i'W!'i//y:f-' ■'''■' ' . NAPOLEON I. Fbotogravtire from a portrait by S. Tofanelli. g^ ^[ji:)a^mjLL^'VJ<'<^')'xwJr^yx<.)'xv^vr^ro^^ .^c JJC^.)XO)XCJX»SSS THE P^J ^^^k^^<7>\ COLONIAL M5^^^ -v\ -^ Copyright, 1900, Bv THE COLONIAL PRESS. SPECIAL INTRODUCTION CREASY'S " Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World from Marathon to Waterloo " is a famous book which is not merely lodged in libraries, but is read and re-read. It is not only an authority, a final authority in one aspect, but the stories the writer tells are as interesting in narrative as human struggle is itself interesting, while his deductions as to the effects are as profound as philosophy and as sound as fact-entrenched truth. To be sure, historical students will differ with him, now and again, in his selection of this battle and that as more decisive than others. Such differences of opinion are inevitable in a world where the minds of men are free ; but these differences in no sense detract from the value of Creasy's work, and his selections are authoritative to-day because, though his book was published almost half a century ago and has been read and studied and discussed ever since, no one has made better selections, no one has on this subject given us a better book. Apart from the scholarliness and literary skill of Creasy's work, there is another reason why this great book has en- during value. The writer was essentially fair-minded. He was educated as a lawyer, but when he undertook this task he held a brief for neither side in any of the cases at issue. He had also been a judge, and when he became the military critic and historian he was thoroughly judicial in his attitude and frame of mind. He was not English in his attitude, nor French, nor German — he was a cosmopolitan observer look- ing at the mighty consequences of great happenings. And so Creasy, though he had published books before, and though he published much afterwards, completed in 1851, in his " Fif- teen Decisive Battles," the work upon which rests his enduring fame. In his own preface to his book, as will presently be seen, 00 A 109 IV DECISIVE BATTLES Creasy half-way apologized for publishing such a book at that time. Europe was then in profound peace. The forces which had struggled at Waterloo, Creasy's last battle, by their sacrifices gave Europe a long season of repose, a repose which the peace societies hoped would never be broken. This, how- ever, was only a very vain hope, for only a few years later the peace of Europe was rudely broken by the conflict of arms in the Crimea, and a universal war was barely averted. And in the Crimea they had battles, too— battles of great moment and consequence— in Alma, Inkerman, Balaklava, and the siege of Sevastopol. None of these, however, seemed to make an addendum to Creasy's work necessary. But before twenty years had passed, before even the death of the distinguished author, there were two momentous battles as great in their consequences as any in Creasy's list. These were Gettysburg and Sedan. To this probably Creasy agreed, and it has often been wondered that he did not himself add them to his book. He did not, however; and so, in this new edition of Creasy's great work, accounts of these battles are added, without any apology and also without any effort to imitate Creasy's style of writing or presentation. And only last year there was a short campaign of the Amer- icans against the Spanish which was decisive in the highest sense, for it ended forever Spain's colonial empire, an empire which once embraced countless islands of the seas, besides more than half a hemisphere. Manila may have been the decisive battle; or it may have been Santiago. We are too close to these events to judge with accuracy, and we shall, therefore, add the campaign to the book as " Manila and San- tiago," and leave it to others to decide where the great and de- cisive battle was fought. It is a rather singular thing that in a work describing eigh- teen great decisive battles three of these should be those in which the United States troops were engaged; for the Ameri- cans have always be«n a peace-loving people, and the great triumphs which have made them powerful have been the tri- umphs of peace. But they won their liberty by war, they have preserved it by war, and by war they have rescued their op- pressed neighbors from a mediaeval tyranny which these neigh- bors were powerless to overthrow. This last war was not great in the quantity of fighting, nor by reason of the numbers SPECIAL INTRODUCTION. v engaged, but it was vastly great in the consequences to which it will lead. Spain has lost all of her colonies, and the United States has assumed grave responsibilities not contemplated by the fathers of the repubHc. What these consequences will be, none but a prophet can say. During twenty-three hundred years Creasy found only fif- teen battles which he called decisive in the highest sense. Be- tween his great battles often two centuries would elapse. And all these happened during the ages when all men were more or less soldiers. In the eighty-four years since Waterloo there have been three conflicts that have been, judged even by a Creasy standard, decisive. This does not mean that the world has grown more warlike or more belligerent; on the contrary, it proves that we do not go to war as lightly as once we did, and that now when we have to fight there is something to fight about. It proves also that modern science enables us to decide these conflicts quickly and with certainty. War has been made less dangerous because it is more dangerous. Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy, the author of this great work, was bom in England in 1812. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1837. He was for a little while an assistant judge of the Westminster Sessions Court, but gave this up in 1840 to become Professor of History in the University of London, It was while he held this post that he did the historical and critical work which will preserve his name among those of the great English writers. In i860 he became Chief Justice of Ceylon, and served as such for ten years. He returned to England in 1870, much broken in health, and died eight years later. After his return home he wrote and published several books, but none of them re- ceived the same share of favor that was accorded to his " Fif- teen Decisive Battles." John Gilmer Speed. THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE IT is an honorable characteristic of the spirit of this age, that projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civ- ilized states with gradually increasing aversion. The Uni- versal Peace Society certainly does not, and probably never will, enroll 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 peace- ful 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 favorite 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 honor, which makes the combatants confront agony and destruction. And the powers of the human intellect are rarely more strongly dis- played 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 pro- vides 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 ofificer. Alva surpassed the Prince of Orange in the field; and Suwarrow viii DECISIVE BATTLES was the military superior of Kosciusko. To adopt the em- phatic 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 ac- count of their enduring importance, and by reason of the prac- tical 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 in- vestigate 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 these battles had come to a dififerent termination. Hallam has ad- mirably expressed this in his remarks on the victory gained by Charles Martel, between Tours and Poictiers, over the in- vading 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. Dififerent 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 dififerent historical personages. But our concurring in our catalogues is of little moment, pro- vided 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 eflfect 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 THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE ix not only to observe what has been and what is, but also to ponder on what might have been.* We thus learn not to judge of the wisdom of measures too exclusively by the results. We learn to apply the juster stand- ard 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 Trpoaipeai,';, to adopt the Greek expressive word of Polyb- ius,f 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 fif- teen. I need hardly remark that it is not the number of killed and wounded in a battle that determines its general historical importance. J 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 numer- ous conflicts between Asiatic rulers make me regard the en- gagement 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 eflfects 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 Plataea confirmed the superiority of European free states over Oriental despot- ism. So ^gospotamos, which finally crushed the maritime * See Bolingbroke " On the Study and Use of History," vol. ii., p. 497 of his collected notes, t Polyb., lib. ix., sect. 9. t See Montesquieu, " Grandeur et Decadence des Remains," p. 35. X DECISIVE BATTLES 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 mili- tary 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 neighboring country, recognize 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 recognize emphatically the wisdom and power of the supreme Lawgiver, the design of the Designer. Mitre Court Chambers, Temple, June 26, j8j/. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. PAGK The Battle of Marathon, B.C. 490 i Explanatory Remarks on some of the Circumstances of the Battle of Marathon 31 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Marathon, B.C. 490, and the Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse, B.C. 413 y^ CHAPTER II. Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse, B.C. 413 36 Synopsis of Events between the Defeat of the Athenians at Syra- cuse and the Battle of Arbela 55 CHAPTER III. The Battle of Arbela, B.C. 331 57 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Arbela and the Battle of the Metaurus 80 CHAPTER IV. The Battle of the Metaurus, B.C. 207 84 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 Ill CHAPTER V. Victory of Arminius over the Roman Legions under Varus, A.D. 9 115 Arminius 129 Synopsis of Events between Arminius's Victory over Varus and the Battle of Chalons 139 xi xii DECISIVE BATTLES CHAPTER VI. PAGE The Battle of Chalons, A.D. 451 141 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Chalons, A.D. 451, and the Battle of Tours, A.D. 732 156 CHAPTER VII. The Battle of Tours, A.D. 732 157 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Tours, A.D. 732, and the Battle of Hastings, A.D. 1066 167 CHAPTER VIII. The Battle of Hastings, A. D. 1066 170 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Hastings, A. D. 1066, and Joan of Arc's Victory at Orleans, A.D. 1429 202 CHAPTER IX. Joan of Arc's Victory over the English at Orleans, A.D. 1429 206 Synopsis of Events between Joan of Arc's Victory at Orleans, A.D. 1429, and the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, A.D. 1588 225 CHAPTER X. The Defeat of the Spanish Armalh^, A.D. 1588 227 Synopsis of Events between the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, A.D. 1 588, and the Battle of Blenheim, A.D. 1704 254 CHAPTER XI. The Battle of Blenheim, A.D. 1704 256 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Blenheim, A.D. 1704, and the Battle of Pultowa, A.D. 1709 279 CHAPTER XII. The Battle of Pultowa, A.D. 1709 280 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Pultowa, A.D. 1709, and the Defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga, A.D. 1777 294 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER XIII. FAGB Victory of the Americans over Burgoyne at Saratoga, A.D. I ^^y 297 Synopsis of European Events between the Defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga, A.D. 1777, and the Battle of Valmy, A.D. 1792 324 Synopsis of American Events between the Declaration of Inde- pendence, A.D. 1776, and the Battle of Gettysburg, A.D. 1863 324 CHAPTER XIV. The Battle of Valmy, A.D. 1792 325 Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Valmy, A.D. 1792, and the Battle of Waterloo, A.D. 1815 340 CHAPTER XV. The Battle of Waterloo, A.D. 181 5 343 Synopsis of European Events between the Battle of Waterloo, A.D. 1815, and the Battle of Sedan, A.D. 1870 404 CHAPTER XVI, The Battle of Gettysburg, A.D. 1863 405 Synopsis of American Events between the Battle of Gettysburg, A.D. 1863, and the War with Spain, A.D. 1898 41 1 CHAPTER XVII. The Battle of Sedan, A.D. 1870 412 CHAPTER XVIII. The Battles of Manila and Santiago, A.D. 1898 425 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Napoleon I (Portrait) Frontispiece Photogravure from a painting Admiral Dewey (Portrait) ii Photograviire from a photograph The Decisive Action with the Armada . . . .228 Photogravure from the original painting by Oswald W. Brierly THE DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD. CHAPTER I. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON. " Quibus actus uterque Europae atque Asise fatis concurrerit orbis." TWO thousand three hundred and forty years ago, a coun- cil of Athenian officers was summoned on the slope of one of the mountains that look over the plain of Mara- thon, 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. But one of the archons was also associated with them in the general com- mand of the army. This magistrate was termed the pole- march or War-ruler; he had the privilege of leading the right wing of the army in battle, and his vote in a council of war was equal to that of any of the generals. A noble Athenian named Callimachus was the War-ruler of this year; and as such stood listening to the earnest discussion of the ten gen- erals. They had, indeed, deep matter for anxiety, though little aware how momentous to mankind w^ere the votes they were about to give, or how the generations to come would read with I V '•'' • •' Decisive battles interest the record of their discussions. 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 intrusted 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 al- ready fulfilled half its mission of vengeance. Eretria, the con- federate of Athens in the bold march against Sardis nine years before, had fallen in the last few days ; and the Athenian gen- erals could discern from the heights the island of ^gilia, 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, who was seeking to be reinstated by foreign cimeters 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 lead- ing away into Median bondage. The numerical disparity between the force which the Athe- nian commanders had under them, and that which they were called on to encounter, was hopelessly 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 differ- ent 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 GEORGE DEWEY. {Admiral of tJie United States Navy.) PhotograTiite from a photograph. A THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 3 from Athens to Marathon, when the news of the Persian land- ing arrived, at higher than ten thousand men.* With one exception, the other Greeks held back from aid- ing 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 from a most unexpected one, did Athens receive aid at the moment of her great peril. Some years before this time the little state of Platsea in Boeotia, being hard pressed by her powerful neighbor, 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 ut- termost parts of the earth to destroy Athens, the brave Platae- ans, unsolicited, marched with their whole force to assist the defense, 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 re-enforcement was numerically small, but the gallant spirit of the men who com- posed it must have made it of ten-fold 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 succors was calculated to create among the Athenian ranks, f This generous daring of their weak but true-hearted ally * 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 for the num- ber of the Athenian free population remarkably confirms it. For the data of this see Boeckh's " Public Economy of Athens," vol. i., p. 45. Some M^TotKoi probably served as Hoplites at Marathon, but the number of resident aliens at Athens cannot have been large at this period. t Mr. Grote observes (vol. iv., p. 464) that " this volunteer march of the whole Plataean force to Marathon is one of the most affecting inci- dents 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 Platseans again were true to the Athenians against all risks, and all calculation of self-interest; and the destruction of 4 DECISIVE BATTLES was never forgotten at Athens. The Platseans were made the civil 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 of- fered up for a joint blessing from Heaven upon the Athenians, and the Platseans also. After the junction of the column from Platsea, the Athe- nian 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. f 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 com- manders saw stretched before them, along the shores of the winding bay, the tents and shipping of the varied nations who 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 exag- gerated, who rates at a hundred thousand the force which on this occasion had sailed, under the satraps Datis and Artapher- nes, from the Cilician shores against the devoted coasts of Eu- boea 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 con- fidence 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 Platsea 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 execu- tioners their loyal adherence to Athens. See Thucydides, lib. iii., sees. 53-60. t At the battle of Plataea, eleven years after Marathon, each of the eight thousand Athenian regular infantry who served them was at- tended by a light-armed slave. — Herod., lib. viii., 27, 28, 29. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 5 the Indian campaigns of our own regiments. On the contrary, up to the day of Marathon the Medes and Persians were re- puted 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 Greek 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 apphed to, and had promised succor 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 gen- erals were for speedier and bolder operations. And, fortunate- ly 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 ^acidje 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 oc- curred at the time when Pisistratus was tyrant of Athens. Two * 'A^Tji/aToi irpwTOi aveaxovTO eadrfrd re MtjSik);!/ opfWVTfs, Ka\ tous ivSpas Ta.VTr]v (adr)fJi(vovs. reois 5€ t\v rolffi ''EAAtjcj kclL rh otvofia twv MtjSwv ' Zwifxii ftf\(Tr}i Se PpaxvTTjTi icpdriaros St) oStos auTO(T;t*5ia^6<>' rh Sfovra THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 9 saw with the mihtary eye of a great general the advantage which the position of the forces gave him for a sudden attack, and as a profound poHtician he feh the perils of remaining in- active, 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 viotes of the generals were five and five, so that the voice of Callimachus would be decisive. O-n 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 countrymen to vote for giving battle : " It now rests with you, Callimachus, either to enslave Athens, or, by assuring her freedom, to win yourself an im- mortality of fame, such as not even Harmodius and Aristogi- ton have acquired ; for nevfer, since the Athenians were a peo- ple, 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 Athe- nians, 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 favor, we are able to get the best of it in an engagement." * The vote of the brave War-ruler was gained, the council determined to give battle ; and such was the ascendency and * Herodotus, lib. vi., sec. 109. The ii6th 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 speeches which ancient historians place in the mouths of kings and generals are generally inventions of their own ; but part of this speech of Miltiades bears internal evidence of authenticity. Such is the case with the remarkable expression ^v Se ^vfji.$d\wfi€i> ■nplv rt koI aadphp 'A^Tifaiuv ixere^fT^poifft ivyevea^ai, ^eciv ri Iffa vefiSuTCDP, oToi re ei/xtv irepiyevea^ai rp avfifioXri. This daring and almost irreverant assertion would never have been coined by Herodotus, but it is precisely con- sonant with what we know of the character of Miltiades ; and it is an expression which, if used by him, would be sure to be remembered and repeated by his hearers. lo DECISIVE BATTLES acknowledged 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 vigorous 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 thev and he were aware of their chance of a bloodless conquest through the machinations of his partisans among the Athe- nians. 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 northeastern 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 toward either extremity, the mountains coming close down to the water at the horns of the bay. There is a valley trending inward 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 bat- tle, 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 ofTer no obstruction to the horseman, but are commonly flooded with rain and so rendered imprac- ticable 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 when- ever he pleased, or of delaying it at his discretion, unless Da- THE BATTLE OF MARATHON ii tis were to attempt the perilous operation of storming the heights. If we turn to the map of the Old World, to test the com- parative territorial resources of the two states whose armies were now about to come into conflict, the immense preponder- ance of the material power of the Persian king over that of the Athenian republic is more striking than any similar con- trast 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 insig- nificance if compared with many a baronial fief of the Middle Ages, or many a colonial allotment of modern times. Its an- tagonist, 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, Afghanistan, 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 indiffer- ence 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 be- fore us through the twilight of primeval history, dim and in- distinct, but massive and majestic, like mountains in the early dawn. Instead, however, of the infinite variety and restless change which has characterized the institutions and fortunes of European states ever since the commencement of the civiliza- tion 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 characterized by the rapidity of their early conquests, by the immense extent of the dominions comprised in them, by the establishment of a satrap or pashaw system of governing the provinces, by an invariable 12 DECISIVE BATTLES and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate nursHngs of the seragHo 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 these 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 na- tions of Inner Asia, the paternal government of every house- hold 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 ab- ject obedience to their sovlereign which they exact from their family and dependents in their domestic economy." We should bear in mind, also, the inseparable connection 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, claim- ing the supreme control of education, stereotyping the lines in which literature and science must move, and limiting the ex- tent to which it shall be lawful for the human mind to prose- cute its inquiries. With these general characteristics rightly felt and under- stood it becomes a comparatively easy task to investigate and appreciate the origin, progress and principles of Oriental em- pires in general, as well as of the Persian monarchy in par- ticular. And we are thus better enabled to appreciate the re- pulse which Greece gave to the arms of the East, and to judge of the probable consequences to human civilization, if the Per- sians 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 ambi- tion ; 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 THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 13 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 organizations. 