but unsuccessful attempts to throw off the Persian yoke

had only served to rivet it more strongly, and to increase the general

belief: that the Greeks could not stand before the Persians in a field

of battle. Darius's Scythian war, though unsuccessful in its immediate

object, had brought about the subjugation of Thrace and the submission

of Macedonia. From the Indus to the Peneus, all was his.

We may imagine the wrath with which the lord of so many nations must

have heard, nine years before the battle of Marathon, that a strange

nation towards the setting sun, called the Athenians, had dared to help

his rebels in Ionia against him, and that they had plundered and burnt

the capital of one of his provinces. Before the burning of Sardis,

Darius seems never to have heard of the existence of Athens; but his

satraps in Asia Minor had for some time seen Athenian refugees at their

provincial courts imploring assistance against their fellow-countrymen.

When Hippias was driven away from Athens, and the tyrannic dynasty of

the Pisistratidae finally overthrown in 510 B.C., the banished tyrant

and his adherents, after vainly seeking to be restored by Spartan

intervention, had betaken themselves to Sardis, the capital city of

the satrapy of Artaphernes. There Hippias (in the expressive words

of Herodotus) [Herod. lib. v. c. 96.] began every kind of agitation,

slandering the Athenians before Artaphernes, and doing all he could to

induce the satrap to place Athens in subjection to him, as the tributary

vassal of King Darius. When the Athenians heard of his practices, they

sent envoys to Sardis to remonstrate with the Persians against taking up

the quarrel of the Athenian refugees. But Artaphernes gave them in reply

a menacing command to receive Hippias back again if they looked for

safety. The Athenians were resolved not to purchase safety at such a

price; and after rejecting the satrap's terms, they considered that they

and the Persians were declared enemies. At this very crisis the Ionian

Greeks implored the assistance of their European brethren, to enable

them to recover their independence from Persia. Athens, and the city of

Eretria in Euboea, alone consented. Twenty Athenian galleys, and five

Eretrian, crossed the AEgean Sea; and by a bold and sudden march upon

Sardis the Athenians and their allies succeeded in capturing the capital

city of the haughty satrap, who had recently menaced them with servitude

or destruction. The Persian forces were soon rallied, and the Greeks

were compelled to retire. They were pursued, and defeated on their

return to the coast, and Athens took no further part in the Ionian war.

But the insult that she had put upon the Persian power was speedily made

known throughout that empire, and was never to be forgiven or forgotten.

In the emphatic simplicity of the narrative of Herodotus, the wrath of

the Great King is thus described:--"Now when it was told to King Darius

that Sardis had been taken and burnt by the Athenians and Ionians, he

took small heed of the Ionians, well knowing who they were, and that

their revolt would soon be put down: but he asked who, and what manner

of men, the Athenians were. And when he had been told, he called for his

bow; and, having taken it, and placed an arrow on the string, he let the

arrow fly towards heaven; and as he shot it into the air, he said, 'O

Supreme God! grant me that I may avenge myself on the Athenians.' And

when he had said this, he appointed one of his servants to say to him

every day as he sat at meat, 'Sire, remember the Athenians.'"

Some years were occupied in the complete reduction of Ionia. But when

this was effected, Darius ordered his victorious forces to proceed to

punish Athens and Eretria, and to conquer European Greece. The first

armament sent for this purpose was shattered by shipwreck, and nearly

destroyed off Mount Athos, But the purpose of King Darius was not

easily shaken. A larger army was ordered to be collected in Cilicia; and

requisitions were sent to all the maritime cities of the Persian empire

for ships of war, and for transports of sufficient size for carrying

cavalry as well as infantry across the AEgean. While these preparations

were being made, Darius sent heralds round to the Grecian cities

demanding their submission to Persia. It was proclaimed in the

market-place of each little Hellenic state (some with territories not

larger than the Isle of Wight), that King Darius, the lord of all men,

from the rising to the setting sun, required earth and water to be

delivered to his heralds, as a symbolical acknowledgment that he was

head and master of the country. [Aeschines in Ctes. p. 622, ed. Reiske.

Mitford, vol. i. p. 485. AEschines is speaking of Xerxes, but Mitford

is probably right in considering it as the style of the Persian kings

in their proclamations. In one of the inscriptions at Persepolis, Darius

terms himself "Darius the great king, king of kings, the king of the

many peopled countries, the supporter also of this great world." In

another, he styles himself "the king of all inhabited countries."

(See "Asiatic Journal" vol. X pp. 287 and 292, and Major Rawlinson's

Comments.)] Terror-stricken at the power of Persia and at the severe

punishment that had recently been inflicted on the refractory Ionians,

many of the continental Greeks and nearly all the islanders submitted,

and gave the required tokens of vassalage. At Sparta and Athens an

indignant refusal was returned: a refusal which was disgraced by outrage

and violence against the persons of the Asiatic heralds.

