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THE COLONIAL- PRESS

NEW-YORK ^ MDCCCXCIX

GEORGE DEWEY.

{Admiral of the United States Navy.)

Photogravure from a photograph.

Copyright, 1899, By the colonial PRESS.

JUN5 1958

NAPOLEON I.

Photo gravnr- ^' -- r portrait hv S. TofanelU.

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 185 1, 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.

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 been 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- iHzed 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 officer. 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 wc probably should have been, if any one of these battles had come to a different 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. Different minds will naturally vary in the impressions which particular events make on them, and in the degree of interest with which they watch the career and reflect on the importance of different historical personages. But our 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 effect of those collisions is not limited to a single age, but may give an impulse which will sway the fortunes of successive generations of mankind. Most valuable, also, is the mental discipline which is thus acquired, and by which we are trained

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 irpoalpecn^i to adopt the Greek expressive word of Polyb- ius,t 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.^ 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 effects were limited in area, or they themselves merely confirmed some great tendency or bias which an earlier battle had originated. For example, the encounters between the Greeks and Persians, which followed Marathon, seem to me not to have been phenomena of primary impulse. Greek superiority had been already asserted, Asiatic ambition had already been checked, before Salamis and Plataea confirmed the superiority of European free states over Oriental despot- ism. So yEgospotamos, which finally crushed the maritime

* See BoHngbroke " On the Study and Use of History," vol, ii., p. 497 of his collected notes, t Polyb., lib. ix., sect. 9. X See Montesquieu, " Grandeur et Decadence des Romains," 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, i8ji.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

FAGB

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 33

CHAPTER n.

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 HI.

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

DECISIVE BATTLES

CHAPTER VI.

PAGB

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 Armada, A.D. 1588 227

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

PAGB

Victory of the Americans over Burgoyne at Saratoga, A.D. 1777 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.. 1815 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 411

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

Admiral Dewey (Portrait) Frontispiece

Photogravure from a photograph

Napoleon I (Portrait) ii

Photogravure from a painting

The Decisive Action with the Armada , . .228

Photogravure from a painting

After Waterloo « . 344

Photogravure from a painting

Bismarck at Versailles . 420

Photogravure from a painting

THE

DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD.

CHAPTER I. THE BATTLE OF MARATHON.

" Quibus actus uterqite Europas 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 were the votes they were about to give, or how the generations to come would read with

I

2 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

.

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 Plataea 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 Platseans 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, t

This generous daring of their weak but true-hearted ally

* The historians, who Hved 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 MfToiKoi 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 o£ 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 Plataeans 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 Plataeans also.

After the junction of the column from Plataea, 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 Platsean prisoners of war, after the memorable siege of their city, justify before their Spartan execu- tioners their loyal adherence to Athens. See Thucydidcs, lib. iii., sees. 53-60.

t At the battle of Platsea, eleven years after Marathon, each of the eight thousand Athenian regular infantry who served them was at- tended by a Hght-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 applied 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 ^acidae 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

* 'A6r}pa7oi. irpwTOi av4<TX0VT0 iffBrjrd re MrjSiK^v bpeayres, Kal robs SivSpa^ ra{nr}V i(T6rifi4}/ovs. T6&1S Se ^v ToTffi "EWtj<ti koL rh otvofia rS>v M-i\Z(av <p6Po aKOvtrai. — Herodotus, lib. vi., c. 112.

At Se yv&'xai Se ^ov\diu.evai airdvTWV avOpdoireeu ^<rav' otru troKXa Koi fieydXa Kai ndxtjJ-a yevt] KaTaSedovXwfjLcwq ^v t] Tlepawu apxh- — Plato, Menexcntio.

6 DECISIVE BATTLES

of the relatives of Miltiades — an uncle of the same name, and a brother named Stesagoras — had ruled the Chersonese before Miltiades became its prince. He had been brought up at Athens in the house of his father, Cimon,* who was renowned throughout Greece for his victories in the Olympic chariot- races, and who must have been possessed of great wealth. The sons of Pisistratus, who succeeded their father in the tyr- anny at Athens, caused Cimon to be assassinated ; f but they treated the young Miltiades with favor and kindness, and when his brother Stesagoras died in the Chersonese, they sent him out there as lord of the principality. This was about twenty- eight years before the battle of Marathon, and it is with his ar- rival in the Chersonese that our first knowledge of the career and character of Miltiades commences. We find, in the first act recorded of him, the proof of the same resolute and un- scrupulous spirit that marked his mature age. His brother's authority in the principality had been shaken by war and re- volt: Miltiades determined to .rule more securely. On his arrival he kept close within his house, as if he was mourning for his brother. The principal men of the Chersonese, hear- ing of this, assembled from all the towns and districts, and went together to the house of Miltiades, on a visit of condolence. As soon as he had thus got them in his power, he made them all prisoners. He then asserted and maintained his own absolute authority in the peninsula, taking into his pay a body of five hundred regular troops, and strengthening his interest by mar- rying the daughter of the king of the neighboring Thracians.

When the Persian power was extended to the Hellespont and its neighborhood, Miltiades, as prince of the Chersonese, submitted to King Darius ; and he was one of the numerous tributary rulers who led their contingents of men to serve in the Persian army, in the expedition against Scythia. Miltiades and the vassal Greeks of Asia Minor were left by the Persian king in charge of the bridge across the Danube, when the in- vading army crossed that river, and plunged into the wilds of the country that now is Russia, in vain pursuit of the ances- tors of the modern Cossacks. On learning the reverses that Darius met with in the Scythian wilderness, Miltiades proposed to his companions that they should break the bridge down, and leave the Persian king and his army to perish by famine and * Herodotus, lib. vi., c. 103. t lb.

THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 7

the Scythian arrows. The rulers of the Asiatic Greek cities, whom Miltiades addressed, shrank from this bold but ruth- less stroke against the Persian power, and Darius returned in safety. But it was known what advice Miltiades had given, and the vengeance of Darius was thenceforth specially directed against the man who had counseled such a deadly blow against his empire and his person. The occupation of the Persian arms in other quarters left Miltiades for some years after this in possession of the Chersonese ; but it was precarious and in- terrupted. He, however, availed himself of the opportunity which his position gave him of conciliating the good will of his fellow-countrymen at Athens, by conquering and placing un- der the Athenian authority the islands of Lemnos and Imbros, to which Athens had ancient claims, but which she had never previously been able to bring into complete subjection. At length, in 494 B. C, the complete suppression of the Ionian revolt by the Persians left their armies and fleets at liberty to act against the enemies of the Great King to the west of the Hellespont. A strong squadron of Phoenician galleys was sent against the Chersonese. Miltiades knew that resistance was hopeless ; and while the Phoenicians were at Tenedos, he loaded five galleys with all the treasure that he could collect, and sailed away for Athens. The Phoenicians fell in with him, and chased him hard along the north of the yEgean. One of his galleys, on board of which was his eldest son Metiochus, was actually captured. But Miltiades, with the other four, suc- ceeded in reaching the friendly coast of Imbros in safety. Thence he afterward proceeded to Athens, and resumed his station as a free citizen of the Athenian commonwealth.

The Athenians, at this time, had recently expelled Hippias, the son of Pisistratus, the last of their tyrants. They were in the full glow of their newly-recovered liberty and equality; and the constitutional changes of Cleisthenes had inflamed their republican zeal to the utmost. Miltiades had enemies at Athens ; and these, availing themselves of the state of popu- lar feeling, brought him to trial for his life for having been tyrant of the Chersonese. The charge did not necessarily im- port any acts of cruelty or wrong to individuals : it was founded on no specific law ; but it was based on the horror with which the Greeks of that age regarded every man who made himself arbitrary master of his fellow-men, and exercised irresponsible

8 DECISIVE BATTLES

dominion over them. The fact of Miltiades having so ruled in the Chersonese was undeniable ; but the question which the Athenians assembled in judgment must have tried, was whether Miltiades, although tyrant of the Chersonese, deserved punish- ment as an Athenian citizen. The eminent service that he had done the state in conquering Lemnos and Imbros for it, pleaded strongly in his favor. The people refused to convict him. He stood high in public opinion. And when the coming invasion of the Persians was known, the people wisely elected him one of their generals for the year.