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 sacer- dotal 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 pre- rogatives.* 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 viarieties of the blending 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, en- terprising, 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 exhib- ited these national characteristics in the strongest degree. This spirit of activity and daring, joined to a generous sym- pathy 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, nerved them to defy the wrath of King Da- rius, and to refuse to receive back at his bidding the tyrant whom they had some years before driven out. 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 com- * 'Eirt prjrois yfpaat irwrpiKal BaaiXiiai. — THUCYD, lib. L , see. 1 2. 14 DECISIVE BATTLES bat at Marathon. Inscriptions in a character termed the Ar^ row-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 bafifled 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 vainglorious inscribers. The elder Niebuhr, Grotefend, and Lassen, had made some guesses at the meaning of the Cuneiform letters ; bui Major Rawlinson, of the East India Company's service, after years of labor, has at last accomplished the glorious achievement of fully revealing the alphabet and the grammar of this long un- known tongue. He has, in particular, fully deciphered and ex- pounded the inscription on the sacred rock of Behistun, on the western frontiers of Media. These records of the Achse- menidse 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.* 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 per- son 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 pre- dominant monarchy of the world. With the exception of the Chinese empire, in which, through- out 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' time, blended into the Persian. The * See the tenth volume of the " Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society." THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 15 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 honor, and the empire being frequently spoken of as that of the Medes, or as that of the Medes and Persians. Egypt and Gy- rene were Persian provinces ; the Greek colonists in Asia Minor and the islands of the ^gaean were Darius' 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 be- fore the Persians in a field of battle. Darius' 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 Mara- thon, that a strange nation toward the setting sun, called the Athenians, had dared to help his rebels in Ionia against him, and that they had plundered and burned 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 Pisistratidge 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 Arta- phernes. There Hippias (in the expressive words of Herodo- tus *) 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, * Herod., lib. v., c. 96. i6 DECISIVE BATTLES 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 con- sented. Twenty Athenian galleys, and five Eretrian, crossed the ^gsean Sea, and by a bold and sudden march upon Sardis, the Athenians and their allies succeeded in capturing the capi- tal city of the haughty satrap, who had recently menaced them with servitude or destruction. They were pursued, and de- feated 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 the empire, and was never to be forgiven or forgotten. In the em- phatic 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 burned by the Athenians and lonians, he took small heed of the lonians, 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 toward heaven ; and as he shot it into the air, he said, ' Oh ! supreme God, grant me that I may avenge myself on the Athenians.' And when he had said this, he ap- pointed one of his servants to say to him every day as he sat at meat, ' Si re,jemember the Athemans .' " Some years were occupied in the'complete reduction of Ionia. But when this was effected, Darius ordered his vic- torious forces to proceed to punish Athens and Eretria, and to conquer European Greece^^ The first armanent sent for this purpose was shattered by shipwreck, and nearly destroyed ofif 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 sufificient size for carrying cavalry as well as infantry across the .^gaean. 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 THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 17 of Wight), that King Darius, the lord of all men, from the ris- ing 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. Terror-stricken at the power of Persia and at the severe punishment that had recently been inflicted on the refractory lonians, many of the continental Greeks and nearly all the islanders submitted, and gave the required tokens of vassalage. At Sparta and Athens an indig- nant 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 vigor. 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 Arta- phernes, the son of the satrap of Sardis, and who was also nephew of Darius, were placed in titular joint command of the expedition. The real supreme authority was probably given to Datis alone, 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 imme- diately before Darius obtained the throne. Datis received in- structions 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 inhabi- tants away captive, and bring them as slaves into the presence of the Great King. Datis embarked his forces in the fleet that awaited them, *^schines in Ctes., p. 522, ed. Reiske. Mitford, vol. i., p. 485. ^schines is speaking of Xerxes, but Mitford is probably right in con- sidering 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.) 2 i8 DECISIVE BATTLES and coasting along the shores of Asia Minor till he was off Samos, he thence sailed due westward through the ^gaean Sea for Greece, taking the islands in his way. The Naxians had, ten years before, successfully stood a siege against a Per- sian armament, but they now were too terrified to offer any resistance, and fled to the mountain tops, while the enemy burned 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 Ere- trians ; 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 re- pulsed the assaults of the Persians against their walls for six days ; on the seventh they were betrayed by two of their chiefs, and the Persians occupied the city. The temples were burned in revenge for the firing of Sardis, and the inhabitants were bound, and placed as prisoners in the neighboring islet of .^gilia, to wait there till Datis should bring the Athenians to join them in captivity, whenBoth 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 ac- complished, Datis re-embarked his troops, and, crossing the little channel that separates Euboea from the mainland, he en- camped 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 advanta- geous, and the level nature of the ground on which he camped was favorable for the employment of his cavalry, if the Athe- nians should venture to engage him. Hippias, who accom- panied him, and acted as the guide of the invaders, had pointed out Marathon as the best place for a landing, for this very rea- son. 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 THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 19 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, who were 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 catas- trophe like that of Eretria, if Miltiades had not resolved and persuaded his colleagues to resolve on fighting at all hazards. When Miltiades arrayed his men for action, he staked on the arbitrament of one battle not only the fate of Athens, but that of all Greece ; for if Athens had fallen, no other Greek state, except Lacedsemon, would have had the courage to re- sist ; and the Lacedaemonians, though they would probably have died in their ranks to the last man, never could have suc- cessfully resisted the victorious Persians and the numerous Greek troops which would have soon marched under the Per- sian 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 reel- ing under the attacks of the Etruscans and Volscians from with- out, 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 afterward put forth ; nor could the Greek colonies in South Italy and Sicily hope to conquer 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 forbear- ance could not long have been relied on, and the future rival of Rome would have become as submissive a minister of the Per- sian power as were the Phoenician cities themselves. If we turn to Spain ; or if we pass the great mountain chain, which, 20 DECISIVE BATTLES 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, Slavs, and Teutons. Had Persia beaten Athens at Marathon, she could have found no obstacle to prevent Darius, the chosen ser- vant 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, 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 fortunate result of suc- cessful folly. As before has been remarked, Miltiades, while prince of the Chersonese, had seen service in the Persian armies ; and he knew by personal observation how many ele- ments 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 un- willing contingents from conquered nations now 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 armor and organization over the Asiatic, notwithstanding former reverses. Above all, he felt and worthily-trusted the en- thusiasm of those whom he led. The Athenians whom he led had proved by their newborn valor in recent wars against the neighboring states that " lib- erty 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 neighbors, 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 thor- oughly." So the nearly contemporaneous historian describes THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 2i the change of spirit that was seen in the Athenians after their tyrants were expelled ; * 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 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 ut- most in his and their own cause. With regard to future attacks from Asia, he might reasonably hope that one victory would inspirit all Greece to combine against the common foe ; and that the latent seeds of revolt and disunion in the Persian em- pire would soon burst forth and paralyze its energies, so as to leave Greek independence secure. With these hopes and risks, Miltiades, on the afternoon of a September day, 490 B.C., gave the word for the Athenian army to prepare the battle. There were many local associa- tions connected with those mountain heights which were cal- culated 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 Athe- nians and the Heraclidse 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 * 'Ab7iva7oi /xev vxJv tj^^t/j'to ' St^Xo? Se oi) kwt ev ixSvov aWci iraPTaxv V 'Iffrtyoplt) ws tffTi XP^t^"- (TirovSaiov, et Ka\ 'A^yaToi Tvpavvev6ixevoi fxei/ oiiSafiov rwv ffcpeas iripioLK(6vTwv ta-av ra iroXefxia o^ueiVoMS, airaWdx^evTes Se Tvpavvwu fj.aKp