Fresh fuel was thus added to the anger of Darius against Athens, and the

Persian preparations went on with renewed vigour. In the summer of 490

B.C., the army destined for the invasion was assembled in the Aleian

plain of Cilicia, near the sea. A fleet of six hundred galleys and

numerous transports was collected on the coast for the embarkation

of troops, horse as well as foot. A Median general named Datis, and

Artaphernes, the son of the satrap of Sardis, and who was also nephew of

Darius, were placed in titular joint command of the expedition. That the

real supreme authority was given to Datis alone is probable, from the

way in which the Greek writers speak of him. We know no details of the

previous career of this officer; but there is every reason to believe

that his abilities and bravery had been proved by experience, or his

Median birth would have prevented his being placed in high command by

Darius. He appears to have been the first Mede who was thus trusted by

the Persian kings after the overthrow of the conspiracy of the Median

Magi against the Persians immediately before Darius obtained the throne.

Datis received instructions to complete the subjugation of Greece, and

especial orders were given him with regard to Eretria and Athens. He

was to take these two cities; and he was to lead the inhabitants away

captive, and bring them as slaves into the presence of the Great King.

Datis embarked his forces in the fleet that awaited them; and coasting

along the shores of Asia Minor till he was off Samos, he thence sailed

due westward through the AEgean Sea for Greece, taking the islands in

his way. The Naxians had, ten years before, successfully stood a siege

against a Persian armament, but they now were too terrified to offer any

resistance, and fled to the mountain-tops, while the enemy burnt their

town and laid waste their lands. Thence Datis, compelling the Greek

islanders to join him with their ships and men, sailed onward to the

coast of Euboea. The little town of Carystus essayed resistance, but was

quickly overpowered. He next attacked Eretria. The Athenians sent four

thousand men to its aid. But treachery was at work among the Eretrians;

and the Athenian force received timely warning from one of the leading

men of the city to retire to aid in saving their own country, instead

of remaining to share in the inevitable destruction of Eretria. Left to

themselves, the Eretrians repulsed the assaults of the Persians against

their walls for six days; on the seventh day they were betrayed by two

of their chiefs and the Persians occupied the city. The temples were

burnt in revenge for the burning of Sardis, and the inhabitants were

bound and placed as prisoners in the neighbouring islet of AEgylia,

to wait there till Datis should bring the Athenians to join them in

captivity, when both populations were to be led into Upper Asia, there

to learn their doom from the lips of King Darius himself.

Flushed with success, and with half his mission thus accomplished, Datis

reimbarked his troops, and crossing the little channel that separates

Euboea from the mainland, he encamped his troops on the Attic coast

at Marathon, drawing up his galleys on the shelving beach, as was the

custom with the navies of antiquity. The conquered islands behind him

served as places of deposit for his provisions and military stores. His

position at Marathon seemed to him in every respect advantageous; and

the level nature of the ground on which he camped was favourable for

the employment of his cavalry, if the Athenians should venture to

engage him. Hippias, who accompanied him, and acted as the guide of the

invaders, had pointed out Marathon as the best place for a landing,

for this very reason. Probably Hippias was also influenced by the

recollection, that forty-seven years previously he, with his father

Pisistratus, had crossed with an army from Eretria to Marathon, and

had won an easy victory over their Athenian enemies on that very plain,

which had restored them to tyrannic power. The omen seemed cheering.

The place was the same; but Hippias soon learned to his cost how great a

change had come over the spirit of the Athenians.

But though "the fierce democracy" of Athens was zealous and true against

foreign invader and domestic tyrant, a faction existed in Athens, as

at Eretria, of men willing to purchase a party triumph over their

fellow-citizens at the price of their country's ruin. Communications

were opened between these men and the Persian camp, which would have led

to a catastrophe like that of Eretria, if Miltiades had not resolved,

and had not persuaded his colleagues to resolve, on fighting at all

hazards.

When Miltiades arrayed his men for action, he staked on the arbitrement

of one battle not only the fate of Athens, but that of all Greece; for

if Athens had fallen, no other Greek state, except Lacedaemon, would

have had the courage to resist; and the Lacedaemonians, though they

would probably have died in their ranks to the last man, never could

have successfully resisted the victorious Persians, and the numerous

Greek troops, which would have soon marched under the Persian satraps,

had they prevailed over Athens.

Nor was there any power to the westward of Greece that could have

offered an effectual opposition to Persia, had she once conquered

Greece, and made that country a basis for future military operations.

Rome was at this time in her season of utmost weakness. Her dynasty of

powerful Etruscan kings had been driven out, and her infant commonwealth

was reeling under the attacks of the Etruscans and Volscians from

without, and the fierce dissensions between the patricians and plebeians

within. Etruria, with her Lucumos and serfs, was no match for Persia.

Samnium had not grown into the might which she afterwards put forth: nor

could the Greek colonies in South Italy and Sicily hope to survive when

their parent states had perished. Carthage had escaped the Persian

yoke in the time of Cambyses, through the reluctance of the Phoenician

mariners to serve against their kinsmen. But such forbearance could not

long have been relied on, and the future rival of Rome would have become

as submissive a minister of the Persian power as were the Phoenician

cities themselves. If we turn to Spain, or if we pass the great mountain

chain which, prolonged through the Pyrenees, the Cevennes, the Alps, and

the Balkan, divides Northern from Southern Europe, we shall find nothing

at that period but mere savage Finns, Celts, Slaves, and Teutons. Had

Persia beaten Athens at Marathon, she could have found no obstacle to

prevent Darius, the chosen servant of Ormuzd, from advancing his sway

over all the known Western races of mankind. The infant energies of

Europe would have been trodden out beneath universal conquest; and the

history of the world, like the history of Asia, would have become a mere

record of the rise and fall of despotic dynasties, of the incursions

of barbarous hordes, and of the mental and political prostration of

millions beneath the diadem, the tiara, and the sword.