Two other men of high eminence in history, though their renown was achieved at a later period than that of Miltiades, were also among the ten Athenian generals at Marathon. One was Themistocles, the future founder of the Athenian navy, and the destined victor of Salamis. The other was Aristides, who afterward led the Athenian troops at Platasa, and whose integrity and just popularity acquired for his country, when the Persians had finally been repulsed, the advantageous pre- eminence of being acknowledged by half of the Greeks as their imperial leader and protector. It is not recorded what part either Themistocles or Aristides took in the debate of the council of war at Marathon. But, from the character of The- mistocles, his boldness, and his intuitive genius for extemporiz- ing the best measures in eVery emergency* (a quality which the greatest of historians ascribes to him beyond all his contem- poraries), we may well believe that the vote of Themistocles was for prompt and decisive action. On the vote of Aristides it may be more difficult to speculate. His predilection for the Spartans may have made him wish to wait till they came up ; but, though circumspect, he was neither timid as a soldier nor as a politician, and the bold advice of Miltiades may probably have found in Aristides a willing, most assuredly it found in him a candid hearer.

Miltiades felt no hesitation as to the course which the Athe- nian army ought to pursue ; and earnestly did he press his opinion on his brother-generals. Practically acquainted with the organization of the Persian armies, Miltiades felt convinced of the superiority of the Greek troops, if properly handled ; he

* See the character of Themistocles in the 138th section of the first book of Thucydides, especially the last sentence. Kal rh ^vixirav flire7v <pv- (reojj imev SvvdiJ.ei ^eAexTjs 5^ ^pa^irr]Ti KpiriffTos S^ ovtos avroo'x^^Ki'C^tv Ttk Beovra

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 felt the perils ofremaining 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.

On that vote, in all human probability, the destiny of all the nations of the world depended. Miltiades turned to him, and in simple soldierly eloquence, the substance of which we may read faithfully reported in Herodotus, who had conversed with the veterans of Marathon, the great Athenian thus adjured his 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 w^ould 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 ^vfi^dxafiev vpiu tikuI aadrphv 'A^T]valwv fiere^eTepoiffi ipyeuea^ai, ^euv rh l<ra v€/.i6jn-uv, oToi re fiiJ.fv irepiyevea^ai r^ <Tvp.^o\ri. 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, howevier, of creating any jealousy, and of so failing to obtain the vigorous co-operation of all parts of his small army, Miltiades v^aited till the day when the chief command would have come round to him in regular rotation before he led the troops against the enemy.

The inaction of the Asiatic commanders during this interval appears strange at first sight ; but Hippias was with them, and they and he were aware of their chance of a bloodless conquest through the machinations of his partisans among the 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 offer 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 n

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 sovereign which they exact from their family and dependents in their domestic economy." We should bear in mind, also, the inseparable connection between tlie 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 civihzation, 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. 0£ 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 py]TOis yepacri iraTpiKal Bcor(A67a(. — Thucyd. lib. i., sec. 12.

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 baffled beholder ; and they were often referred to as instances of the folly of human pride, which could indeed write its own praises in the solid rock, but only for the rock to outlive the language as well as the memory of the vainglorious inscribers. The elder Niebuhr, Grotefend, and Lassen, had made some guesses at the meaning of the Cuneiform letters; but Major Rawlinson, of the East India Company's service, after years of labor, has at last accomphshed 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 Achae- menidae 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 ^gsean 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 Pisistratidse 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 xA^thenian galleys, and five Eretrian, crossed the ^gaean 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, * Sire, remember the Athenians.' "

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 off Mount Athos. But the purpose of King Darius was not easily shaken. A larger army was ordered to be collected in Cilicia, and requisitions were sent to all the maritime cities of the Persian empire for ships of war, and for transports of sufficient size for carrying cavalry as well as infantry across the ^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 CiHcia, 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.)

i8 DECISIVE BATTLES

and coasting along the shores of Asia Minor till he was off Samos, he thence sailed due westward through the ^Egaean 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, compelhng the Greek islanders to join him with their ships and men, sailed onward to the coast of Eubcea. 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 .Egilia, to wait there till Datis should bring the Athenians to join them in captivity, when both populations were to be led into Upper Asia, there to learn their doom from the lips of King Darius himself.

Flushed with success^ and with half his mission thus 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 IJippias 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 wiUing 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 Lacedaemon, 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 21

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 Heraclidas 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

* 'A^T]i/aioi fifv vvv r}ij^r]vro ' Sr]\o7 Sh ov /cot' ^v ijlSvov oKKh. iravraxn V 'lar-nyopirj us €(TTi XPVI^^ cnrovSaioy, et kol 'A^vaToi Tvpavvev6fx,€V0i fiev ovSa/iov rwv ar<peas irepioiKe6vra}v effav ra noXefiia a/xelvovs, airaWdx^eures 5e rvpduvuv fxaKp^ irpwroi kyivovro ' StjKoT Sju ravra on Karex^f^^voi imeu e^eXoKaKeop, ebs SecrirSrv epya(6- tievoi ' €\ev^€pa)^€j/Tav Se avrhs fKaarros ccoury irpobvfieeTO KaT€pya^€<r^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 'la-nyopl-n XP^M« (Tirov^aiov 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."

2 2 DECISIVE BATTLES

that very spot, and who were beheved 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 Miltiades 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 century after Marathon, when Epaminondas introduced the tactics which Alexander the Great in ancient times, and Frederic the Great in modern times, made so famous, of concentrating an overpowering force to bear on some decisive point of the enemy's line, while he kept back, or, in military phrase, refused, the weaker part of his own.

" 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."

'Q TTolBes 'FiXXr/viov tre *EX€u^£povT£ TrarptS', iXivSepovre 8e naiSas, yui/at/cas, ■^ctov t€ TraTpwcov eS?/, ©r/Kas re irpoyovoiv. Nvv inrkp 7rdvT0)V dywv.*

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 * Persae, 402.

24

DECISIVE BATTLES

the large host there was no uniformity of language, creed, race or military system. Still, among them there were many gallant men, under a veteran general; they were familiarized with victory, and in contemptuous confidence, their infantry, which alone had time to form, awaited the Athenian charge. On came the Greeks, with one unwavering line of levelled spears, against which the light targets, the short lances and 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 Sacse 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 Platsean 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* o/n«? airuff6}Me<T0a ^vv OeoZs irphs ctrirepa.

— Aristoph., Vesxtoe, 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 off from the fatal shore ; but even here the skill of Datis did not desert him, and he sailed round to the western coast of

f ^Enax^fJi'^crO^ avroicri, Qvfiov o|jVrjf ireTcoKjTes, Sriy av^p trap' avffp vir' opyris r^v X€\w7jj' iardluv ' 'TffJ> Se rwv ro^evfiaTwy ovk ^v idfiv rhv ovpavhv.

— Aristoph., Vesper, 1082. t See the description in the 626. 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 Vespae 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 shaf tless 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 Childe 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. Mihiades, 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 baffled armada returned to the Asiatic coasts.

After the battle had been fought, but while the dead bodies were yet on the ground, the promised 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

MapaSuiVOfxa^oL, repose.

A separate tumulus was raised over the bodies of the slain Platseans, 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 achievtement 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 ^gsean, 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 o! 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 calumnies 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 milder sentence, Plato (in a passage written to show the misfortunes that befell Athenian statesmen) would readily exaggerate this fact into the story that appears in his text.