v ravra '6ti KarexofJ-foi i^ei/ ^be^OKixKeov, i? SeffTrirri epya(6- fievoi • eKev^fpcobevTWv 5e aiiThs fKaffTOS kwvrcp irpo^vfieero Karepyd^ea^ai. — Herod., lib. v., c. 87. Mr. Grote's comment on this is one of the most eloquent and philo- sophical passages in his admirable fourth volume. The expression '10-7)70^/77 XPW** ffirovBalov is like some lines in old Barbour's poem of " The Bruce " : " Ah, Fredome is a noble thing ; Fredome makes man to haiff lyking, Freedome all solace to men gives. He lives at ease that freely lives." 22 DECISIVE BATTLES that very spot, and who were believed to be now heavenly powers, looking down with interest on their still beloved coun- try, and capable of interposing with superhuman aid in its be- half. According to old national custom, the warriors of each tribe were arrayed together; neighbor thus fighting by the side of neighbor, friend by friend, and the spirit of emulation and the consciousness of responsibility excited to the very utmost. The War-ruler, Callimachus, had the leading of the right wing; the 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 pur- suit 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 ad- vanced slowly and steadily into action in a uniform phalanx of about eight spears deep. But the military genius of Aliltiades led him to deviate on this occasion from the commonplace tac- tics of his countrymen. It was essential for him to extend his line so as to cover all the practicable ground, and to secure himself from being outflanked and charged in the rear by the Persian horse. This extension involved the weakening of his line. Instead of a uniform reduction of its strength, he deter- mined 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.* ^ In this order, and availing himself probably of the inequal- ities of the ground, so as to conceal his preparations from the enemy till the last possible moment, Miltiades drew up the * It is remarkable that there is no other instance of a Greek general deviating from the ordinary mode of bringing a phalanx of spearmen into action until the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea, more than a centiiry 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 to bear on some decisive point of the enemy's line, while he kept back or, m military phrase, refused, the weaker part of his own. '■ Persae," 402. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 23 eleven thousand infantry whose spears were to decide this crisis in the struggle between the European and the Asiatic worlds. The sacrifices by which the favor of heavlen 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 re- sounded the mutual exhortation, which ^schylus, who fought in both battles, tells us was afterward heard over the waves of Salamis : " On, sons of the Greeks ! Strike for the freedom of your country ! strike for the freedom of your children and of your wives — for the shrines of your fathers' gods, and for the sepulchres of your sires. All — all are now staked upon the strife." *0 iratSes 'EXXi^vcov tre '^XivSipovT€ irarpiS', iXevSepovTi 8i YlalSa^, yuvatKas, ^eojv re Trarpwuiv iSrj, ®y]Kas re Trpoyovwv. Nw iirlp TrdvTuyv dycov.* Instead of advancing at the usual slow pace of the phalanx, Miltiades brought his men on at a run. They were all trained in the exercise of the 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 mile or so of level ground that lay between the mountain foot and the Persian outposts, and so to get his troops into close action before the Asiatic cavalry could mount, form and manoeuvre against him, or their archers keep him long under fire, and before the enemy's generals could fairly deploy their masses. " When the Persians," says Herodotus, " saw the Athenians running down on them, without horse or bowmen, and scanty in numbers, they thought them a set of madmen rushing upon certain destruction." They began, however, to prepare to receive them, and the Eastern chiefs arrayed, as quickly as time and place allowed, the varied races who served in their motley ranks. Mountaineers from Hyrcania and Af- ghanistan, 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 * Persse, 402. 24 DECISIVE BATTLES the large host there was no uniformity of language, creed, race or mihtary 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 cimeters of the Orientals, offered weak defence. The front rank of the Asiatics must have gone down to a man at the first shock. Still they recoiled not, but strove by individual gallantry and by the weight of numbers to make up for the disadvantages of weap- ons and tactics, and to bear back the shallow line of the Euro- peans. In the centre, where the native Persians and the Sacae fought, they succeeded in breaking through the weakened part of th Athenian phalanx; and the tribes led by Aristides and Themistocles were, after a brave resistance, driven back over the plain, and chased by the Persians up the valley toward the inner country. There the nature of the ground gave the opportunity of rallying and renewing the struggle. Mean- while, 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 fugi- tives, 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 re- newed the fight with their reorganized troops, and the full force of the Greeks was brought into close action with the Persian and Sacian divisions of the enemy. Datis' veterans strove hard to keep their ground, and evening* was approaching before the stern encounter was decided. But the Persians, with their slight wicker shields, destitute of body-armor, and never taught by training to keep the even front and act with the regular movement of the Greek infantry, fought at heavy disadvantage with their shorter and feebler weapons against the compact array of well-armed Athenian and Plataean spearmen, all perfectly drilled to perform each necessary evolution in concert, and to preserve a uniform and * 'AAA' 2/xwt awucr6iJi,eada ^iiv 6eo7s -rrpht fo-irepa. — Aristoph., Vesuoe, 1085. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 25 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 f over the heads of their comrades, the foremost Persians kept rush- ing forward, sometimes singly, sometimes in desperate groups of twelve or ten upon the projecting spears of the Greeks, striv- ing to force a lane into the phalanx, and to bring their cimeters and daggers into play. J But the Greeks felt their superiority, and though the fatigue of the long-continued action told heav- ily on their inferior numbers, the sight of the carnage that they dealt upon their assailants nerved them to fight still more fiercely on. At last the previously unvanquished lords of Asia turned their backs and fled, and the Greeks followed, striking them down, to the water's edge,* where the invaders were now hastily launching their galleys, and seeking to embark and fly. Flushed with success, the Athenians attacked and strove to fire the fleet. But here the Asiatics resisted desperately, and the principal loss sustained by the Greeks was in the assault on the ships. Here fell the brave War-ruler Callimachus, the gen- eral Stesilaus, and other Athenians of note. Seven galleys were fired ; but the Persians succeeded in saving the rest. They pushed ofT from the fatal shore ; but even here the skill of Datis did not desert him, and he sailed round to the western coast of •j- 'E/xax^f'fcB' avTo7(Ti, Qv/xov o^ivr)v irenwKiTes, Stos a.vi]p irap' avffp vt" opyrjs rijv x^^vyrjy iffdiuv ' 'Tirh Sh Tuv TO^evixdruv ovk rjv ISfiv rbv ovpavhv. — Aristoph., Vespce, 1082. t See the description in the 62d section of the ninth book of Herodotus of the gallantry shown by the Persian infantry against the Lacedae- monians at Platsea. 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 Vespse already quoted), and the spirit of the Persians rnust have been even higher at Marathon than at Platsea. In both battles it was only the true Persians and the Sacse who showed this valor; the other Asiatics fled like sheep. * The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow ; The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear; Mountains above. Earth's, Oceans's plain below, Death in the front, Destruction in the rear! Such was the scene. — Byron's Cliilde Harold. 26 DECISIVE BATTLES Attica, in hopes to find the city unprotected, and to gain pos- session 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 harbor in the morning, Datis saw ar- rayed on the heights above the city the troops before whom his men had fled on the preceding evening. All hope of further con- quest in Europe for the time was abandoned, and the bafHed armada returned to the Asiatic coasts. After the battle had been fought, but while the dead bodies were yet on the ground, the promised re-enforcement from Sparta arrived. Two thousand Lacedaemonian spearmen, starting immediately after the full moon, had marched the hun- dred and fifty miles between Athens and Sparta in the wonder- fully 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 Lace- daemon. The number of the Persian dead was 6,400 ; of the Athenians, 192, The number of the 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 armor of the Greek spearmen, and the impossibility of heavy slaughter be- ing inflicted by sword or lance on troops so armed, as long as they kept firm in their ranks.* 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 de- posited 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 honors paid to the men of Marathon, even as their merit had been distinguished over that of all other * Mitford well refers to Crecy. Poitiers, and Agincourt as instances of similar disparity of loss between the conquerors and the conquered. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 27 Athenians. A lofty mound was raised on the plain of Mara- thon, 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 monu- mental column of each tribe were graven the names of those of its members whose glory it was to have fallen in the great battle of liberation. The antiquarian Pausanias read those names there six hundred years after the time when they were first graven, f The columns have long perished, but the mound still marks the spot where the noblest heroes of antiquity, the MapaSwvofxaxot, repose. A separate tumulus was raised over the bodies of the slain Platgeans, and another over the light-armed slaves who had taken part and had fallen in the battle.