Great as the preponderance of the Persian over the Athenian power

at that crisis seems to have been, it would be unjust to impute wild

rashness to the policy of Miltiades, and those who voted with him in the

Athenian council of war, or to look on the after-current of events as

the mere result of successful indiscretion, as before has been remarked,

Miltiades, whilst prince of the Chersonese, had seen service in the

Persian armies; and he knew by personal observation how many elements of

weakness lurked beneath their imposing aspect of strength. He knew that

the bulk of their troops no longer consisted of the hardy shepherds and

mountaineers from Persia Proper and Kurdistan, who won Cyrus's battles:

but that unwilling contingents from conquered nations now largely filled

up the Persian muster rolls, fighting more from compulsion than from

any zeal in the cause of their masters. He had also the sagacity and

the spirit to appreciate the superiority of the Greek armour and

organization over the Asiatic, notwithstanding former reverses. Above

all, he felt and worthily trusted the enthusiasm of the men under his

command.

The Athenians, whom he led, had proved by their new-born valour in

recent wars against the neighbouring states, that "Liberty and Equality

of civic rights are brave spirit-stirring things: and they who, while

under the yoke of a despot, had been no better men of war than any of

their neighbours, as soon as they were free, became the foremost men of

all; for each felt that in fighting for a free commonwealth, he fought

for himself, and, whatever he took in hand, he was zealous to do the

work thoroughly." So the nearly contemporaneous historian describes the

change of spirit that was seen in the Athenians after their tyrants were

expelled; [Herod. lib. v. c. 87.] and Miltiades knew that in leading

them against the invading army, where they had Hippias, the foe they

most hated, before them, he was bringing into battle no ordinary men,

and could calculate on no ordinary heroism. As for traitors, he was

sure, that whatever treachery might lurk among some of the higher-born

and wealthier Athenians, the rank and file whom he commanded were ready

to do their utmost in his and their own cause. With regard to future

attacks from Asia, he might reasonably hope that one victory would

inspirit all Greece to combine against common foe; and that the latent

seeds of revolt and disunion in the Persian empire would soon burst

forth and paralyse its energies, so as to leave Greek independence

secure.

With these hopes and risks, Miltiades, on the afternoon of a September

day, 490 B.C., gave the word for the Athenian army to prepare for

battle. There were many local associations connected with those mountain

heights, which were calculated powerfully to excite the spirits of the

men, and of which the commanders well knew how to avail themselves in

their exhortations to their troops before the encounter. Marathon itself

was a region sacred to; Hercules. Close to them was the fountain of

Macaria, who had in days of yore devoted herself to death for the

liberty of her people. The very plain on which they were to fight was

the scene of the exploits of their national hero, Theseus; and there,

too, as old legends told, the Athenians and the Heraclidae had routed

the invader, Eurystheus. These traditions were not mere cloudy myths, or

idle fictions, but matters of implicit earnest faith to the men of that

day: and many a fervent prayer arose from the Athenian ranks to the

heroic spirits who while on earth had striven and suffered on that very

spot, and who were believed to be now heavenly powers, looking down with

interest on their still beloved country, and capable of interposing with

superhuman aid in its behalf.

According to old national custom, the warriors of each tribe were

arrayed together; neighbour thus fighting by the side of neighbour,

friend by friend, and the spirit of emulation and the consciousness of

responsibility excited to the very utmost. The War-Ruler, Callimachus,

had the leading of the right wing; the Plataeans formed the extreme

left; and Themistocles and Aristides commanded the centre. The line

consisted of the heavy-armed spearmen only. For the Greeks (until the

time of Iphicrates) took little or no account of light-armed soldiers in

a pitched battle, using them only in skirmishes or for the pursuit of a

defeated enemy. The panoply of the regular infantry consisted of a long

spear, of a shield, helmet, breast-plate, greaves, and short sword. Thus

equipped, they usually advanced slowly and steadily into action in an

uniform phalanx of about eight spears deep. But the military genius

of Miltiades led him to deviate on this occasion from the commonplace

tactics of his countrymen. It was essential for him to extend his line

so as to cover all the practicable ground, and to secure himself from

being outflanked and charged in the rear by the Persian horse. This

extension involved the weakening of his line. Instead of an uniform

reduction of its strength, he determined on detaching principally from

his centre, which, from the nature of the ground, would have the best

opportunities for rallying if broken; and on strengthening his wings, so

as to insure advantage at those points; and he trusted to his own skill,

and to his soldiers' discipline, for the improvement of that advantage

into decisive victory.

[It is remarkable that there is no other instance of a Greek general

deviating from the ordinary mode of bringing a phalanx of spearmen into

action, until the battles of Leuctra and Mantineia, more than a century

after Marathon, when Epaminondas introduced the tactics (which Alexander

the Great in ancient times, and Frederic the Great in modern times, made

so famous) of concentrating an overpowering force on some decisive point

of the enemy's line, while he kept back, or, in military phrase, refused

the weaker part of his own.]

