Home : Mimico History : Retail Stores and Merchants : Fast Food Outlets : Banks : Postal Outlet : Library : Travel Agents : Bars and Restaurants : Medical and Dental : Professional Services : Community and Service Organizations : Churches : Schools : Motels : Condominims and Townhouses : Apartment Buildings : Cleaning and Maid Services : Funeral Homes : Dry Cleaners and Laundromats : Gas Stations and Auto Repair : Driving Schools : Daycare Services : Sailing and Powerboating : Sail Makers and Boat Sales : Mimico-by-the-Lake B.I.A. : Bus and Streetcar Services : Parks and Recreation : Community Events : Community News : Search for Bestselling Products : Save with these fine Internet Stores and Companies : Advertise on this site : Top 30 pages on this site : Site Map

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.

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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER III.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA, B.C. 331.

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


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER XI.

THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM, A.D. 1704.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Blenheim, 1704, and the
Battle of Pultowa, 1709.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER XIV.

THE BATTLE OF VALMY.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Valmy, 1792, and the Battle
of Waterloo, 1815.


CHAPTER 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.


CHAPTER II.

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

"The Romans knew not, and could not know, how deeply the
greatness of their own posterity, and the fate of the whole
Western world, were involved in the destruction of the fleet of
Athens in the harbour of Syracuse.  Had that great expedition
proved victorious, the energies of Greece during the next
eventful century would have found their field in the West no less
than in the East; Greece, and not Rome, might have conquered
Carthage; Greek instead of Latin might have been at this day the
principal element of the language of Spain, of France, and of
Italy; and the laws of Athens, rather than of Rome, might be the
foundation of the law of the civilized world."--ARNOLD.  "The
great expedition to Sicily, one of the most decisive events in
the history of the world."--NIEBUHR.

Few cities have undergone more memorable sieges during ancient
and mediaeval times, than has the city of Syracuse.  Athenian,
Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Saracen, and Norman, have
in turns beleaguered her walls; and the resistance which she
successfully opposed to some of her early assailants was of the
deepest importance, not only to the fortunes of the generations
then in being, but to all the subsequent current of human events.
To adopt the eloquent expressions of Arnold respecting the check
which she gave to the Carthaginian arms, "Syracuse was a
breakwater, which God's providence raised up to protect the yet
immature strength of Rome."  And her triumphant repulse of the
great Athenian expedition against her was of even more wide-
spread and enduring importance.  It forms a decisive epoch in the
strife for universal empire, in which all the great states of
antiquity successively engaged and failed.

The present city of Syracuse is a place of little or no military
strength, as the fire of artillery from the neighbouring heights
would almost completely command it.  But in ancient warfare its
position, and the care bestowed on its walls, rendered it
formidably strong against the means of offence which then were
employed by besieging armies.

The ancient city, in the time of the Peloponnesian war, was
chiefly built on the knob of land which projects into the sea on
the eastern coast of Sicily, between two bays; one of which, to
the north, was called the bay of Thapsus, while the southern one
formed the great harbour of the city of Syracuse itself.  A small
island, or peninsula (for such it soon was rendered), lies at the
south-eastern extremity of this knob of land, stretching almost
entirely across the mouth of the great harbour, and rendering it
nearly land-locked.  This island comprised the original
settlement of the first Greek colonists from Corinth, who founded
Syracuse two thousand five hundred years ago; and the modern city
has shrunk again into these primary limits.  But, in the fifth
century before our era, the growing wealth and population of the
Syracusans had led them to occupy and include within their city
walls portion after portion of the mainland lying next to the
little isle; so that at the time of the Athenian expedition the
seaward part of the land between the two bays already spoken of
was built over, and fortified from bay to bay; constituting the
larger part of Syracuse.

The landward wall, therefore, of the city traversed this knob of
land, which continues to slope upwards from the sea, and which to
the west of the old fortifications (that is, towards the interior
of Sicily) rises rapidly for a mile or two, but diminishes in
width, and finally terminates in a long narrow ridge, between
which and Mount Hybla a succession of chasms and uneven low
ground extend.  On each flank of this ridge the descent is steep
and precipitous from its summits to the strips of level land that
lie immediately below it, both to the south-west and north-west.