30 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 Phoenician 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 Xw/Jt? iTTTrek is said to have originated from some Ionian Greeks, who were serving compulsorily in the army of Datis, contriving to inform Miltiades that the Persian cavalry had gone away, whereupon Miltiades immediately joined battle and gained the victory. There may probably be a gleam of truth in this legend. If Datis* 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 off 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 Cecryphalse and ^gina, 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 viery 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 yEgina, and in Megara, in the same year.' "*

445. A thirty years* truce concluded between Athens and Lacedsemon.

* Paeans of the Athenian Navy.

THE BATTLE OF MARATHON 35

440. The Samians endeavor to throw off the supremacy of Athens. Samos completely reduced to subjection. Pericles is now sole director of the Athenian councils.

431. Commencement of the great Peloponnesian war, in which Sparta, at the head of nearly all the Peloponnesian states, and aided by the Boeotians and some of the other Greeks beyond the Isthmus, 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 11.

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 v^alls; 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 Hmits. 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 republic 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 military 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 fleet 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 sufficient 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 d'Acre, and told his staff that the capture of that town would decide his destiny and would change the face of the world, so the Athenian officers, from the heights of Epipolse, 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 iEgsean 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.

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 ^gaean, 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 Kd^ea-ruTos rhi ^ffffw virh SwaTwrepoi KaTeipyetr^ai. — ThuC, i., 77.

DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 41

implicity obeyed her orders. The Mgadan Sea was an Attic lake. Westward of Greece, her influence, though strong, was not equally predominant. She had colonies and allies among the wealthy and populous Greek settlements in Sicily and South Italy, but she had no organized system of confederates in those regions ; and her galleys brought her no tribute from the 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 reward 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 * Thuc, 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 ji t^iirty-four war-galleys, with a multitude of store-ships. A pjowerful 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,t and many of its topics might, by a slight alteration of names and details, serve admirably for the party among ourselves at present ;X 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 j 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, et seq., Arnold's edition, I have almost literally transcribed some of the marginal epitomes of the original speech. t 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 power as ours, their destruction would he easy and inevitable^ Their ships zuill 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 military 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 entertained 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 military 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 storm4 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 gav(: them in detail information of all that the Athenians most dreaded, and how his country might receive the most distress- ing and enduring injury at their hands.

The Spartans resolved to act on his advice, and appointed Gylippus to the Sicilian command. Gylippus v^as 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 off; 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 obUged 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 army, 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 Epipolse. 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 Epipolae, 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.

50 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 -^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 oi Pylos on the Messenian coast, the successful defence of that place against the fleet and armies of Lacedsemon, and the subsequent capture of the Spartan forces on the isle of Sphacteria, v^^hich 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 GyHppus 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 efflciency, 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

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 Epipolae 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 alUes had run out an outwork along Epipolas from the city walls, intersecting the fortified Hnes 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 Epipolae, 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 cliff, and succeeded in completely surprising the Syracusan outposts, and in placing his troops fairly on the extreme summit of the all-important Epipolse. 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 Epipolse, 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-

* *Hf fiev yhp (reXfivri KafiiTph kapaiv 5e otrws a\\-fi\ovs, &5 iv (T€\-fiui] e'lKh^ t^v fihv iypiv rov ffdinaTos irpoopav t)]v Se yvwcriv tov olKciov air larreTadai. — Thuc. lib. vii., 44. Compare Tacitus' description of the night engagement in the civil war between Vespasian and Vitellius. " Neutro inclinaverat fortuna, donee adulta nocte, luna ostenderet acies, falleretque." — Hist., lib. iii., sec. 23.

54 DECISIVE BATTLES

sailed each other. Keeping their ranks close, the Syracusans and their aUies pressed on against the disorganized masses of the besiegers, and at length drove them, with heavy slaughter, over the cliffs, v^hich an hour or two before they had scaled full of hope, and apparently certain of success.

This defeat was decisive of the event of the siege. The Athe- nians afterward struggled only to protect themselves from the vengeance which the Syracusans sought to wreak in the com- plete destruction of their invaders. Never, however, was vengeance more complete and terrible. A series of sea-fights followed, in which the Athenian galleys were utterly destroyed or captured. The mariners and soldiers who escaped death in disastrous engagements, and a vain attempt to force a retreat into the interior of the island, became prisoners of war. Nicias and Demosthenes were put to death in cold blood, and their men either perished miserably in the Syracusan dungeons, or were sold into slavery to the very persons whom, In their pride of power, they had crossed the seas to enslave.

All danger from Athens to the independent nations of the West was now forever at an end. She, indeed, continued to struggle against her combined enemies and revolted allies with unparalleled gallantry, and many more years of varying war- fare passed away before she surrendered to their arms. But no success in subsequent contests could ever have restored her to the pre-eminence in enterprise, resources, and maritime skill which she had acquired before her fatal reverses in Sicily. Nor among the rival Greek republics, whom her own rashness aided to crush her, was there any capable of reorganizing her empire, or resuming her schemes of conquest. The dominion of West- ern Europe was left for Rome and Carthage to dispute two cen- turies later, in conflicts still more terrible, and with even higher displays of military daring and genius than Athens had wit- nessed either in her rise, her meridian, or her fall.

DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 55

Synopsis of Events Between the Defeat of the Athe- nians AT Syracuse and the Battle of Arbela.

412 B.C. Many of the subject allies of Athens revolt from her on her disasters before Syracuse being known ; the seat ot war is transferred to the Hellespont and eastern side of the yEgaean.

410. The Carthaginians attempt to make conquests in Sicily.

407. Cyrus the Younger is sent by the King of Persia to take the government of all the maritime parts of Asia Minor, and with orders to help the Lacedaemonian fleet against the Athenian.

406. Agrigentum taken by the Carthaginians.

405. The last Athenian fleet destroyed by Lysander at ^gos- potami. Athens closely besieged. Rise of the power of Diony- sius at Syracuse.

404. Athens surrenders. End of the Peloponnesian war. The ascendency of Sparta complete throughout Greece.

403. Thrasybulus, aided by the Thebans and with the con- nivance of one of the Spartan kings, liberates Athens from the Thirty Tyrants, and restores the democracy.

401. Cyrus the Younger commences his expedition into Up- per Asia to dethrone his brother, Artaxerxes Mnemon. He takes with him an auxiliary force of ten thousand Greeks. He is killed in battle at Cunaxa, and the ten thousand, led by Xenophon, effect their retreat in spite of the Persian armies and the natural obstacles of their march.

399. In this and the five following years, the Lacedaemo- nians, under Agesilaus and other commanders, carry on war against the Persian satraps in Asia Minor.

396. Syracuse besieged by the Carthaginians, and success- fully defended by Dionysius.

394. Rome makes her first great stride in the career of con- quest by the capture of Veii.

393. The Athenian admiral, Conon, in conjunction with the Persian satrap Pharnabazus, defeats the Lacedaemonian fleet off Cnidus, and restores the fortifications of Athens. Several of the former allies of Sparta in Greece carry on hostilities against her.

388. The nations of Northern Europe now first appear in au- thentic history. The Gauls overrun great part of Italy and

56 DECISIVE BATTLES

burn Rome. Rome recovers from the blow, but her old ene- mies the uEquians and Volscians are left completely crushed by the Gallic invaders.

387. The peace of Antalcidas is concluded among the Greeks by the mediation, and under the sanction, of the Persian king.

378 to 361. Fresh wars in Greece. Epaminondas raises Thebes to be the leading state of Greece, and the supremacy of Sparta is destroyed at the battle of Leuctra. Epaminondas is killed in gaining the victory of Mantinea, and the power of Thebes falls with him. The Athenians attempt a balancing system between Sparta and Thebes.

359. Philip becomes king of Macedon.

357. The Social War breaks out in Greece and lasts three years. Its result checks the attempt of Athens to regain her old maritime empire.

356. Alexander the Great is born.

343. Rome begins her wars with the Samnites ; they ex- tend over a period of fifty years. The end of this obstinate con- test is to secure for her the dominion of Italy.