In this order, and availing himself probably of the inequalities of the

ground, so as to conceal his preparations from the enemy till the last

possible moment, Miltiades drew up the eleven thousand infantry whose

spears were to decide this crisis in the struggle between the European

and the Asiatic worlds. The sacrifices, by which the favour of Heaven

was sought, and its will consulted, were announced to show propitious

omens. The trumpet sounded for action, and, chanting the hymn of battle,

the little army bore down upon the host of the foe. Then, too, along the

mountain slopes of Marathon must have resounded the mutual exhortation

which AEschylus, who fought in both battles, tells us was afterwards

heard over the waves of Salamis,--"On, sons of the Greeks! Strike for

the freedom of your country! strike for the freedom of your children

and of your wives--for the shrines of your fathers' gods, and for the

sepulchres of your sires. All--all are now staked upon the strife!"

Instead of advancing at the usual slow pace of the phalanx, Miltiades

brought his men on at a run. They were all trained in the exercises of

the palaestra, so that there was no fear of their ending the charge in

breathless exhaustion: and it was of the deepest importance for him

to traverse as rapidly as possible the space of about a mile of level

ground, that lay between the mountain foot and the Persian outposts, and

so to get his troops into close action before the Asiatic cavalry could

mount, form, and manoeuvre against him, or their archers keep him long

under bow-shot, and before the enemy's generals could fairly deploy

their masses.

"When the Persians," says Herodotus, "saw the Athenians running down on

them, without horse or bowmen, and scanty in numbers, they thought them

a set of madmen rushing upon certain destruction." They began, however,

to prepare to receive them and the Eastern chiefs arrayed, as quickly

as time and place allowed, the varied races who served in their motley

ranks. Mountaineers from Hyrcania and Affghanistan, wild horsemen from

the steppes of Khorassan, the black archers of Ethiopia, swordsmen from

the banks of the Indus, the Oxus, the Euphrates, and the Nile, made

ready against the enemies of the Great King. But no national cause

inspired them, except the division of native Persians; and in the large

host there was no uniformity of language, creed, race, or military

system. Still, among them there were many gallant men, under a veteran

general; they were familiarized with victory; and in contemptuous

confidence their infantry, which alone had time to form, awaited

the Athenian charge. On came the Greeks, with one unwavering line of

levelled spears, against which the light targets, the short lances and

scymetars of the Orientals offered weak defence. The front rank of the

Asiatics must have gone down to a man at the first shock. Still they

recoiled not, but strove by individual gallantry, and by the weight of

numbers, to make up for the disadvantages of weapons and tactics, and

to bear back the shallow line of the Europeans. In the centre, where the

native Persians and the Sacae fought, they succeeded in breaking through

the weaker part of the Athenian phalanx; and the tribes led by Aristides

and Themistocles were, after a brave resistance, driven back over

the plain, and chased by the Persians up the valley towards the inner

country. There the nature of the ground gave the opportunity of rallying

and renewing the struggle: and meanwhile, the Greek wings, where

Miltiades had concentrated his chief strength, had routed the Asiatics

opposed to them; and the Athenian and Plataean officers, instead of

pursuing the fugitives, kept their troops well in hand, and wheeling

round they formed the two wings together. Miltiades instantly led them

against the Persian centre, which had hitherto been triumphant, but

which now fell back, and prepared to encounter these new and unexpected

assailants. Aristides and Themistocles renewed the fight with their

re-organized troops, and the full force of the Greeks was brought into

close action with the Persian and Sacian divisions of the enemy. Datis's

veterans strove hard to keep their ground, and evening [ARISTOPH. Vesvoe

1085.] was approaching before the stern encounter was decided.

But the Persians, with their slight wicker shields, destitute of

body-armour, and never taught by training to keep the even front and

act with the regular movement of the Greek infantry, fought at grievous

disadvantage with their shorter and feebler weapons against the compact

array of well-armed Athenian and Plataean spearmen, all perfectly

drilled to perform each necessary evolution in concert, and to preserve

an uniform and unwavering line in battle. In personal courage and in

bodily activity the Persians were not inferior to their adversaries.

Their spirits were not yet cowed by the recollection of former defeats;

and they lavished their lives freely, rather than forfeit the fame which

they had won by so many victories. While their rear ranks poured

an incessant shower of arrows over the heads of their comrades, the

foremost Persians kept rushing forward, sometimes singly, sometimes

in desperate groups of twelve or ten upon the projecting spears of the

Greeks, striving to force a lane into the phalanx, and to bring their

scimetars and daggers into play. But the Greeks felt their superiority,

and though the fatigue of the long-continued action told heavily on

their inferior numbers, the sight of the carnage that they dealt amongst

their assailants nerved them to fight still more fiercely on.