The usual mode of assailing fortified towns in the time of the
Peloponnesian war, was to build a double wall round them,
sufficiently strong to check any sally of the garrison from
within, or any attack of a relieving force from without.  The
interval within the two walls of the circumvallation was roofed
over, and formed barracks, in which the besiegers posted
themselves, and awaited the effects of want or treachery among
the besieged in producing a surrender.  And, in every Greek city
of those days, as in every Italian republic of the middle ages,
the rage of domestic sedition between aristocrats and democrats
ran high.  Rancorous refugees swarmed in the camp of every
invading enemy; and every blockaded city was sure to contain
within its walls a body of intriguing malcontents, who were eager
to purchase a party-triumph at the expense of a national
disaster.  Famine and faction were the allies on whom besiegers
relied.  The generals of that time trusted to the operation of
these sure confederates as soon as they could establish a
complete blockade.  They rarely ventured on the attempt to storm
any fortified post.  For the military engines of antiquity were
feeble in breaching masonry, before the improvements which the
first Dionysius effected in the mechanics of destruction; and the
lives of spearmen the boldest and most highly-trained would, of
course, have been idly spent in charges against unshattered
walls.

A city built, close to the sea, like Syracuse, was impregnable,
save by the combined operations of a superior hostile fleet and a
superior hostile army.  And Syracuse, from her size, her
population, and her military and naval resources, not unnaturally
thought herself secure from finding in another Greek city a foe
capable of sending a sufficient armament to menace her with
capture and subjection.  But in the spring of 414 B.C. the
Athenian navy was mistress of her harbour and the adjacent seas;
an Athenian army had defeated her troops, and cooped them within
the town; and from bay to bay a blockading wall was being rapidly
carried across the strips of level ground and the high ridge
outside the city (then termed Epipolae), which, if completed,
would have cut the Syracusans off from all succour from the
interior of Sicily, and have left them at the mercy of the
Athenian generals.  The besiegers' works were, indeed,
unfinished; but every day the unfortified interval in their lines
grew narrower, and with it diminished all apparent hope of safety
for the beleaguered town.

Athens was now staking the flower of her forces, and the
accumulated fruits of seventy years of glory, on one bold throw
for the dominion of the Western world.  As Napoleon from Mount
Coeur de Lion pointed to St. Jean d'Acre, and told his staff that
the capture of that town would decide his destiny, and would
change the face of the world; so the Athenian officers, from the
heights of Epipolae, must have looked on Syracuse, and felt that
with its fall all the known powers of the earth would fall
beneath them.  They must have felt also that Athens, if repulsed
there, must pause for ever in her career of conquest, and sink
from an imperial republic into a ruined and subservient
community.

At Marathon, the first in date of the Great Battles of the World,
we beheld Athens struggling for self-preservation against the
invading armies of the East.  At Syracuse she appears as the
ambitious and oppressive invader of others.  In her, as in other
republics of old and of modern times, the same energy that had
inspired the most heroic efforts in defence of the national
independence, soon learned to employ itself in daring and
unscrupulous schemes of self-aggrandizement at the expense of
neighbouring nations.  In the interval between the Persian and
Peloponnesian wars she had rapidly grown into a conquering and
dominant state, the chief of a thousand tributary cities, and the
mistress of the largest and best-manned navy that the
Mediterranean had yet beheld.  The occupations of her territory
by Xerxes and Mardonius, in the second Persian war, had forced
her whole population to become mariners; and the glorious results
of that struggle confirmed them in their zeal for their country's
service at sea.  The voluntary suffrage of the Greek cities of
the coasts and islands of the AEgean first placed Athens at the
head of the confederation formed for the further prosecution of
the war against Persia.  But this titular ascendancy was soon
converted by her into practical and arbitrary dominion.  She
protected them from piracy and the Persian power, which soon fell
into decrepitude and decay; but she exacted in return implicit
obedience to herself.  She claimed and enforced a prerogative of
taxing them at her discretion; and proudly refused to be
accountable for her mode of expending their supplies.
Remonstrance against her assessments was treated as factious
disloyalty; and refusal to pay was promptly punished as revolt.
Permitting and encouraging her subject allies to furnish all
their contingents in money, instead of part consisting of ships
and men, the sovereign republic gained the double object of
training her own citizens by constant and well-paid service in
her fleets, and of seeing her confederates lose their skill and
discipline by inaction, and become more and more passive and
powerless under her yoke.  Their towns were generally dismantled;
while the imperial city herself was fortified with the greatest
care and sumptuousness:  the accumulated revenues from her
tributaries serving to strengthen and adorn to the utmost her
havens, her docks, her arsenals, her theatres, and her shrines;
and to array her in that plenitude of architectural magnificence,
the ruins of which still attest the intellectual grandeur of the
age and people, which produced a Pericles to plan and a Phidias
to execute.

