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 the common foe;
and that the latent seeds of revolt and disunion in the Persian empire
would soon burst forth and paralyze its energies, so as to leave Greek
independence secure.
With these hopes and risks, Miltiades, on the afternoon of a September
day, B.C. 490, 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 Heraclidæ 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; neighbor thus fighting by the side of neighbor, 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 Platæans 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, breastplate, greaves, and short sword.
Thus equipped, they usually advanced slowly and steadily into action in
a 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 a 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.[45]
[Footnote 45: 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 Mantinea, more
than a century after Marathon, when Epaminondas introduced the tactics
which Alexander the Great in ancient times, and Frederick the Great in
modern times, made so famous, of concentrating an overpowering force to
bear 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 favor 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 Æschylus, who fought in both battles, tells us was afterward 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 exercise of
the _palæstra_, 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 mile or so 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 fire,
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 Afghanistan, 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 leveled spears, against which the light targets, the
short lances and cimeters 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 Sacæ fought, they succeeded in
breaking through the weakened 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
toward the inner country. There the nature of the ground gave the
opportunity of rallying and renewing the struggle.
Meanwhile, the Greek wings, where Miltiades had concentrated his chief
strength, had routed the Asiatics opposed to them; and the Athenian and
Platæan 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 reorganized troops, and the
full force of the Greeks was brought into close action with the Persian
and Sacean divisions of the enemy. Datis' veterans strove hard to keep
their ground, and evening was approaching before the stern encounter was
decided.
But the Persians, with their slight wicker shields, destitute of body
armor, and never taught by training to keep the even front and act with
the regular movement of the Greek infantry, fought at heavy disadvantage
with their shorter and feebler weapons against the compact array of
well-armed Athenian and Platæan spearmen, all perfectly drilled to
perform each necessary evolution in concert, and to preserve a 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 ten or twelve, upon the projecting spears of the
Greeks, striving to force a lane into the phalanx, and to bring their
cimeters 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 upon
their assailants nerved them to fight still more fiercely on.
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,[46] where the invaders were now hastily launching their galleys,
and seeking to embark and fly. Flushed with success, the Athenians
attacked and strove to fire the fleet. But here the Asiatics resisted
desperately, and the principal loss sustained by the Greeks was in the
assault on the ships. Here fell the brave War-ruler Callimachus, the
general Stesilaus, and other Athenians of note. Seven galleys were
fired; 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.
[Footnote 46:
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.]
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
harbor 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 reënforcement from Sparta arrived. Two thousand
Lacedæmonian 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 Lacedæmon.
The number of the Persian dead was sixty-four hundred; of the Athenians,
one hundred and ninety-two. The number of the Platæans 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 armor 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.[47]
[Footnote 47: 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 "Ceramicus." But it was
felt that a distinction ought to be made in the funeral honors 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 antiquarian Pausanias read
those names there six hundred years after the time when they were first
graven.[48] The columns have long perished, but the mound still marks
the spot where the noblest heroes of antiquity repose.
[Footnote 48: Pausanias stales, with implicit belief, that the
battle-field 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 neighborhood 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.]
A separate tumulus was raised over the bodies of the slain Platæans, and
another over the light-armed slaves who had taken part and had fallen in
the battle.[49] There was also a separate funeral 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 success. As soon
as the Persians had quitted the western coasts of the Ægean, 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 it at his disposal; not telling them whither he meant to lead it,
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.
[Footnote 49: 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.]
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 El Dorado of the West. The Athenians probably thought that
the recent victor of Marathon, and former officer of Darius, was about
to lead 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
afterward forbade 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 the 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. Xanthippas, 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
afterward illustrious Cimon, Miltiades dying, soon after the trial, of
the injury which he had received at Paros.
The melancholy end of Miltiades, after his elevation to such a height
of power and glory, must often have been recalled to the minds 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 itself 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 afterward, 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 background were
seen the Phoenician galleys, and, nearer to the spectator, the Athenians
and the Platæans--distinguished by their leather 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 cimeters, their
loose trousers, and Phrygian tiaras.
These and other memorials of Marathon were the produce of the meridian
age of Athenian intellectual splendor, of the age of Phidias and
Pericles; for it was not merely by the generation whom the battle
liberated from Hippias and the Medes that the transcendent importance of
their victory was gratefully recognized. 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 district 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."
It was not indeed by one defeat, however signal, that the pride of
Persia could be broken, and her dreams of universal empire dispelled.
Ten years afterward 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 signalized the conflicts of Greeks and Persians at
Artemisium, Salamis, Platæa, 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 forever the spell of Persian
invincibility, which had previously paralyzed men's minds. It generated
among the Greeks the spirit which beat back Xerxes, and afterward 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 civilization.
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 favorable 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 abatis 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.
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 (Xenophon), 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 Wordsworth,[50]
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 leveled spears, against which, if any Persian
horse advanced, they would be driven back in confusion upon their own
foot.
[Footnote 50: _Greece_.]
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
Cæsar routed the Pompeian cavalry--which had previously defeated his
own--and won the battle of Pharsalia.