[See the description, in the 62nd section of the ninth book of

Herodotus, of the gallantry shown by the Persian infantry against the

Lacedaemonians at Plataea. We have no similar detail of the fight at

Marathon, but we know that it was long and obstinately contested (see

the 113th section of the sixth book of Herodotus, and the lines from the

"Vespae" already quoted), and the spirit of the Persians must have been

even higher at Marathon than at Plataea. In both battles it was only the

true Persians and the Sacae who showed this valour; the other Asiatics

fled like sheep.]

At last the previously unvanquished lords of Asia turned their backs and

fled, and the Greeks followed, striking them down, to the water's edge,

where the invaders were now hastily launching their galleys, and seeking

to embark and fly. Flushed with success, the Athenians dashed at the

fleet.

[The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow;

The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;

Mountains above, Earth's, Ocean's plain below,

Death in the front, Destruction in the rear!

Such was the scene.--Byron's CHILDE HARROLD.]

"Bring fire, bring fire," was their cry; and they began to lay hold of

the ships. But here the Asiatics resisted desperately, and the principal

loss sustained by the Greeks was in the assault on the fleet. Here

fell the brave War-Ruler Callimachus, the general Stesilaus, and other

Athenians of note. Conspicuous among them was Cynaegeirus, the brother

of the tragic poet AEschylus. He had grasped the ornamental work on

the stern of one of the galleys, and had his hand struck off by an axe.

Seven galleys were captured; but the Persians succeeded in saving the

rest. They pushed off from the fatal shore: but even here the skill of

Datis did not desert him, and he sailed round to the western coast of

Attica, in hopes to find the city unprotected, and to gain possession

of it from some of the partisans of Hippias. Miltiades, however, saw

and counteracted his manoeuvre. Leaving Aristides, and the troops of his

tribe, to guard the spoil and the slain, the Athenian commander led

his conquering army by a rapid night-march back across the country to

Athens. And when the Persian fleet had doubled the Cape of Sunium and

sailed up to the Athenian harbour in the morning, Datis saw arrayed on

the heights above the city the troops before whom his men had fled on

the preceding evening. All hope of further conquest in Europe for the

time was abandoned, and the baffled armada returned to the Asiatic

coasts.

After the battle had been fought, but while the dead bodies were yet on

the ground, the promised reinforcement from Sparta arrived. Two thousand

Lacedaemonian spearmen, starting immediately after the full moon, had

marched the hundred and fifty miles between Athens and Sparta in the

wonderfully short time of three days. Though too late to share in

the glory of the action, they requested to be allowed to march to the

battle-field to behold the Medes. They proceeded thither, gazed on the

dead bodies of the invaders, and then, praising the Athenians and what

they had done, they returned to Lacedaemon.

The number of the Persian dead was six thousand four hundred; of the

Athenians, a hundred and ninety-two. The number of Plataeans who fell is

not mentioned, but as they fought in the part of the army which was not

broken, it cannot have been large.

The apparent disproportion between the losses of the two armies is not

surprising, when we remember the armour of the Greek spearmen, and the

impossibility of heavy slaughter being inflicted by sword or lance on

troops so armed, as long as they kept firm in their ranks. [Mitford

well refers to Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, as instances of similar

disparity of loss between the conquerors and the conquered.]

The Athenian slain were buried on the field of battle. This was contrary

to the usual custom, according to which the bones of all who fell

fighting for their country in each year were deposited in a public

sepulchre in the suburb of Athens called the Cerameicus. But it was felt

that a distinction ought to be made in the funeral honours paid to the

men of Marathon, even as their merit had been distinguished over that of

all other Athenians. A lofty mound was raised on the plain of Marathon,

beneath which the remains of the men of Athens who fell in the battle

were deposited. Ten columns were erected on the spot, one for each of

the Athenian tribes; and on the monumental column of each tribe were

graven the names of those of its members whose glory it was to have

fallen in the great battle of liberation. The antiquary Pausanias read

those names there six hundred years after the time when they were first

graven. The columns have long perished, but the mound still marks the

spot where the noblest heroes of antiquity, the MARATHONOMAKHOI repose.

[Pausanias states, with implicit belief, that the battlefield was

haunted at night by supernatural beings, and that the noise of

combatants and the snorting of horses were heard to resound on it. The

superstition has survived the change of creeds, and the shepherds of the

neighbourhood still believe that spectral warriors contend on the

plain at midnight, and they say that they have heard the shouts of the

combatants and the neighing of the steeds. See Grote and Thirlwall.]