All republics that acquire supremacy over other nations, rule
them selfishly and oppressively.  There is no exception to this
in either ancient or modern times.  Carthage, Rome, Venice,
Genoa, Florence, Pisa, Holland, and Republican France, all
tyrannized over every province and subject state where they
gained authority.  But none of them openly avowed their system of
doing so upon principle, with the candour which the Athenian
republicans displayed, when any remonstrance was made against the
severe exactions which they imposed upon their vassal allies.
They avowed that their empire was a tyranny, and frankly stated
that they solely trusted to force and terror to uphold it.  They
appealed to what they called "the eternal law of nature, that the
weak should be coerced by the strong."  [THUC. i. 77.]  Sometimes
they stated, and not without some truth, that the unjust hatred
of Sparta against themselves forced them to be unjust to others
in self-defence.  To be safe they must be powerful; and to be
powerful they must plunder and coerce their neighbours.  They
never dreamed of communicating any franchise, or share in office,
to their dependents; but jealously monopolized every post of
command, and all political and judicial power; exposing
themselves to every risk with unflinching gallantry; enduring
cheerfully the laborious training and severe discipline which
their sea-service required; venturing readily on every ambitious
scheme; and never suffering difficulty or disaster to shake their
tenacity of purpose.  Their hope was to acquire unbounded empire
for their country, and the means of maintaining each of the
thirty thousand citizens who made up the sovereign republic, in
exclusive devotion to military occupations, and to those
brilliant sciences and arts in which Athens already had reached
the meridian of intellectual splendour.

Her great political, dramatist speaks of the Athenian empire as
comprehending a thousand states.  The language of the stage must
not be taken too literally; but the number of the dependencies of
Athens, at the time when the Peloponnesian confederacy attacked
her, was undoubtedly very great.  With a few trifling exceptions,
all the islands of the AEgean, and all the Greek cities, which in
that age fringed the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, and
Thrace paid tribute to Athens, and implicitly obeyed her orders.
The AEgean Sea was an Attic lake.  Westward of Greece, her
influence though strong, was not equally predominant.  She had
colonies and allies among the wealthy and populous Greek
settlements in Sicily and South Italy, but she had no organized
system of confederates in those regions; and her galleys brought
her no tribute from the western seas.  The extension of her
empire over Sicily was the favourite project of her ambitious
orators and generals.  While her great statesman Pericles lived,
his commanding genius kept his countrymen under control and
forbade them to risk the fortunes of Athens in distant
enterprises, while they had unsubdued and powerful enemies at
their own doors.  He taught Athens this maxim; but he also taught
her to know and to use her own strength, and when Pericles had
departed the bold spirit which he had fostered overleaped the
salutary limits which he had prescribed.  When her bitter
enemies, the Corinthians, succeeded, in 431 B.C., in inducing
Sparta to attack her, and a confederacy was formed of five-sixths
of the continental Greeks, all animated by anxious jealousy and
bitter hatred of Athens; when armies far superior in numbers and
equipment to those which had marched against the Persians were
poured into the Athenian territory, and laid it waste to the city
walls; the general opinion was that Athens would, in two or three
years at the farthest, be reduced to submit to the requisitions
of her invaders.  But her strong fortifications, by which she was
girt and linked to her principal haven, gave her, in those ages,
almost all the advantages of an insular position.  Pericles had
made her trust to her empire of the seas.  Every Athenian in
those days was a practised seaman.  A state indeed whose members,
of an age fit for service, at no time exceeded thirty thousand,
and whose territorial extent did not equal half Sussex, could
only have acquired such a naval dominion as Athens once held, by
devoting, and zealously training, all its sons to service in its
fleets.  In order to man the numerous galleys which she sent out,
she necessarily employed also large numbers of hired mariners and
slaves at the oar; but the staple of her crews was Athenian, and
all posts of command were held by native citizens.  It was by
reminding them of this, of their long practice in seamanship, and
the certain superiority which their discipline gave them over the
enemy's marine, that their great minister mainly encouraged them
to resist the combined power of Lacedaemon and her allies.  He
taught them that Athens might thus reap the fruit of her zealous
devotion to maritime affairs ever since the invasion of the
Medes; "she had not, indeed, perfected herself; but the reward of
her superior training was the rule of the sea--a mighty dominion,
for it gave her the rule of much fair land beyond its waves, safe
from the idle ravages with which the Lacedaemonians might harass
Attica, but never could subdue Athens." [THUC. lib. i. sec. 144.]