* There was also a sepa- rate funeral monument to the general to whose genius the vic- tory was mainly due. Miltiades did not live long after his achievement at Marathon, but he lived long enough to experi- ence a lamentable reverse of his popularity and success. As soon as the Persians had quitted the western coasts of the TEgsean, he proposed to an assembly of the Athenian people that they should fit out seventy galleys, with a proportionate force of soldiers and military stores, and place it at his disposal ; not telling them whither he meant to lead it, but promising them that if they would equip the force he asked for, and give him discretionary powers, he would lead it to a land where there was gold in abundance to be won with ease. The Greeks of that time believed in the existence of Eastern realms teeming with gold, as firmly as the Europeans of the sixteenth century believed in El Dorado of the West. The Athenians probably thought that the recent victor of Marathon, and former officer of Darius, was about to lead them on a secret expedition against some wealthy and unprotected cities of treasure in the Persian dominions. The armament was voted and equipped, and t Pausanias states, with implicit belief, that the battle-field was haunted at night by supernatural beings, and that the noise of combatants and the snorting of horses were heard to resound on it. The superstition has survived the change of creeds, and the shepherds of the neighbor- hood still believe that spectral warriors contend on the plain at mid- night, and they say they have heard the shouts of the combatants and the neighing of the steeds. See Grote and Thirlwall. * 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. 28 DECISIVE BATTLES 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 in- volved 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 him- self 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 fight he fell and fractured his leg; how an oracle afterward forbade the Parians to punish the sacrilegious and traitorous priestess, " because it was fated that Miltiades should come to an ill end, and she was only the instrument to lead him to evil." Such was the tale that Herodotus heard at Paros. Certain it was that Miltiades either dislocated or broke his leg during an unsuccessful siege of the city, and returned home in evil plight with his baffled and defeated forces. The indignation of the Athenians was proportionate to the hope and excitement which his promises had raised. Xanthip- pas, the head of one of the first families in Athens, indicted him before the supreme popular tribunal for the capital offense of having deceived the people. His guilt was undeniable, and the Athenians passed their verdict accordingly. But the recollec- tions of Lemnos and Marathon, and the sight of the fallen gen- eral, who lay stretched on a couch before them, pleaded suc- cessfully in mitigation of punishment, and the sentence was commuted from death to a fine of fifty talents. This was paid by his son, the afterward illustrious Cimon, Miltiades dying, THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 29 soon after the trial, of the injury which he had received at Paros.* The melancholy end of Miltiades, after his elevation to such a height of power and glory, must often have been recalled to the minds of the ancient Greeks by the sight of one in particular of the memorials of the great battle which he won. This was the remarkable statue (minutely described by Pausanias) which the Athenians, in the time of Pericles, caused to be hewn out of a huge block of marble, which, it was believed, had been pro- vided 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 * The commonplace cahimnies against the Athenians respecting Milti- ades have been well answered by Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer 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 com- plete 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, that 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 cus- tomary to submit to the jurors subsequently and separately the ques- tion as to 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 con- strained to take their choice between these two, no third gradation of penalty being admissible for consideration. Of course, under such cir- cumstances, 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 prefer 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 favor ; but it is to be remembered that Plato, with all his transcendent genius, was (as Niebuhr has termed him) a very in- different patriot, who loved to blacken the character of his country's democratical institutions; and if the fact was that the prytanis, at the trial of Miltiades, opposed the vote of capital punishment, and spoke in favor of the mjlder sentence, Plato (in a passage written to show the mi'^fortunes that befell Athenian statesmen) would readily exaggerate this fact into the story that appears in his text. 3° DECISIVE BATTLES Marathon. Athens itself contained numerous memorials of her primary great victory. Panenus, the cousin of Phidias, represented it in fresco on the walls of the painted porch ; and, centuries afterward, the figures of Miltiades and Callimachus at the head of the Athenians were conspicuous in the fresco. The tutelary deities were exhibited taking part in the fray. In the background were seen the Phcenician galleys, and, nearer to the spectator, the Athenians and the Platseans (distinguished by their leather helmets) were chasing routed Asiatics into the marshes and the sea. The battle was sculptured also on the Temple of Victory in the Acropolis, and even now there may be traced on the freize the figures of the Persian combatants with their lunar shields, their bows and quivers, their curved cimeters, their loose trousers, and Phrygian tiaras.* These and other memorials of Marathon were the produce of the meridian age of Athenian intellectual splendor, of the age of Phidias and Pericles ; for it was not merely by the gen- eration whom the battle liberated from Hippias and the Medes that the transcendent importance of their victory was gratefully recognized. Through the whole epoch of her prosperity, through the long Olympiads of her decay, through centuries after her fall, Athens looked back on the day of Marathon as the brightest of her national existence. By a natural blending of patriotic pride with grateful piety, the very spirits of the Athenians who fell at Marathon were deified by their countrymen. The inhabitants of the district of Marathon paid religious rites to them, and orators solemnly invoked them in their most impassioned adjurations before the assembled men of Athens. " Nothing was omitted that could keep alive the remembrance of a deed which had first taught the Athenian people to know its own strength, by measuring it with the power which had subdued the greater part of the known world. The consciousness thus awakened fixed its character, its station, and its destiny ; it was the spring of its later great actions and ambitious enterprises."! It was not indeed by one defeat, however signal, that the pride of Persia could be broken, and her dreams of universal empire dispelled. Ten years afterward she renewed her at- tempts upon Europe on a grander scale of enterprise, and was repulsed by Greece with greater and reiterated loss. Larger * Wordsworth's " Greece," p. 115. t Thirlwall. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 31 forces and heavier slaughter than had been seen at Marathon signaHzed the conflicts of Greeks and Persians at Artemisium, Salamis, Platsea, and the Eurymedon. But, mighty and mo- mentous as these battles were, they rank not with Marathon in importance. They originated no new impulse. They turned back no current of fate. They were merely confirmatory of the already existing bias which Marathon had created. The day of Marathon is the critical epoch in the history of the two nations. It broke forever the spell of Persian invincibility, which had previously paralyzed men's minds. It generated among the Greeks the spirit which beat back Xerxes, and after- ward led on Xenophon, Agesilaus, and Alexander, in terrible retaliation through their Asiatic campaigns. It secured for mankind the intellectual treasures of Athens, the growth of free institutions, the liberal enlightenment of the Western world, and the gradual ascendency for many ages of the great principles of European civilization. Explanatory Remarks on Some of the Circumstances of THE Battle of Marathon. Nothing is said by Herodotus of the Persian cavalry taking any part in the battle, although he mentions that Hippias recommended the Persians to land at Marathon, because the plain was favorable for cavalry evolutions. In the life of Mil- tiades which is usually cited as the production of Cornelius Nepos, but which I believe to be of no authority whatever, it is said that Miltiades protected his flanks from the enemy's horse by an abatis of felled trees. While he was on the high ground he would not have required this defense, 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 Xwpt? linrek is said to have originated from some Ionian Greeks, who were serving compulsorily in the army of Datis, contriving to inform ]\Iiltiades 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' cavalry was numer- ous, as the abundant pastures of Euboea were close at hand, the Persian general, when he thought, from the inaction of 32 DECISIVE BATTLES 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 neighborhood of Eretria, where he had already left a detachment, and where his military stores must have been deposited. The knowledge of such a movment 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 Athe- nian spearmen to have been as sudden as it was rapid. The Persian horse-soldier, on an alarm being given, had to take the shackles ofif his horse, to strap the saddle on, and bridle him, besides equipping himself (see Xenophon, "Anabasis," 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 Orien- tal 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 gen- eral from arranging and employing his horsemen on his ex- treme wings, while it also enabled the Greeks, as they came for- ward, 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 confu- sion 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 Pom- peian cavalry (which had previously defeated his own), and won the battle of Pharsalia. I have represented the battle of Marathon as beginning in the afternoon and ending toward evening. If it had lasted all day, Herodotus would have probably mentioned that fact. That it ended toward 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'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 BATTLE OF MARATHON 33 the rear ranks of the Persians keeping up a fire of arrows over the heads of their comrades, as the Normans did at Hastings. 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 filled with the preparations made by King Darius for a new expedition against Greece. Themis- tocles persuades the Athenians to leave ofif dividing the pro- ceeds of their silver mines among themselves, and to employ the money in strengthening their navy. 487. Egypt revolts from the Persians, and delays the ex- pedition 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 Thermopylae. 