A separate tumulus was raised over the bodies of the slain Plataeans,

and another over the light-armed slaves who had taken part and had

fallen in the battle. [It is probable that the Greek light-armed

irregulars were active in the attack on the Persian ships and it was in

this attack that the Greeks suffered their principal loss.] There was

also a distinct sepulchral monument to the general to whose genius

the victory was mainly due. Miltiades did not live long after his

achievement at Marathon, but he lived long enough to experience a

lamentable reverse of his popularity and good fortune. As soon as the

Persians had quitted the western coasts of the AEgean, he proposed to

an assembly of the Athenian people that they should fit out seventy

galleys, with a proportionate force of soldiers and military stores,

and place them at his disposal; not telling them whither he meant to

proceed, but promising them that if they would equip the force he asked

for, and give him discretionary powers, he would lead it to a land where

there was gold in abundance to be won with ease. The Greeks of that time

believed in the existence of Eastern realms teeming with gold, as firmly

as the Europeans of the sixteenth century believed in Eldorado of the

West. The Athenians probably thought that the recent victor of Marathon,

and former officer of Darius, was about to guide them on a secret

expedition against some wealthy and unprotected cities of treasure in

the Persian dominions. The armament was voted and equipped, and sailed

eastward from Attica, no one but Miltiades knowing its destination,

until the Greek isle of Paros was reached, when his true object

appeared. In former years, while connected with the Persians as prince

of the Chersonese, Miltiades had been involved in a quarrel with one of

the leading men among the Parians, who had injured his credit and caused

some slights to be put upon him at the court of the Persian satrap,

Hydarnes. The feud had ever since rankled in the heart of the Athenian

chief, and he now attacked Paros for the sake of avenging himself on his

ancient enemy. His pretext, as general of the Athenians, was, that the

Parians had aided the armament of Datis with a war-galley. The Parians

pretended to treat about terms of surrender, but used the time which

they thus gained in repairing the defective parts of the fortifications

of their city; and they then set the Athenians at defiance. So far, says

Herodotus, the accounts of all the Greeks agree. But the Parians, in

after years, told also a wild legend, how a captive priestess of a

Parian temple of the Deities of the Earth promised Miltiades to give him

the means of capturing Paros: how, at her bidding, the Athenian general

went alone at night and forced his way into a holy shrine, near the city

gate, but with what purpose it was not known: how a supernatural awe

came over him, and in his flight he fell and fractured his leg: how

an oracle afterwards forbad the Parians to punish the sacrilegious and

traitorous priestess, "because it was fated that Miltiades should come

to an ill end, and she was only the instrument to lead him to evil."

Such was the tale that Herodotus heard at Paros. Certain it was that

Miltiades either dislocated or broke his leg during an unsuccessful

siege of that city, and returned home in evil plight with his baffled

and defeated forces.

The indignation of the Athenians was proportionate to the hope and

excitement which his promises had raised. Xanthippus, the head of one

of the first families in Athens, indicted him before the supreme popular

tribunal for the capital offence of having deceived the people.

His guilt was undeniable, and the Athenians passed their verdict

accordingly. But the recollections of Lemnos and Marathon, and the sight

of the fallen general who lay stretched on a couch before them, pleaded

successfully in mitigation of punishment, and the sentence was commuted

from death to a fine of fifty talents. This was paid by his son, the

afterwards illustrious Cimon, Miltiades dying, soon after the trial, of

the injury which he had received at Paros.

[The common-place calumnies against the Athenians respecting Miltiades

have been well answered by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton in his "Rise and

Fall of Athens," and Bishop Thirlwall in the second volume of his

"History of Greece;" but they have received their most complete

refutation from Mr. Grote in the fourth volume of his History, p.490 et

seq., and notes. I quite concur with him that, "looking to the practice

of the Athenian dicastery in criminal cases, 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 the 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 far the heavier sentence

recommended by his opponent." The stories of Miltiades having been cast

into prison and died there, and of his having been saved from death only

by the interposition of the Prytanis of the day, are, I think, rightly

rejected by Mr. Grote as the fictions of after ages. The silence of

Herodotus respecting them is decisive. It is true that Plato, in the

Gorgias, says that the Athenians passed a vote to throw Miltiades into

the Barathrum, and speaks of the interposition of the Prytanis in his

favour; but it is to be remembered that Plato, with all his transcendent

genius, was (as Niebuhr has termed him) a very indifferent patriot, who

loved to blacken the character of his country's democratic institutions;

and if the fact was that the Prytanis, at the trial of Miltiades,

opposed the vote of capital punishment, and spoke in favour of the

milder sentence, Plato (in a passage written to show the misfortunes

that befell Athenian statesmen) would readily exaggerate this fact into

the story that appears in his text.]

The melancholy end of Miltiades, after his elevation to such a height

of power and glory, must often have been recalled to the mind of the

ancient Greeks by the sight of one, in particular, of the memorials of

the great battle which he won. This was the remarkable statue (minutely

described by Pausanias) which the Athenians, in the time of Pericles,

caused to be hewn out of a huge block of marble, which, it was believed,

had been provided by Datis to form a trophy of the anticipated victory

of the Persians. Phidias fashioned out of this a colossal image of the

goddess Nemesis, the deity whose peculiar function was to visit the

exuberant prosperity both of nations and individuals with sudden and

awful reverses. This statue was placed in a temple of the goddess at

Rhamnus, about eight miles from Marathon, Athens herself contained

numerous memorials of her primary great victory. Panenus, the cousin

of Phidias, represented it in fresco on the walls of the painted porch;

and, centuries afterwards, the figures of Miltiades and Callimachus at

the head of the Athenians were conspicuous in the fresco. The tutelary

deities were exhibited taking part in the fray. In the back-ground were

seen the Phoenician galleys; and nearer to the spectator, the Athenians

and the Plataeans (distinguished by their leathern helmets) were chasing

routed Asiatics into the marshes and the sea. The battle was sculptured

also on the Temple of Victory in the Acropolis; and even now there may

be traced on the frieze the figures of the Persian combatants with their

lunar shields, their bows and quivers, their curved scimetars, their

loose trowsers, and Phrygian tiaras. [Wordsworth's "Greece," p. 115.]