Athens accepted the war with which her enemies threatened her,
rather than descend from her pride of place.  And though the
awful visitation of the Plague came upon her, and swept away more
of her citizens than the Dorian spear laid low, she held her own
gallantly against her foes.  If the Peloponnesian armies in
irresistible strength wasted every spring her corn lands, her
vineyards, and her olive groves with fire and sword, she
retaliated on their coasts with her fleets; which, if resisted,
were only resisted to display the pre-eminent skill and bravery
of her seamen.  Some of her subject-allies revolted, but the
revolts were in general sternly and promptly quelled.  The genius
of one enemy had, indeed, inflicted blows on her power in Thrace
which she was unable to remedy; but he fell in battle in the
tenth year of the war; and with the loss of Brasidas the
Lacedaemonians seemed to have lost all energy and judgment.  Both
sides at length grew weary of the war; and in 421 B.C. a truce of
fifty years was concluded, which, though ill kept, and though
many of the confederates of Sparta refused to recognise it, and
hostilities still continued in many parts of Greece, protected
the Athenian territory from the ravages of enemies, and enabled
Athens to accumulate large sums out of the proceeds of her annual
revenues.  So also, as a few years passed by, the havoc which the
pestilence and the sword had made in her population was repaired;
and in 415 B.C. Athens was full of bold and restless spirits, who
longed for some field of distant enterprise, wherein they might
signalize themselves, and aggrandize the state; and who looked on
the alarm of Spartan hostility as a mere old woman's tale.  When
Sparta had wasted their territory she had done her worst; and the
fact of its always being in her power to do so, seemed a strong
reason for seeking to increase the transmarine dominion of
Athens.

The West was now the quarter towards which the thoughts of every
aspiring Athenian were directed.  From the very beginning of the
war Athens had kept up an interest in Sicily; and her squadrons
had from time to time appeared on its coasts and taken part in
the dissensions in which the Sicilian Greeks were universally
engaged one against the other.  There were plausible grounds for
a direct quarrel, and an open attack by the Athenians upon
Syracuse.

With the capture of Syracuse all Sicily, it was hoped, would be
secured.  Carthage and Italy were next to be assailed.  With
large levies of Iberian mercenaries she then meant to overwhelm
her Peloponnesian enemies.  The Persian monarchy lay in hopeless
imbecility, inviting Greek invasion; nor did the known world
contain the power that seemed capable of checking the growing
might of Athens, if Syracuse once could be hers.

The national historian of Rome has left us, as an episode of his
great work, a disquisition on the probable effects that would
have followed, if Alexander the Great had invaded Italy.
Posterity has generally regarded that disquisition as proving
Livy's patriotism more strongly than his impartiality or
acuteness.  Yet, right or wrong, the speculations of the Roman
writer were directed to the consideration of a very remote
possibility.  To whatever age Alexander's life might have been
prolonged, the East would have furnished full occupation for his
martial ambition, as well as for those schemes of commercial
grandeur and imperial amalgamation of nations, in which the truly
great qualities of his mind loved to display themselves.  With
his death the dismemberment of his empire among his generals was
certain, even as the dismemberment of Napoleon's empire among his
marshals would certainly have ensued, if he had been cut off in
the zenith of his power.  Rome, also, was far weaker when the
Athenians were in Sicily, than she was a century afterwards, in
Alexander's time.  There can be little doubt but that Rome would
have been blotted out from the independent powers of the West,
had she been attacked at the end of the fifth century B.C., by an
Athenian army, largely aided by Spanish mercenaries, and flushed
with triumphs over Sicily and Africa; instead of the collision
between her and Greece having been deferred until the latter had
sunk into decrepitude, and the Roman Mars had grown into full
vigour.

The armament which the Athenians equipped against Syracuse was in
every way worthy of the state which formed such projects of
universal empire; and it has been truly termed "the noblest that
ever yet had been sent forth by a free and civilized
commonwealth."  [Arnold's History of Rome.]  The fleet consisted
of one hundred and thirty-four war galleys, with a multitude of
store ships.  A powerful force of the best heavy-armed infantry
that Athens and her allies could furnish was sent on board,
together with a smaller number of slingers and bowmen.  The
quality of the forces was even more remarkable than the number.
The zeal of individuals vied with that of the republic