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 Platsea. The Greeks land in Asia Minor, and defeat a Per- sian force at Mycale. In this and the following years the Per- sians 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 Eurym- edon. 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 3 34 DECISIVE BATTLES 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 con- quests 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 Mem- phis. As the complement of a trireme galley was at least two hundred men, we can not 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 yEgina, 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 ag- gregate number of the crews, we may form some estimate of the forces which this little Greek state then kept on foot. Be- tween 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 ^gina 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 as- sailants. 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 Erechthean 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 ^gina, and in Megara, in the same year.' "* 445. A thirty years' truce concluded between Athens and Lacedaemon. * Paeans of the Athenian Navy. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 35 440. The Samians endeavor to throw off the supremacy of Athens. Sanios 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, endeavors 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. 425. The Athenians gain great advantages over the Spartans at Sphacteria, and by occupying Cythera ; but they suffer a se- vere 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 great- ness of their own posterity, and the fate of the whole Western world, were involved in the destruction of the fleet of Athens in the harbor 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. FEW cities have undergone more memorable sieges dur- ing 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 elo- quent expressions of Arnold respecting the check which she gave to the Carthaginian arms, " Syracuse was a break-water which God's providence raised up to protect the yet imma- ture 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 neighboring 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. 36 DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 37 The ancient city, in its most prosperous times, 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 harbor of the city of Syracuse itself. A small island, or peninsula (for such it soon was rendered), lies at the southeastern extremity of this knob of land, stretching almost entirely across the mouth of the great harbor, and rendering it nearly land-locked. This island comprised the original set- tlement of the first Greek colonists from Corinth, who founded Syracuse two thousand five hundred years ago ; and the mod- ern city has shrunk again into these primary limits. But, in the fifth century before our era, the growing wealth and popu- lation 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, and constituted the larger part of Syracuse. The landward wall, therefore, of this district of the city trav- ersed this knob of land, which continues to slope upward 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 nar- row ridge, between which and Mount Hybla a succession of chasms and uneven low ground extends. 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 southwest and northwest. The usual mode of assailing fortified towns in the time of the Peloponnesian war was to build a double wall round them, suf- ficiently 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 be- sieged in producing a surrender ; and, in every Greek city of those days, as in every Italian repubHc of the Middle Ages, the range 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 con- 38 DECISIVE BATTLES tain 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 opera- tion 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 mihtary engines of antiquity were feeble in breaching masonry before the improvements which the first Dionysius effected in the mechanics of destruc- tion; and the lives of spearmen the boldest and most high- 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 fieet and a superior hostile army ; and Syracuse, from her size, her popu- lation, and her military and naval resources, not unnaturally thought herself secure from finding in another Greek city a foe capable of sending a suf^cient armament to menace her with capture and subjection. But in the spring of 414 b. c, the Athenian navy was mistress of her harbor 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 succor 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 ac- cumulated 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 dAcre, 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 forever from her career of con- quest, and sink from an imperial republic into a ruined and sub- servient community. DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 39 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 in- dependence, soon learned to employ itself in daring and un- scrupulous schemes of self-aggrandizement at the expense of neighboring nations. In the interval between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars she had rapidly grown into a con- quering 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 ^gsean first placed Athens at the head of the confederation formed for the further prosecution of the war against Persia. But this titular ascendency 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 her self. 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 en- couraging her subject allies to furnish all their contingents in money, instead of part consisting of ships and men, the sover- eign 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 tribu- taries 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. 40 DECISIVE BATTLES 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. C? 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 sys- tem of doing so upon principle with the candor which the Athe- nian 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."* 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 neighbors. 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 ju- dicial power ; exposing themselves to every risk with unflinch- ing gallantry ; embarking readily in every ambitious scheme ; and never suffering difficulty or disaster to shake their tenacity of purpose: in the hope of acquiring unbounded empire for their country, and the means of maintaining each of the thirty thousand citizens who made up the sovereign republic, in ex- clusive devotion to military occupations, and to those brilliant sciences and arts in which Athens already had reached the meridian of intellectual splendor. Her great political dramatist speaks of the Athenian em- pire 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 Peloponne- sian confederacy attacked her, was undoubtedly very great. With a few trifling exceptions, all the islands of the ^gsean, and all the Greek cities, which in that age fringed the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, and Thrace, paid tribute to Athens, and * 'Ael Ko^ecTTaJToj rhi tjcrffco ii7rj» SvvaTwrfpoi Kareipyfa^ai. — ThUC, i., yy. DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 41 implicity obeyed her orders. The /Egasan Sea was an Attic lake. Westward of Greece, her influence, though strong, was not equally predominant. She had colonies and aUies 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 West- ern seas. The extension of her empire over Sicily was the favorite 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 at- tack her, and a confederacy was formed of five-sixths of the con- tinental 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 be reduced, in two or three years at the farthest, 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, in- deed, whose members, of an age fit for service, at no time ex- ceeded thirty thousand, and whose territorial extent did not equal half Sussex, could only have acquired such a naval do- minion as Athens once held, by devoting and zealously training all its sons to service in its fleets. In order to man the numer- ous galleys which she sent out, she necessarily employed 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 42 DECISIVE BATTLES 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 revi^ard of her su- perior 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."* 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 enemies. If the Peloponne- sian 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 a truce for fifty years was concluded, which, though ill kept, and though many of the confederates of Sparta refused to recognize 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 Spar- tan 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 trans-marine dominion of Athens. The West was now the quarter toward which the thoughts * Tliuc, lib. i., sec. 144. DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 43 of every aspiring Athenian were directed. From the very be- ginning of the war Athens had kept up an interest in Sicily, and her squadron had, from time to time, appeared on its coasts and taken part in the dissensions in which the SiciHan Greeks were universally engaged one against each 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 attacked. With large levies of Iberian mercenaries she then meant to overwhelm her Peloponnesian enemies. The Persian mon- archy 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 an episode of his great work, a disquisition on the probable effects that would have followed if Alexander the Great had invaded Italy. Pos- terity 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 am- bition, 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 after- ward 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 vigor. The armament which the Athenians equipped against Syra- 44 DECISIVE BATTLES cuse 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."* 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 it, 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 in giving every galley the best possible crew, and every troop the most perfect accoutrements. And with private as well as public wealth eagerly lavished on all that could give splendor as well as effi- ciency to the expedition, the fated fleet began its voyage for the Sicilian shores in the summer of 415. The Syracusans themselves, at the time of the Peloponnesian war, were a bold and turbulent democracy, tyrannizing over the weaker Greek cities in Sicily, and trying to gain in that island the same arbitrary supremacy which Athens maintained along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In numbers and in spirit they were fully equal to the Athenians, but far inferior to them in military and naval discipline. When the probabil- ity of an Athenian invasion was first publicly discussed at Syra- cuse, and efforts were made by some of the wiser citizens to improve the state of the national defences, and prepare for the impending danger, the rumors of coming war and the proposal for preparation were received by the mass of the Syracusans with scornful incredulity. The speech of one of their popular orators is preserved to us in Thucydides,f and many of its topics might, by a slight alteration of names and details, serve admirably for the party among ourselves at present ;I which op- poses the augmentation of our forces, and derides the idea of our being in any peril from the sudden attack of a French ex- pedition. The Syracusan orator told his countrymen to dis- miss with scorn the visionary terrors which a set of designing men among themselves strove to excite, in order to get power and influence thrown into their own hands. He told them that Athens knew her own interest too well to think of wantonly * Arnold's " History of Rome." t Lib. vi., sec. 36, cf seq., Arnold's edition. I have almost literally transcribed some of the marginal epitomes of the original speech. ? 