These and other memorials of Marathon were the produce of the meridian

age of Athenian intellectual splendour--of the age of Phidias and

Pericles. For it was not merely by the generation of men whom the battle

liberated from Hippias and the Medes, that the transcendent importance

of their victory was gratefully recognised. Through the whole epoch

of her prosperity, through the long Olympiads of her decay, through

centuries after her fall, Athens looked back on the day of Marathon as

the brightest of her national existence.

By a natural blending of patriotic pride with grateful piety, the very

spirits of the Athenians who fell at Marathon were deified by their

countrymen. The inhabitants of the districts of Marathon paid religious

rites to them; and orators solemnly invoked them in their most

impassioned adjurations before the assembled men of Athens. "Nothing was

omitted that could keep alive the remembrance of a deed which had first

taught the Athenian people to know its own strength, by measuring it

with the power which had subdued the greater part of the known world.

The consciousness thus awakened fixed its character, its station, and

its destiny; it was the spring of its later great actions and ambitious

enterprises." [Thirlwall.]

It was not indeed by one defeat, however signal, that the pride of

Persia could be broken, and her dreams of universal empire be dispelled.

Ten years afterwards she renewed her attempts upon Europe on a grander

scale of enterprise, and was repulsed by Greece with greater and

reiterated loss. Larger forces and heavier slaughter than had been

seen at Marathon signalised the conflicts of Greeks and Persians

at Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and the Eurymedon. But mighty and

momentous as these battles were, they rank not with Marathon in

importance. They originated no new impulse. They turned back no current

of fate. They were merely confirmatory of the already existing bias

which Marathon had created. The day of Marathon is the critical epoch in

the history of the two nations. It broke for ever the spell of Persian

invincibility, which had paralysed men's minds. It generated among

the Greeks the spirit which beat back Xerxes, and afterwards led on

Xenophon, Agesilaus, and Alexander, in terrible retaliation, through

their Asiatic campaigns. It secured for mankind the intellectual

treasures of Athens, the growth of free institutions the liberal

enlightenment of the Western world, and the gradual ascendency for many

ages of the great principles of European civilisation.

EXPLANATORY REMARKS ON SOME OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BATTLE OF

MARATHON.

Nothing is said by Herodotus of the Persian cavalry taking any part in

the battle, although he mentions that Hippias recommended the Persians

to land at Marathon, because the plain was favourable for cavalry

evolutions. In the life of Miltiades, which is usually cited as the

production of Cornelius Nepos, but which I believe to be of no authority

whatever, it is said that Miltiades protected his flanks from the

enemy's horse by an abattis of felled trees. While he was on the high

ground he would not have required this defence; and it is not likely

that the Persians would have allowed him to erect it on the plain.

Bishop Thirlwall calls our attention to a passage in Suidas, where

the proverb KHORIS HIPPEIS is said to have originated from some Ionian

Greeks, who were serving compulsorily in the army of Datis, contriving

to inform Miltiades that the Persian cavalry had gone away, whereupon

Miltiades immediately joined battle and gained the victory. There may

probably be a gleam of truth in this legend. If Datis's cavalry was

numerous, as the abundant pastures of Euboea were close at hand, the

Persian general, when he thought, from the inaction of his enemy, that

they did not mean to come down from the heights and give battle, might

naturally send the larger part of his horse back across the channel to

the neighbourhood of Eretria, where he had already left a detachment,

and where his military stores must have been deposited. The knowledge of

such a movement would of course confirm Miltiades in his resolution to

bring on a speedy engagement.

But, in truth, whatever amount of cavalry we suppose Datis to have

had with him on the day of Marathon, their inaction in the battle is

intelligible, if we believe the attack of the Athenian spearmen to have

been as sudden as it was rapid. The Persian horse-soldier, on an alarm

being given, had to take the shackles off his horse, to strap the saddle

on, and bridle him, besides equipping himself (see Xenoph. Anab. lib.iii

c.4); and when each individual horseman was ready, the line had to be

formed; and the time that it takes to form the Oriental cavalry in line

for a charge, has, in all ages, been observed by Europeans.

The wet state of the marshes at each end of the plain, in the time of

year when the battle was fought, has been adverted to by Mr Wordsworth;

and this would hinder the Persian general from arranging and employing

his horsemen on his extreme wings, while it also enabled the Greeks, as

they came forward, to occupy the whole breadth of the practicable ground

with an unbroken line of levelled spears, against which, if any Persian

horse advanced they would be driven back in confusion upon their own

foot.

Even numerous and fully-arrayed bodies of cavalry have been repeatedly

broken, both in ancient and modern warfare, by resolute charges of

infantry. For instance, it was by an attack of some picked cohorts that

Caesar routed the Pompeian cavalry, which had previously defeated his

own at Pharsalia.

I have represented the battle of Marathon as beginning in the afternoon,

and ending towards evening. If it had lasted all day, Herodotus would

have probably mentioned that fact. That it ended towards evening is, I

think, proved by the line from the "Vespae" which I have already quoted,

and to which my attention was called by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's

account of the battle. I think that the succeeding lines in

Aristophanes, also already quoted, justify the description which I have

given of the rear-ranks of the Persians keeping up a flight of arrows

over the heads of their comrades against the Greeks.