340. Fresh attempts of the Carthaginians upon Syracuse. Timoleon defeats them with great slaughter.

338. Philip defeats the confederate armies of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea, and the Macedonian supremacy over Greece is firmly established.

336. Philip is assassinated, and Alexander the Great be- comes king of Macedon. He gains several victories over the northern barbarians who had attacked Macedonia, and de- stroys Thebes, which, in conjunction with Athens, had taken up arms against the Macedonians.

334. Alexander passes the Hellespont.

CHAPTER III.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA, B.C. 331.

" Alexander deserves the glory which he has enjoyed for so many centuries and among all nations : but what if he had been beaten at Arbela, having the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the deserts in his rear, without any strong places of refuge, nine hundred leagues from Mace- donia ! " — Napoleon.

" Asia beheld with astonishment and awe the uninterrupted progress of a hero, the sweep of whose conquests was as wide and rapid as that of her own barbaric kings, or of the Scythian or Chaldsean hordes ; but, far unlike the transient whirlwinds of Asiatic warfare, the advance of the Macedonian leader was no less deliberate than rapid : at every step the Greek power took root, and the language and the civilization of Greece were planted from the shores of the ^gaean to the banks of the Indus, from the Caspian and the great Hyrcanian plain to the cataracts of the Nile; to exist actually for nearly a thousand years, and in their effects to endure forever." — Arnold.

ALONG and not uninstructive list might be made out of illustrious men whose characters have been vindi- cated during recent times from aspersions which for centuries had been thrown on them. The spirit of modern in- quiry, and the tendency of modern scholarship, both of which are often said to be solely negative and destructive, have, in truth, restored to splendor, and almost created anew, far more than they have assailed with censure, or dismissed from con- sideration as unreal. The truth of many a brilliant narrative of brilliant exploits has of late years been triumphantly demon- strated, and the shallowness of the skeptical scoffs with which little minds have carped at the great minds of antiquity has been in many instances decisively exposed. The laws, the politics, and the lines of action adopted or recommended by eminent men and powerful nations have been examined with keener investigation, and considered with more comprehen- sive judgment than formerly were brought to bear on these sub- jects. The result has been at least as often favorable as unfavor- able to the persons and the states so scrutinized, and many an

57

58 DECISIVE BATTLES

oft-repeated slander against both measures and men has thus been silenced, we may hope forever.

The veracity of Herodotus, the pure patriotism of Pericles, of Demosthenes, and of the Gracchi, the wisdom of Clisthenes and of Licinius as constitutional reformers, may be mentioned as facts which recent writers have cleared from unjust suspicion and censure. And it might be easily shown that the defensive tendency, which distinguishes the present and recent great writers of Germany, France, and England, has been equally manifested in the spirit in which they have treated the heroes of thought and heroes of action who lived during what we term the Middle Ages, and whom it was so long the fashion to sneer at or neglect.

The name of the victor of Arbela has led to these reflections ; for, although the rapidity and extent of Alexander's conquests have through all ages challenged admiration and amazement, the grandeur of genius which he displayed in his schemes of commerce, civilization, and of comprehensive union and unity among nations, has, until lately, been comparatively unhon- ored. This long-continued depreciation was of early date. The ancient rhetoricians — a class of babblers, a school for lies and scandal, as Niebuhr justly termed them — chose, among the stock themes for their commonplaces, the character and ex- ploits of Alexander. They had their followers in every age; and, until a very recent period, all who wished to " point a moral or adorn a tale," about unreasoning ambition, extravagant pride, and the formidable frenzies of free will when leagued with free power, have never failed to blazon forth the so-called madman of Macedonia as one of the most glaring examples. Without doubt, many of these writers adopted with implicit credence, traditional ideas, and supposed, with uninquiring philanthropy, that in blackening Alexander they were doing humanity good service. But also, without doubt, many of his assailants, like those of other great men, have been mainly in- stigated by " that strongest of all antipathies, the antipathy of a second-rate mind to a first-rate one,"* and by the envy which talent too often bears to genius.

Arrian, who wrote his history of Alexander when Hadrian was emperor of the Roman world, and when the spirit of decla- mation and dogmatism was at its full height, but who was him-

* De Stael.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA

59

self, unlike the dreaming pedants of the schools, a statesman and a soldier of practical and proved ability, well rebuked the malevolent aspersions which he heard continually, thrown upon the memory of the great conqueror of the East. He truly says, " Let the man who speaks evil of Alexander not merely bring forward those passages of Alexander's life which were really evil, but let him collect and review all the actions of Alexander, and then let him thoroughly consider first who and what man- ner of man he himself is, and what has been his own career ; and then let him consider who and what manner of man Alexander was, and to what an eminence of human grandeur he arrived. Let him consider that Alexander was a king, and the undis- puted lord of the two continents, and that his name is renowned throughout the whole earth. Let the evil-speaker against Alexander bear all this in mind, and then let him reflect on his own insignificance, the pettiness of his own circumstances and affairs, and the blunders that he makes about these, paltry and trifling as they are. Let him then ask himself whether he is a fit person to censure and revile such a man as Alexander. I believe that there was in his time no nation of men, no city, nay, no single individual, with whom Alexander's name had not be- come a familiar word. I therefore hold that such a man, who was like no ordinary mortal, was not born into the world with- out some special providence."*

And one of the most distinguished soldiers and writers of our own nation, Sir Walter Raleigh, though he failed to esti- mate justly the full merits of Alexander, has expressed his sense of the grandeur of the part played in the world by " the great Emathian conqueror" in language that well deserves quota- tion :

** So much hath the spirit of some one man excelled as it hath undertaken and effected the alteration of the greatest states and commonweals, the erection of monarchies, the con- quest of kingdoms and empires, guided handfuls of men against multitudes of equal bodily strength, contrived victories beyond all hope and discourse of reason, converted the fearful passions of his own followers into magnanimity, and the valor of his enemies into cowardice ; such spirits have been stirred up in sundry ages of the world, and in divers parts thereof, to erect and cast down again, to establish and to destroy, and to * Arrian, lib. vii., ad finem.

6o DECISIVE BATTLES

bring all things, persons, and states to the same certain ends, which the infinite spirit of the Universal, piercing, moving and governing all things, hath ordained. Certainly, the things that this king did were marvelous, and would hardly have been un- dertaken by any one else; and though his father had deter- mined to have invaded the Lesser Asia, it is like enough that he would have contented himself with some part thereof, and not have discovered the river of Indus, as this man did."*

A higher authority than either Arrian or Raleigh may now be referred to by those who wish to know the real merit of Alexander as a general, and how far the commonplace asser- tions are true that his successes were the mere results of fortu- nate rashness and unreasoning pugnacity. Napoleon selected Alexander as one of the seven greatest generals whose noble deeds history has handed down to us, and from the study of whose campaigns the principles of war are to be learned. The critique of the greatest conqueror of modern times on the mili- tary career of the great conqueror of the Old World is no less graphic than true :

" Alexander crossed the Dardanelles 334 B.C., with an army of about forty thousand men, of which one-eighth was cavalry; he forced the passage of the Granicus in opposition to an army under Memnon, the Greek, who commanded for Darius on the coast of Asia, and he spent the whole of the year 333 in establishing his power in Asia Minor. He was seconded by the Greek colonies, who dwelt on the borders of the Black Sea and on the Mediterranean, and in Sardis, Ephesus, Tarsus, Miletus, etc. The kings of Persia left their provinces and towns to be governed according to their own particular laws. Their empire was a union of confederated states, and did not form one nation ; this facilitated its conquest. As Alexander only wished for the throne of the monarch, he easily effected the change by respecting the customs, manners, and laws of the people, who experienced no change in their condition.