1851. DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 45 provoking their hostility : "Even if the enemies were to come," said he, " so distant from their resources, and opposed to such a pozver as ours, their destruction would he easy and inevitable. Their ships will have enough to do to get to our island at all, and to carry such stores of all sorts as will be needed. They cannot therefore carry, besides, an army large enough to cope with such a population as ours. They will have no fortified place from which to commence their operations, but must rest them on no better base than a set of wretched tents, and such means as the necessities of the moment will allozv them. But, in truth, I do not believe that they would even be able to effect a disembarka- tion. Let us, therefore, set at naught these reports as altogether of home manufacture ; and be sure that if any enemy does come, the state zvill know how to defend itself in a manner worthy of the national honor." Such assertions pleased the Syracusan assembly, and their counterparts find favor now among some portion of the Eng- lish public. But the invaders of Syracuse came ; made good their landing in Sicily ; and, if they had promptly attacked the city itself, instead of wasting nearly a year in desultory opera- tions in other parts of Sicily, the Syracusans must have paid the penalty of their self-sufficient carelessness in submission to the Athenian yoke. But, of the three generals who led the Athenian expedition, two only were men of ability, and one was most weak and incompetent. Fortunately for Syracuse, Alcibiades, the most skilful of the three, was soon deposed from his command by a fractious and fanatic vote of his fellow coun- trymen, and the other competent one, Lamachus, fell early in a skirmish ; while, more fortunately still for her, the feeble and vacillating Nicias remained unrecalled and unhurt, to assume the undivided leadership of the Athenian army and fleet, and to mar, by alternate over-caution and over-carelessness, every chance of success which the early part of the operations offered. Still, even under him, the Athenians nearly won the town. They defeated the raw levies of the Syracusans, cooped them within the walls, and, as before mentioned, almost effected a continuous fortification from bay to bay over Epipolse, the completion of which would certainly have been followed by a capitulation. Alcibiades, the most complete example of genius without principle that history produces, the Bolingbroke of antiquity, 46 DECISIVE BATTLES but with high miHtary talents superadded to diplomatic and oratorical powers, on being summoned home from his com- mand in Sicily to take his trial before the Athenian tribunal, had escaped to Sparta, and had exerted himself there with all the selfish rancor of a renegade to renew the war with Athens, and to send instant assistance to Syracuse. When we read his words in the pages of Thucydides (who was himself an exile from Athens at this period, and may probably have been at Sparta, and heard Alcibiades speak), we are at a loss whether most to admire or abhor his subtile counsels. After an artful exordium, in which he tried to disarm the suspicions which he felt must be entertaf.ned of him, and to point out to the Spartans how completely his interests and theirs were identified, through hatred of the Athenian democ- racy, he thus proceeded : " Hear me, at any rate, on the matters which require your grave attention, and which I, from the personal knowledge that I have of them, can and ought to bring before you. We Athe- nians sailed to Sicily with the design of subduing, first the Greek cities there, and next those in Italy. Then we intended to make an attempt on the dominions of Carthage, and on Carthage itself.* If all these projects succeeded (nor did we limit ourselves to them in these quarters), we intended to in- crease our fleet with the inexhaustible supplies of ship timber which Italy affords, to put in requisition the whole militarj' force of the conquered Greek states, and also to hire large armies of the barbarians, of the Iberians, f and others in those regions, who are allowed to make the best possible soldiers. Then, when we had done all this, we intended to assail Pelopon- nesus with our collected force. Our fleets would blockade you by sea, and desolate your coasts, our armies would be landed at different points and assail your cities. Some of these * Arnold, in his notes on this passage, well reminds the reader that Agathocles, with a Greek force far inferior to that of the Athenians at this period, did, some years afterward, very nearly conquer Carthage. t It will be remembered that Spanish infantry were the staple of the Carthaginian armies. Doubtless Alcibiades and other leading Athenians had made themselves acquainted with the Carthaginian system of carry- ing on war, and meant to adopt it. With the marvellous powers which Alcibiades possessed of ingratiating himself with men of every class and every nation, and his high military genius, he would have been as formidable a chief of an army of condottieri as Hannibal afterward was. DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 47 we expected to storm, | and others we meant to take by sur- rounding them with fortified lines. We thought that it would thus be an easy matter thoroughly to war you down ; and then we should become the masters of the whole Greek race. As for expense, we reckoned that each conquered state would give us supplies of money and provisions sufficient to pay for its own conquest, and furnish the means for the conquest of its neigh- bors. " Such are the designs of the present Athenian expedition to Sicily, and you have heard them from the lips of the man who, of all men living, is most accurately acquainted with them. The other Athenian generals, who remain with the expedition, will endeavor to carry out these plans. And be sure that with- out your speedy interference they will all be accomplished. The Sicilian Greeks are deficient in military training ; but still, if they could at once be brought to combine in an organized resistance to Athens, they might even now be saved. But as for the Syracusans resisting Athens by themselves, they have already, with the whole strength of their population, fought a battle and been beaten ; they cannot face the Athenians at sea ; and it is quite impossible for them to hold out against the force of their invaders. And if this city falls into the hands of the Athenians, all Sicily is theirs, and presently Italy also; and the danger, which I warned you of from that quarter, will soon fall upon yourselves. You must, therefore, in Sicily, fight for the safety of Peloponnesus. Send some galleys thither instantly. Put men on board who can work their own way over, and who, as soon as they land, can do duty as regular troops. But, above all, let one of yourselves, let a man of Sparta, go over to take the chief command, to bring into order and effective discipline the forces that are in Syracuse, and urge those who at present hang back to come forward and aid the Syracusans. The presence of a Spartan general at this crisis will do more to save the city than a whole army."* The renegade then proceeded to urge on them the necessity of en- couraging their friends in Sicily, by showing that they them- selves were in earnest in hostility to Athens. He exhorted them t Alcibiades here alluded to Sparta itself, which was unfortified. His Spartan hearers must have glanced round them at these words with mixed alarm and indignation. * Thuc, lib. vi., sec. 90, 91. 48 DECISIVE BATTLES not only to march their armies into Attica again, but to take up a permanent fortified position in the country ; and he gavt them in detail information of all that the Athenians most dreaded, and how his country might receive the most dirtress- ing and enduring injury at their hands. The Spartans resolved to act on his advice, and appointed Gylippus to the Sicilian command. Gylippus was a man who, to the national bravery and military skill of a Spartan, united political sagacity that was worthy of his great fellow-country- man Brasidas ; but his merits were debased by mean and sor- did vices ; and his is one of the cases in which history has been austerely just, and where little or no fame has been accorded to the successful but venal soldier. But for the purpose for which he was required in Sicily, an abler man could not have been found in Lacedaemon. His country gave him neither men nor money, but she gave him her authority ; and the influence of her name and of his own talents was speedily seen in the zeal with which the Corinthians and other Peloponnesian Greeks began to equip a squadron to act under him for the rescue of Sicily. As soon as four galleys were ready, he hur- ried over with them to the southern coast of Italy, and there, though he received such evil tidings of the state of Syracuse that he abandoned all hope of saving that city, he determined to remain on the coast, and do what he could in preserving the Italian cities from the Athenians. So nearly, indeed, had Nicias completed his beleaguering lines, and so utterly desperate had the state of Syracuse seem- ingly become, that an assembly of the Syracusans was actually convened, and they were discussing the terms on which they should offer to capitulate, when a galley was seen dashing into the great harbor, and making her way toward the town with all the speed which her rowers could supply. From her shun- ning the part of the harbor where the Athenian fleet lay, and making straight for the Syracusan side, it was clear that she was a friend ; the enemy's cruisers, careless through confidence of success, made no attempt to cut her ofif; she touched the beach, and a Corinthian captain, springing on shore from her, was eagerly conducted to the assembly of the Syracusan peo- ple just in time to prevent the fatal vote being put for a sur- render. Providentially for Syracuse, Gongylus, the commander of DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 49 the galley, had been prevented by an Athenian squadron from following Gylippus to South Italy, and he had been obliged to push direct for Syracuse from Greece. The sight of actual succor, and the promise of more, revived the drooping spirits of the Syracusans. They felt that they were not left desolate to perish, and the tidings that a Spartan was coming to command them confirmed their resolution to continue their resistance. Gylippus was already near the city. He had learned at Locri that the first report which had reached him of the state of Syracuse was exaggerated, and that there was unfinished space in the besiegers' lines through which it was barely possible to introduce re-enforcements into the town. Crossing the Straits of Messina, which the culpable negligence of Nicias had left unguarded, Gylippus landed on the northern coast of Sicily, and there began to collect from the Greek cities an aririy, of which the regular troops that he brought from Peloponnesus formed the nucleus. Such was the influence of the name of Sparta,* and such were his own abilities and ac- tivity that he succeeded in raising a force of about two thou- sand fully-armed infantry, with a larger number of irregular troops. Nicias, as if infatuated, made no attempt to counter- act his operations, nor, when Gylippus marched his little army toward Syracuse, did the Athenian commander endeavor to check him. The Syracusans marched out to meet him ; and while the Athenians were solely intent on completing their fortifications on the southern side toward the harbor, Gylippus turned their position by occupying the high ground in the extreme rear of Epipolae. He then marched through the unforti- fied interval of Nicias' lines into the besieged town, and joining his troops with the Syracusan forces, after some engage- ments with varying success, gained the mastery over Nicias, drove the Athenians from Epipolse, and hemmed them into a disadvantageous position in the low grounds near the great harbor. The attention of all Greece was now fixed on Syracuse, and every enemy of Athens felt the importance of the opportunity now offered of checking her ambition, and, perhaps, of strik- ing a deadly blow at her power. Large re-enforcements from * The effect of the presence of a Spartan officer on the troops of the other Greeks seems to have been like the effect of the presence of an English officer upon native Indian troops. 