SYNOPSIS OF EVENTS BETWEEN THE BATTLE OF MARATHON, B.C. 490, AND THE

DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS AT SYRACUSE, B.C. 413.

B.C. 490 to 487. All Asia is filled with the preparations made by King

Darius for a new expedition against Greece. Themistocles persuades the

Athenians to leave off dividing the proceeds of their silver mines among

themselves, and to employ the money in strengthening their navy.

487. Egypt revolts from the Persians, and delays the expedition against

Greece.

485. Darius dies, and Xerxes his son becomes King of Persia in his

stead.

484 The Persians recover Egypt.

480 Xerxes invades Greece. Indecisive actions between the Persian and

Greek fleets at Artemisium. Destruction of the three hundred Spartans

at Thermopyae. The Athenians abandon Attica and go on shipboard. Great

naval victory of the Greeks at Salamis. Xerxes returns to Asia, leaving

a chosen army under Mardonius, to carry on the war against the Greeks.

478. Mardonius and his army destroyed by the Greeks at Plataea The

Greeks land in Asia Minor, and defeat a Persian force at Mycale. In this

and the following years the Persians lose all their conquests in Europe,

and many on the coast of Asia.

477. Many of the Greek maritime states take Athens as their leader,

instead of Sparta.

466. Victories of Cimon over the Persians at the Eurymedon.

464. Revolt of the Helots against Sparta. Third Messenian war.

460. Egypt again revolts against Persia. The Athenians send a powerful

armament to aid the Egyptians, which, after gaining some successes, is

destroyed, and Egypt submits. This war lasted six years.

457. Wars in Greece between the Athenian and several Peloponnesian

states. Immense exertions of Athens at this time. There is an original

inscription still preserved in the Louvre, which attests the energies of

Athens at this crisis, when Athens, like England in modern wars, at once

sought conquests abroad, and repelled enemies at home. At the period we

now advert to (B.C. 457), an Athenian armament of two hundred galleys

was engaged in a bold though unsuccessful expedition against Egypt. The

Athenian crews had landed, had won a battle; they had then re-embarked

and sailed up the Nile, and were busily besieging the Persian garrison

in Memphis. As the complement of a trireme galley was at least two

hundred men, we cannot estimate the forces then employed by Athens

against Egypt at less than forty thousand men. At the same time she kept

squadrons on the coasts of Phoenicia and Cyprus, and yet maintained

a home-fleet that enabled her to defeat her Peloponnesian enemies

at Cecryphalae and AEgina, capturing in the last engagement seventy

galleys. This last fact may give us some idea of the strength of the

Athenian home-fleet that gained the victory; and by adopting the same

ratio of multiplying whatever number of galleys we suppose to have been

employed, by two hundred, so as to gain the aggregate number of the

crews, we may form some estimate of the forces which this little, Greek

state then kept on foot. Between sixty and seventy thousand men must

have served in her fleets during that year. Her tenacity of purpose was

equal to her boldness of enterprise. Sooner than yield or withdraw from

any of their expeditions the Athenians at this very time, when Corinth

sent an army to attack their garrison at Megara, did not recall a single

crew or a single soldier from AEgina or from abroad; but the lads and

old men, who had been left to guard the city, fought and won a battle

against these new assailants. The inscription which we have referred to

is graven on a votive tablet to the memory of the dead, erected in that

year by the Erecthean tribe, one of the ten into which the Athenians

were divided. It shows, as Thirlwall has remarked, "that the Athenians

were conscious of the greatness of their own effort;" and in it this

little civic community of the ancient world still "records to us with

emphatic simplicity, that 'its slain fell in Cyprus, in Egypt, in

Phoenicia, at Haliae, in AEgina, and in Megara, IN THE SAME YEAR.'"

[Paeans of the Athenian Navy.]

455. A thirty years' truce concluded between Athens and Lacedaemon.

440. The Samians endeavour to throw off the supremacy of Athens. Samos

completely reduced to subjection. Pericles is now sole director of the

Athenian councils.

431. Commencement of the great Peloponnesian war, in which Sparta,

at the head of nearly all the Peloponnesian states, and aided by the

Boeotians and some of the other Greeks beyond the Isthmus, endeavours

to reduce the power of Athens, and to restore independence to the

Greek maritime states who were the subject allies of Athens. At the

commencement of the war the Peloponnesian armies repeatedly invade and

ravage Attica, but Athens herself is impregnable, and her fleets secure

her the dominion of the sea.

430. Athens visited by a pestilence, which sweeps off large numbers of

her population.

426. The Athenians gain great advantages over the Spartans at

Sphacteria, and by occupying Cythera; but they suffer a severe defeat

in Boeotia, and the Spartan general Brasidas, leads an expedition to

the Thracian coasts, and conquers many of the most valuable Athenian

possessions in those regions.

421. Nominal truce for thirty years between Athens and Sparta, but

hostilities continue on the Thracian coast and in other quarters.

415. The Athenians send an expedition to conquer Sicily.