" In the year 332 he met with Darius at the head of sixty thousand men, who had taken up a position near Tarsus, on the banks of the Issus, in the province of Cilicia. He defeated him, entered Syria, took Damascus, which contained all the riches of the Great King, and laid siege to Tyre. This superb metropolis of the commerce of the world detained him nine * " The Historic of the World," by Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, p. 648.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 6i

months. He took Gaza after a siege of two months ; crossed the Desert in seven days ; entered Pelusium and Memphis, and founded Alexandria. In less than two years, after two battles and four or five sieges, the coasts of the Black Sea, from Phasis to Byzantium, those of the Mediterranean as far as Alex- andria, all Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, had submitted to his arms.

" In 331 he repassed the Desert, encamped in Tyre, recrossed Syria, entered Damascus, passed the Euphrates and Tigris, and defeated Darius on the field of Arbela when he was at the head of a still stronger army than that which he commanded on the Issus, and Babylon opened her gates to him. In 330 he overran Susa and took that city, Persepolis, and Pasargada, which contained the tomb of Cyrus. In 329 he directed his course northward, entered Ecbatana, and extended his con- quests to the coasts of the Caspian, punished Bessus, the cow- ardly assassin of Darius, penetrated into Scythia, and subdued the Scythians. In 328 he forced the passage of the Oxus, re- ceived sixteen thousand recruits from Macedonia, and reduced the neighboring people to subjection. In 327 he crossed the Indus, vanquished Porus in a pitched battle, took him prisoner, and treated him as a king. He contemplated passing the Ganges, but his army refused. He sailed down the Indus, in the year 326, with eight hundred vessels ; having arrived at the ocean, he sent Nearchus with a fleet to run along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf as far as the mouth of the Euphrates. In 325 he took sixty days in crossing from Gedrosia, entered Keramania, returned to Pasargada, Per- sepolis, and Susa, and married Statira, the daughter of Darius. In 324 he marched once more to the north, passed Ecbatana, and terminated his career at Babylon."*

The enduring importance of Alexander's conquests is to be estimated, not by the duration of his own Hfe and empire, or even by the duration of the kingdoms which his generals after his death formed out of the fragments of that mighty dominion. In every region of the world that he traversed, Alexander planted Greek settlements and founded cities, in the populations of which the Greek element at once asserted its predominance. Among his successors, the Seleucidse and the Ptolemies imitated their great captain in blending schemes of civili- * See Count Montholon's " Memoirs of Napoleon."

62 DECISIVE BATTLES

zation, of commercial intercourse, and of literary and scientific research with all their enterprises of military aggrandizement and with all their systems of civil administration. Such was the ascendency of the Greek genius, so wonderfully compre- hensive and assimilating was the cultivation which it intro- duced, that, within thirty years after Alexander crossed the Hellespont, the Greek language was spoken in every country from the shores of the ^gaean to the Indus, and also through- out Egypt — not, indeed, wholly to the extirpation of the native dialects, but it became the language of every court, of all litera- ture, of every judicial and political function, and formed a medium of communication among the many myriads of man- kind inhabiting these large portions of the Old World, f Throughout Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, the Hellenic char- acter that was thus imparted remained in full vigor down to the time of the Mohammedan conquests. The infinite value of this to humanity in the highest and hoHest point of view has often been pointed out, and the workings of the finger of Provi- dence have been gratefully recognized by those who have ob- served how the early growth and progress of Christianity were aided by that diffusion of the Greek language and civilization throughout Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, which had been caused by the Macedonian conquest of the East.

In upper Asia, beyond the Euphrates, the direct and material influence of Greek ascendency was more short-lived. Yet, during the existence of the Hellenic kingdoms in these regions, especially of the Greek kingdom of Bactria, the modern Bok- hara, very important effects were produced on the intellectual tendencies and tastes of the inhabitants of those countries, and of the adjacent ones, by the animating contact of the Grecian spirit. Much of Hindoo science and philosophy, much of the literature of the later Persian kingdom of the Arsacidae, either originated from, or was largely modified by, Grecian influences. So, also, the learning and science of the Arabians were in a far less degree the result of original invention and genius, than the reproduction, in an altered form, of the Greek philosophy and the Greek lore acquired by the Saracenic conquerors, together with their acquisition of the provinces which Alexander had subjugated, nearly a thousand years before the armed disciples of Mohammed commenced their career in the East. It is well t See Arnold, Hist. Rome, ii,, p. 406.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 63

known that Western Europe in the Middle Ages drew its philosophy, its arts, and its science principally from Arabian teachers. And thus we see how the intellectual influence of ancient Greece, poured on the Eastern world by Alexander's victories, and then brought back to bear on Mediaeval Europe by the spread of the Saracenic powers, has exerted its action on the elements of modern civilization by this powerful, though indirect, channel, as well as by the more obvious effects of the remnants of classic civilization which survived in Italy, Gaul, Britain, and Spain, after the irruption of the Germanic nations.*

These considerations invest the Macedonian triumphs in the East with never-dying interest, such as the most showy and sanguinary successes of mere " low ambition and the pride of kings," however they may dazzle for a moment, can never re- tain with posterity. Whether the old Persian empire which Cyrus founded could have survived much longer than it did, even if Darius had been victorious at Arbela, may safely be dis- puted. That ancient dominion, like the Turkish at the present time, labored under every cause of decay and dissolution. The satraps, like the modern pashaws, continually rebelled against the central power, and Egypt in particular was almost always in a state of insurrection against its nominal sovereign. There was no longer any effective central control, or any internal prin- ciple of unity fused through the huge mass of the empire, and binding it together. Persia was evidently about to fall; but, had it not been for Alexander's invasion of Asia, she would most probably have fallen beneath some other Oriental power, as Media and Babylon had formerly fallen before herself, and as, in after times, the Parthian supremacy gave way to the re- vived ascendency of Persia in the East, under the sceptres of the Arsacidae. A revolution that merely substituted one East- ern power for another would have been utterly barren and un- profitable to mankind.

Alexander's victory at Arbela not only overthrew an Ori- ental dynasty, but established European rulers in its stead. It broke the monotony of the Eastern world by the impression of Western energy and superior civilization, even as England's present mission is to break up the mental and moral stagnation of India and Cathay by pouring upon and through them the impulsive current of Anglo-Saxon commerce and conquest. * See Humboldt's " Cosmos."

64 DECISIVE BATTLES

Arbela, the city which has furnished its name to the decisive battle which gavte Asia to Alexander, lies more than twenty miles from the actual scene of the conflict. The little village, then named Gaugamela, is close to the spot where the armies met, but has ceded the honor of naming the battle to its more euphonious neighbor. Gaugamela is situate in one of the wide plains that lie between the Tigris and the mountains of Kurdistan. A few undulating hillocks diversify the surface of this sandy tract; but the ground is generally level, and ad- mirably qualified for the evolutions of cavalry, and also calcu- lated to give the larger of two armies the full advantage of numerical superiority. The Persian king (who, before he came to the throne, had proved his personal valor as a soldier and his skill as a general) had wisely selected this region for the third and decisive encounter between his forces and the invader. The previous defeats of his troops, however severe they had been, were not looked on as irreparable. The Granicus had been fought by his generals rashly and without mutual concert ; and, though Darius himself had commanded and been beaten at Issus, that defeat might be attributed to the disadvantageous nature of the ground, where, cooped up between the moun- tains, the river, and the sea, the numbers of the Persians con- fused and clogged alike the general's skill and the soldiers' prowess, and their very strength had been made their weak- ness. Here, on the broad plains of Kurdistan, there was scope for Asia's largest host to array its lines, to wheel, to skirmish, to condense or expand its squadrons, to manoeuvre, and to charge at will. Should Alexander and his scanty band dare to plunge into that living sea of war, their destruction seemed in- evitable.