4 5° DECISIVE BATTLES Corinth, Thebes and other cities now reached the Syracusans, while the baffled and dispirited Athenian general earnestly be- sought his countrymen to recall him, and represented the further prosecution of the siege as hopeless. But Athens had made it a maxim never to let difficulty or disaster drive her back from any enterprise once undertaken, so long as she possessed the means of making any effort, how- ever desperate, for its accomplishment. With indomitable pertinacity, she now decreed, instead of recalling her first ar- mament from before Syracuse, to send out a second, though her enemies near home had now renewed open warfare against her, and by occupying a permanent fortification in her terri- tory had severely distressed her population, and were pressing her with almost all the hardships of an actual siege. She still was mistress of the sea, and she sent forth another fleet of sev- enty galleys, and another army, which seemed to drain almost the last reserves of her military population, to try if Syracuse could not yet be won, and the honor of the Athenian arms be preserved from the stigma of a retreat. Hers was, indeed, a spirit that might be broken, but never would bend. At the head of this second expedition she wisely placed her best general, Demosthenes, one of the most distinguished officers that the long Peloponnesian war had produced, and who, if he had originally held the Sicilian command, would soon have brought Syracuse to submission. The fame of Demosthenes the general has been dimmed by the superior lustre of his great countryman, Demosthenes the orator. When the name of Demosthenes is mentioned, it is the latter alone that is thought of. The soldier has found no biographer. Yet out of the long list of great men whom the Athenian republic produced, there are few that deserve to stand higher than this brave, though finally unsuccessful, leader of her fleets and armies in the first half of the Peloponnesian war. In his first campaign in i^tolia he had shown some of the rash- ness of youth, and had received a lesson of caution by which he profited throughout the rest of his career, but without los- ing any of his natural energy in enterprise or in execution. He had performed the distinguished service of rescuing Naupactus from a powerful hostile armament in the seventh year of the war ; he had then, at the request of the Acarnanian republics, taken on himself the office of commander-in-chief of all their \ DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 51 forces, and at their head he had gained some important ad- vantages over the enemies of Athens in Western Greece. His most celebrated exploits had been the occupation of Pylos on the Messenian coast, the successful defence of that place against the fleet and armies of Lacedasmon, and the subsequent capture of the Spartan forces on the isle of Sphacteria, which was the severest blow dealt to Sparta throughout the war, and which had mainly caused her to humble herself to make the truce with Athens. Demosthenes was as honorably unknown in the war of party politics at Athens as he was eminent in the war against the foreign enemy. We read of no intrigues of his on either the aristocratic or democratic side. He was neither in the in- terest of Nicias nor of Cleon. His private character was free from any of the stains which polluted that of Alcibiades. On all these points the silence of the comic dramatist is decisive evidence in his favor. He had also the moral courage, not always combined with physical, of seeking to do his duty to his country, irrespective of any odium that he himself might incur, and unhampered by any petty jealousy of those who were asso- ciated with him in command. There are few men named in ancient history of whom posterity would gladly know more, or whom we sympathize with more deeply in the calamities that befell them, than Demosthenes, the son of Alcisthenes, who, in the spring of the year 413 B.C., left Piraeus at the head of the second Athenian expedition against Sicily. His arrival was critically timed ; for Gylippus had encour- aged the Syracusans to attack the Athenians under Nicias by sea as well as by land, and by one able stratagem of Ariston, one of the admirals of the Corinthian auxiliary squadron, the Syracusans and their confederates had inflicted on the fleet of Nicias the first defeat that the Athenian navy had ever sustained from a numerically inferior enemy. Gylippus was preparing to follow up his advantage by fresh attacks on the Athenians on both elements, when the arrival of Demosthenes completely changed the aspect of affairs, and restored the superiority to the invaders. With seventy-three war-galleys in the highest state of efficiency, and brilliantly equipped, with a force of five thousand picked men of the regular infantry of Athens and her allies, and a still larger number of bow-men, javelin-men, and slingers on board, Demosthenes rowed round the great harbor with loud cheers and martial music, as if in defiance of the 5 52 DECISIVE BATTLES Syracusans and their confederates. His arrival had indeed changed their newly-born hopes into the deepest consterna- tion. The resources of Athens seemed inexhaustible, and re- sistance to her hopeless. They had been told that she was re- duced to the last extremities, and that her territory was occu- pied by an enemy ; and yet here they saw her sending forth, as if in prodigality of power, a second armament to make foreign conquests, not inferior to that with which Nicias had first landed on the Sicilian shores. With the intuitive decision of a great commander, De- mosthenes at once saw that the possession of Epipolse was the key to the possession of Syracuse, and he resolved to made a prompt and vigorous attempt to recover that position, while his force was unimpaired, and the consternation which its ar- rival had produced among the besieged remained unabated. The Syracusans and their allies had run out an outwork along Epipolse from the city walls, intersecting the fortified lines of circumvallation which Nicias had commenced, but from which he had been driven by Gylippus. Could Demosthenes succeed in storming this outwork, and in re-establishing the Athenian troops on the high ground, he might fairly hope to be able to resume the circumvallation of the city, and become the con- queror of Syracuse ; for when once the besiegers' lines were completed, the number of the troops with which Gylippus had garrisoned the place would only tend to exhaust the stores of provisions and accelerate its downfall. An easily-repelled attack was first made on the outwork in the day-time, probably more with the view of blinding the be- sieged to the nature of the main operations than with any ex- pectation of succeeding in an open assault, with every disad- vantage of the ground to contend against. But, when the dark- ness had set in, Demosthenes formed his men in columns, each soldier taking with him five days' provisions, and the engineers and workmen of the camp following the troops with their tools, and all portable implements of fortification, so as at once to secure any advantage of ground that the army might gain. Thus equipped and prepared, he led his men along by the foot of the southern flank of Epipolse, in a direction toward the in- terior of the island, till he came immediately below the narrow ridge that forms the extremity of the high ground looking westward. He then wheeled his vanguard to the right, sent DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 53 them rapidly up the paths that wind along the face of the cliflf, and succeeded in completely surprising the Syracusan outposts, and in placing his troops fairly on the extreme summit of the all-important Epipolae. Thence the Athenians marched eager- ly down the slope toward the town, routing some Syracusan detachments that were quartered in their way, and vigorously assailing the unprotected side of the outwork. All at first favored them. The outwork was abandoned by its garrison, and the Athenian engineers began to dismantle it. In vain Gylippus brought up fresh troops to check the assault ; the Athenians broke and drove them back, and continued to press hotly forward, in the full confidence of victory. But, amid the general consternation of the Syracusans and their confederates, one body of infantry stood firm. This was a brigade of their Boeotian allies, which was posted low down the slope of Epipolae, outside the city walls. Coolly and steadily the Boeotian infantry formed their line, and, undismayed by the current of flight around them, advanced against the advancing Athenians. This was the crisis of the battle. But the Athenian van was disorganized by its own previous successes ; and, yielding to the unexpected charge thus made on it by troops in perfect order, and of the most obstinate courage, it was driven back in confusion upon the other divisions of the army, that still con- tinued to press forward. When once the tide was thus turned, the Syracusans passed rapidly from the extreme of panic to the extreme of vengeful daring, and with all their forces they now fiercely assailed the embarrassed and receding Athenians. In vain did the officers of the latter strive to re-form their line. Amid the din and the shouting of the fight, and the confusion inseparable upon a night engagement, especially one where many thousand combatants were pent and whirled together in a narrow and uneven area, the necessary manoeuvres were im- practicable ; and though many companies still fought on des- perately, wherever the moonlight showed them the semblance of a foe,* they fought without concert or subordination ; and not unfrequently, amid the deadly chaos, Athenian troops as- * ''Hy ixev yatp ffe\-i)vi] \anirf)b. eSpaiv h\ otirwi aW-fi\ovi, ij iv