Darius felt, however, the critical nature to himself, as well as to his adversary, of the coming encounter. He could not hope to retrieve the consequences of a third overthrow. The great cities of Mesopotamia and Upper Asia, the central provinces of the Persian empire, were certain to be at the mercy of the victor. Darius knew also the Asiatic character well enough to be aware how it yields to the prestige of success and the appar- ent career of destiny. He felt that the diadem was now either to be firmly replaced on his own brow, or to be irrevocably trans- ferred to the head of his European conqueror. He, therefore, during the long interval left him after the battle of Issus, while

I

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 65

Alexander was subjugating Syria and Egypt, assiduously busied himself in selecting the best troops which his vast em- pire supplied, and in training his varied forces to act together with some uniformity of discipline and system.

The hardy mountaineers of Afghanistan, Bokhara, Khiva, and Thibet v/ere then, as at present, far diiiferent to the gen- erality of Asiatics in warlike spirit and endurance. From these districts Darius collected large bodies of admirable infantry; and the countries of the modern Kurds and Turkomans sup- plied, as they do now, squadrons of horsemen, hardy, skilful, bold, and trained to a life of constant activity and warfare. It is not uninteresting to notice that the ancestors of our own late enemies, the Sikhs, served as allies of Darius against the Mace- donians. They are spoken of in Arrian as Indians who dwelt near Bactria. They were attached to the troops of that satrapy, and their cavalry was one of the most formidable forces in the whole Persian army.

Besides these picked troops, contingents also came in from the numerous other provinces that yet obeyed the Great King. Altogether, the horse are said to have been forty thousand, the scythe-bearing chariots two hundred, and the armed ele- phants fifteen in number. The amount of the infantry is un- certain ; but the knowledge which both ancient and modern times supply of the usual character of Oriental armies, and of their populations of camp-followers, may warrant us in be- lieving that many myriads were prepared to fight, or to en- cumber those who fought for the last Darius.

The position of the Persian king near Mesopotamia was chosen with great military skill. It was certain that Alex- ander, on his return from Egypt, must march northward along the Syrian coast before he attacked the central provinces of the Persian empire. A direct eastward march from the lower part of Palestine across the great Syrian Desert was then, as ever, utterly impracticable. Marching eastward from Syria, Alex- ander would, on crossing the Euphrates, arrive at the vast Mesopotamian plains. The wealthy capitals of the empire, Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis, would then lie to the south; and if he marched down through Mesopotamia to attack them, Darius might reasonably hope to follow the Macedonians with his immense force of cavalry, and, without even risking a pitched battle, to harass and finally overwhelm them. We may 5

66 DECISIVE BATTLES

remember that three centuries afterwards a Roman army un- der Crassus was thus actually destroyed by the Oriental arch- ers and horsemen in these very plains,* and that the ancestors of the Parthians who thus vanquished the Roman legions served by thousands under King Darius. If, on the contrary, Alexander should defer his march against Babylon, and first seek an encounter with the Persian army, the country on each side of the Tigris in this latitude was highly advantageous for such an army as Darius commanded, and he had close in his rear the mountainous districts of Northern Media, where he himself had in early life been satrap, where he had acquired reputation as a soldier and a general, and where he justly ex- pected to find loyalty to his person, and a safe refuge in case of defeat, t

His great antagonist came on across the Euphrates against him, at the head of an army which Arrian, copying from the journals of Macedonian officers, states to have consisted of forty thousand foot and seven thousand horse. In studying the campaigns of Alexander, we possess the peculiar advan- tage of deriving our information from two of Alexander's gen- erals of division, who bore an important part in all his enter- prises. Aristobulus and Ptolemy (who afterward became king of Egypt) kept regular journals of the military events which they witnessed, and these journals were in the possession of Ar- rian when he drew up his history of Alexander's expedition. The high character of Arrian for integrity makes us confident that he used them fairly, and his comments on the occasional discrepancies between the two Macedonian narratives prove that he used them sensibly. He frequently quotes the very words of his authorities ; and his history thus acquires a charm such as very few ancient or modern military narratives possess. The anecdotes and expressions which he records we fairly be- lieve to be genuine, and not to be the coinage of a rhetorician, like those in Curtius. In fact, in reading Arrian, we read Gen-

* See Mitford.

t Mitford's remarks on the strategy of Darius in his last campaign are very just. After having been unduly admired as an historian, Mitford is now unduly neglected. His partiality and his deficiency in scholar- ship have been exposed sufficiently to make him no longer a dangerous guide as to Greek politics, while the clearness and brilliancy of his narrative, and the strong common sense of his remarks (where his party prejudices do not interfere), must always make his volumes valu- able as well as entertaining.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 67

eral Aristobulus and General Ptolemy on the campaigns of the Macedonians, and it is like reading General Jomini or Gen- eral Foy on the campaigns of the French.

The estimate which we find in Arrian of the strength of Alexander's army seems reasonable enough, when we take into account both the losses which he had sustained and the re-enforcements which he had received since he left Europe. Indeed, to EngHshmen, who know with what mere handfuls of men our own generals have, at Plassy, at Assaye, at Meeanee, and other Indian battles, routed large hosts of Asiatics, the disparity of numbers that we read of in the victories won by the Macedonians over the Persians presents nothing incredi- ble. The army which Alexander now led was wholly com- posed of veteran troops in the highest possible state of equip- ment and discipline, enthusiastically devoted to their leader, and full of confidence in his military genius and his victorious destiny.

The celebrated Macedonian phalanx formed the main strength of his infantry. This force had been raised and or- ganized by his father Philip, who, on his accession to the Mace- donian throne, needed a numerous and quickly-formed army, and who, by lengthening the spear of the ordinary Greek phalanx, and increasing the depth of the files, brought the tac- tic of armed masses to the highest extent of which it was ca- pable with such materials as he possessed.* He formed his men sixteen deep, and placed in their grasp the sarissa, as the Macedonian pike was called, which was four-and-twenty feet in length, and when couched for action, reached eighteen feet in front of the soldier ; so that, as a space of about two feet was allowed between the ranks, the spears of the five files behind him projected in front of each front-rank man. The pha- langite soldier was fully equipped in the defensive armor of the regular Greek infantry. And thus the phalanx presented a ponderous and bristling mass, which, as long as its order was kept compact, was sure to bear down all opposition. The de- fects of such an organization are obvious, and were proved in after years, when the Macedonians were opposed to the Roman legions. But it is clear that under Alexander the phalanx was not the cumbrous, unwieldy body which it was at Cynoscephalae and Pydna. His men were veterans; and he * See Niebuhr's " Hist, of Rome," vol. iii., p. 466.

68 DECISIVE BATTLES

could obtain from them an accuracy of movement and steadi- ness of evolution such as probably the recruits of his father would only have floundered in attempting, and such as cer- tainly were impracticable in the phalanx when handled by his successors, especially as under them it ceased to be a standing force, and became only a militia f Under Alexander the pha- lanx consisted of an aggregate of eighteen thousand men, who were divided into six brigades of three thousand each. These were again subdivided into regiments and companies ; and the men were carefully trained to wheel, to face about, to take more ground, or to close up, as the emergencies of the battle required. Alexander also arrayed troops armed in a different manner in the intervals of the regiments of his phalangites, who could prevent their line from being pierced and their companies taken in flank, when the nature of the ground prevented a close formation, and who cotild be with- drawn when a favorable opportunity arrived for closing up the phalanx or any of its brigades for a charge, or when it was necessary to prepare to receive cavalry.

Besides the phalanx, Alexander had a considerable force of infantry who were called shield-bearers: they were not so heavily armed as the phalangites, or as was the case with the Greek regular infantry in general, but they were equipped for close fight as well as for skirmishing, and were far superior to the ordinary irregular troops of Greek warfare. They were about six thousand strong. Besides these, he had several bodies of Greek regular infantry ; and he had archers, slingers, and javelin-men, who fought also with broadsword and target, and who were principally supplied him by the highlanders of Illyria and Thracia. The main strength of his cavalry con- sisted in two chosen regiments of cuirassiers, one Macedonian and one Thessalian, each of which was about fifteen hundred strong. They were provided with long lances and heavy swords, and horse as well as man was fully equipped with de- fensive armor. Other regiments of regular cavalry were less heavily armed, and there were several bodies of light horse- men, whom Alexander's conquests in Egypt and Syria had en- abled him to mount superbly.

A little before the end of August, Alexander crossed the Euphrates at Thapsacus, a small corps of Persian cavalry un- t See Niebuhr.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 69

der Mazaeus retiring before him. Alexander was too prudent to march down through the Mesopotamian deserts, and con- tinued to advance eastward with the intention of passing the Tigris, and then, if he was unable to find Darius and bring him to action, of marching southward on the left side of that river along the skirts of a mountainous district where his men would suffer less from heat and thirst, and where provisions would be more abundant.

Darius, finding that his adversary was not to be enticed into the march through Mesopotamia against his capital, deter- mined to remain on the battle-ground, which he had chosen on the left of the Tigris ; where, if his enemy met a defeat or a check, the destruction of the invaders would be certain with two such rivers as the Euphrates and the Tigris in their rear. The Persian king availed himself to the utmost of every ad- vantage in his power. He caused a large space of ground to be carefully levelled for the operation of his scythe-armed chariots; and he deposited his military stores in the strong town of Arbela, about twenty miles in his rear. The rhetori- cians of after ages have loved to describe Darius Codomanus as a second Xerxes in ostentation and imbecility ; but a fair ex- amination of his generalship in this his last campaign shows that he was worthy of bearing the same name as his great pre- decessor, the royal son of Hystaspes.

On learning that Darius was with a large army on the left of the Tigris, Alexander hurried forward and crossed that river without opposition. He was at first unable to procure any cer- tain intelligence of the precise position of the enemy, and after giving his army a short interval of rest, he marched for four days down the left bank of the river. A moralist may pause upon the fact that Alexander must in this march have passed within a few miles of the ruins of Nineveh, the great city of the primeval conquerors of the human race. Neither the Mace- donian king nor any of his followers knew what those vast mounds had once been. They had already sunk into utter de- struction ; and it is only within the last few years that the intel- lectual energy of one of our own countrymen has rescued Nine- veh from its long centuries of oblivion.*

On the fourth day of Alexander's southward march, his ad-

* See Layard's " Nineveh," and see Vaux's " Nineveh and Persep- oHs," p. 16.

70 DECISIVE BATTLES

vanced guard reported that a body of the enemy's cavalry was in sight. He instantly formed his army in order for battle, and directing them to advance steadily, he rode forward at the head of some squadrons of cavalry, and charged the Persian horse, whom he found before him. This was a mere reconnoitring party, and they broke and fled immediately; but the Mace- donians made some prisoners, and from them Alexander found that Darius was posted only a few miles ofif, and learned the strength of the army that he had with him. On receiving this news Alexander halted, and gave his men repose for four days, so that they should go into action fresh and vigorous. He also fortified his camp and deposited in it all his military stores, and all his sick and disabled soldiers, intending to advance upon the enemy with the serviceable part of his army perfectly un- encumbered. After this halt, he moved forward, while it was yet dark, with the intention of reaching the enemy, and attack- ing them at break of day. About half way between the camps there were some undulations of the ground, which concealed the two armies from each other's view; but, on Alexander arriving at their summit, he saw, by the early light, the Persian host arrayed before him, and he probably also observed traces of some engineering operation having been carried on along part of the ground in front of them. Not knowing that these marks had been caused by the Persians having levelled the ground for the free use of their war-chariots, Alexander sus- pected that hidden pitfalls had been prepared with a view of disordering the approach of his cavalry. He summoned a council of war forthwith. Some of the officers were for attack- ing instantly, at all hazards ; but the more prudent opinion of Parmenio prevailed, and it was determined not to advance further till the battle-ground had been carefully surveyed.

Alexander halted his army on the heights, and, taking with him some light-armed infantry and some cavalry, he passed part of the day in reconnoitring the enemy, and observing the nature of the ground which he had to fight on. Darius wisely refrained from moving from his position to attack the Mace- donians on the eminences which they occupied, and the two armies remained until night without molesting each other. On Alexander's return to his headquarters, he summoned his generals and superior officers together, and telling them that he knew well that their zeal wanted no exhortation, he be-

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA

71

sought them to do their utmost in encouraging and instructing those whom each commanded, to do their best in the next day's battle. They were to remind them that they were now not go- ing to fight for a province as they had hitherto fought, but they were about to decide by their swords the dominion of all Asia. Each officer ought to impress this upon his subalterns, and they should urge it on their men. Their natural courage re- quired no long words to excite its ardor ; but they should be reminded of the paramount importance of steadiness in action. The silence in the ranks must be unbroken as long as silence was proper ; but when the time came for the charge, the shout and the cheer must be full of terror for the foe. The officers were to be alert in receiving and communicating orders ; and every one was to act as if he felt that the whole result of the battle depended on his own single good conduct.

Having thus briefly instructed his generals, Alexander or- dered that the army should sup, and take their rest for the night.

Darkness had closed over the tents of the Macedonians, when Alexander's veteran general, Parmenio, came to him, and proposed that they should make a night attack on the Per- sians. The king is said to have answered that he scorned to filch a victory, and that Alexander must conquer openly and fairly. Arrian justly remarks that Alexander's resolution was as wise as it was spirited. Besides the confusion and uncer- tainty which are inseparable from night engagements, the value of Alexander's victory would have been impaired, if gained under circumstances which might supply the enemy with any excuse for his defeat, and encouraged him to renew the con- test. It was necessary for Alexander not only to beat Darius, but to gain such a victory as should leave his rival without apology and without hope of recovery.

The Persians, in fact, expected, and were prepared to meet, a night attack. Such was the apprehension that Darius enter- tained of it, that he formed his troops at evening in order of battle, and kept them under arms all night. The effect of this was, that the morning found them jaded and dispirited, while it brought their adversaries all fresh and vigorous against them.

The written order of battle which Darius himself caused to be drawn up, fell into the hands of the Macedonians after the engagement, and Aristobulus copied it into his journal. We

72 DECISIVE BATTLES

thus possess, through Arrian, unusually authentic information as to the composition and arrangement of the Persian army. On the extreme left were the Bactrian, Daan, and Arachosian cavalry. Next to these Darius placed the troops from Persia proper, both horse and foot. Then came the Susians, and next to these the Cadusians. These forces made up the left wing. Darius' own station was in the centre. This was composed of the Indians, the Carians, the Mardian archers, and the divi- sion of Persians who were distinguished by the golden apples that formed the knobs of their spears. Here also were sta- tioned the body-guard of the Persian nobility. Besides these, there were, in the centre, formed in deep order, the Uxian and Babylonian troops, and the soldiers from the Red Sea. The brigade of Greek mercenaries whom Darius had in his service, and who alone were considered fit to stand the charge of the Macedonian phalanx, was drawn up on either side of the royal chariot. The right wing was composed of the Coelosyrians and Mesopotamians, the Medes, the Parthians, the Sacians, the Tapurians, Hyrcanians, Albanians, and Sacesinse. In advance of the line on the left wing were placed the Scythian cavalry, with a thousand of the Bactrian horse, and a hundred scythe- armed chariots. The elephants and fifty scythe-armed chariots were ranged in front of the centre; and fifty more chariots, with the Armenian and Cappadocian cavalry, were drawn up in advance of the right wing.

Thus arrayed, the great host of King Darius passed the night, that to many thousands of them was the last of their existence. The morning of the first of October,* two thou- sand one hundred and eighty-two years ago, dawned slowly to their wearied watching, and they could hear the note of the Macedonian trumpet sounding to arms, and could see King Alexander's forces descend from their tents on the heights, and form in order of battle on the plain.

There was deep need of skill, as well as of valor, on Alex- ander's side; and few battle-fields have witnessed more con- summate generalship than was now displayed by the Mace- donian king. There were no natural barriers by which he could protect his flanks; and not only was he certain to be over-

* See Clinton's " Fasti Hellenici." The battle was fought eleven days after an eclipse of the moon, which gives the means of fixing the pre- cise date.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 73

lapped on either wing by the vast lines of the Persian army, but there was imminent risk of their cirding round him, and charging him in the rear, while he advanced against their cen- tre. He formed, therefore, a second or reserve line, which was to wheel round, if required, or to detach troops to either flank, as the enemy's movements might necessitate; and thus, with their whole army ready at any moment to be thrown into one vast hollow square, the Macedonians advanced in two lines against the enemy, Alexander himself leading on the right wing, and the renowned phalanx forming the centre, while Parmenio commanded on the left.

Such was the general nature of the disposition which Alex- ander made of his army. But we have in Arrian the details of the position of each brigade and regiment; and as we know that these details were taken from the journals of Macedonian generals, it is interesting to examine them, and to read the names and stations of King Alexander's generals and colonels in this, the greatest of his battles.

The eight regiments of the royal horse-guards formed the right of Alexander's line. Their colonels were Cleitus (whose regiment was on the extreme right, the post of peculiar dan- ger), Glaucias, Ariston, Sopolis, Heracleides, Demetrias, Mel- eager, and Hegelochus. Philotas was general of the whole division. Then came the shield-bearing infantry: Nicanor was their general. Then came the phalanx in six brigades. Coenus' brigade was on the right, and nearest to the shield- bearers ; next to this stood the brigade of Perdiccas, then Meleager's, then Polysperchon's ; and then the brigade of Amynias, but which was now commanded by Simmias, as Amynias had been sent to Macedonia to levy recruits. Then came the infantry of the left wing, under the command of Craterus. Next to Craterus' infantry were placed the cavalry regiments of the allies, with Eriguius for their general. The Thessalian cavalry, commanded by Philippus, were next, and held the extreme left of the whole army. The whole left wing was intrusted to the command of Parmenio, who had round his person the Pharsalian regiment of cavalry, which was the strongest and best of all the Thessalian horse regiments.

The centre of the second line was occupied by a body of phalangite infantry, formed of companies which were drafted for this purpose from each of the brigades of their phalanx.

74 DECISIVE BATTLES

The officers in command of this corps were ordered to be ready to face about, if the enemy should succeed in gaining the rear of the army. On the right of this reserve of infantry, in the second hne, and behind the royal horse-guards, Alexander placed half the Agrian light-armed infantry under Attains, and with them Brison's body of Macedonian archers and Cleander's regiment of foot. He also placed in this part of his army Menidas' squadron of calvary, and Aretes' and Ariston's light horse. Menidas was ordered to watch if the enemy's cavalry tried to turn their flank, and, if they did so, to charge them be- fore they wheeled completely round, and so take them in flank themselves. A similar force was arranged on the left of the second line for the same purpose. The Thracian infantry of Sitalces were placed there, and Coeranus' regiment of the cavalry of the Greek allies, and Agathon's troops of the Odry- sian irregular horse. The extreme left of the second line in this quarter was held by Andromachus' cavalry. A division of Thracian infantry was left in guard of the camp. In advance of the right wing and centre was scattered a number of light- armed troops, of javelin-men and bow-men, with the intention of warding off the charge of the armed chariots.*

Conspicuous by the brilliancy of his armor, and by the chosen band of officers who were round his person, Alexander took his own station, as his custom was, in the right wing, at the head of his cavalry ; and when all the arrangements for the battle were complete, and his generals were fully instructed how to act in each probable emergency, he began to lead his men toward the enemy.

It was ever his custom to expose his life freely in battle, and to emulate the personal prowess of his great ancestor, Achilles. Perhaps, in the bold enterprise of conquering Persia, it was politic for Alexander to raise his army's daring to the utmost by the example of his own heroic valor ; and, in his subsequent campaigns, the love of the excitement, of " the raptures of the strife," may have made him, like Murat, continue from choice a custom which he commenced from duty. But he never suf- fered the ardor of the soldier to make him lose the coolness of

* Kleber's arrangement of his troops at the battle of Heliopolis, where, with ten thousand Europeans, he had to encounter eighty thousand Asiatics in an open plain, is worth comparing with Alexander's tactics at Arbela. See Thiers' " Histoire du Consulat," &c., vol. ii., livre v.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 75

the general, and at Arbela, in particular, he showed that he could act up to his favorite Homeric maxim of being

'A/jicf}6T€pov, jSao-iXevs t aya&o<s Kparepoi t ai;(/x'>yTi/s.

Great reliance had been placed by the Persian king on the effects of the scythe-bearing chariots. It was designed to launch these against the Macedonian phalanx, and to follow them up by a heavy charge of cavalry, which, it was hoped, would find the ranks of the spearmen disordered by the rush of the chariots, and easily destroy this most formidable part of Alexander's force. In front, therefore, of the Persian centre, where Darius took his station, and which it was supposed that the phalanx would attack, the ground had been carefully lev- elled and smoothed, so as to allow the chariots to charge over it with their full sweep and speed. As the Macedonian army approached the Persian, Alexander found that the front of his whole line barely equalled the front of the Persian centre, so that he was outflanked on his right by the entire left wing of the enemy, and by their entire right wing on his left. His tac- tics were to assail some one point of the hostile army, and gain a decisive advantage, while he refused, as far as possible, the encounter along the rest of the line. He therefore inclined his order of march to the right, so as to enable his right wing and centre to come into collision with the enemy on as favorable terms as possible, although the manoeuvre might in some re- spect compromise his left.

The effect of this oblique movement was to bring the phalanx and his own wing nearly beyond the limits of the ground which the Persians had prepared for the operations of the chariots ; and Darius, fearing to lose the benefit of this arm against the most important parts of the Macedonian force, ordered the Scythian and Bactrian cavalry, who were drawn up in advance on his extreme left, to charge round upon Alex- ander's right wing, and check its further lateral progress. Against these assailants Alexander sent from his second line Menidas' cavalry. As these proved too few to make head against the enemy, he ordered Ariston also from the second line with his right horse, and Cleander with his foot, in sup- port of Menidas. The Bactrians and Scythians now began to give way; but Darius reinforced them by the mass of Bac-

76 DECISIVE BATTLES

trian cavalry from his main line, and an obstinate cavalry fight now took place. The Bactrians and Scythians were numerous, and were better armed than the horsemen under Menidas and Ariston ; and the loss at first was heaviest on the Macedonian side. But still the European cavalry stood the charge of the Asiatics, and at last, by their superior discipline, and by acting in squadrons that supported each other,* instead of fighting in a confused mass like the barbarians, the Macedonians broke their adversaries, and drove them off the field.

Darius now directed the scythe-armed chariots to be driven against Alexander's horse-guards and the phalanx, and these formidable vehicles were accordingly sent rattling across the plain, against the Macedonian line. When we remember the alarm which the war-chariots of the Britons created among Caesar's legions, we shall not be prone to deride this arm of ancient warfare as always useless. The object of the chariots was to create unsteadiness in the ranks against which they were driven, and squadrons of cavalry followed close upon them to profit by such disorder. But the Asiatic chariots were rendered ineffective at Arbela by the light-armed troops, whom Alexan- der had specially appointed for the service, and who, wounding the horses and drivers with their missile weapons, and run- ning alongside so as to cut the traces or seize the reins, marred the intended charge ; and the few chariots that reached the phalanx passed harmlessly through the intervals which the spearmen opened for them, and were easily captured in the rear.

A mass of the Asiatic cavalry was now, for the second time, collected against Alexander's extreme right, and moved round

* 'AWa Koi &>s rhs irpoa&oXh.s avrwp iSexovro ol MaKedSves, Kol $la. nar* Jf\a irpo<T- irliTToyres i^ia^ovv iK rrjs rd^fcus. — ArriaN, lib. iii., c. 13.

The best explanation of this may be found in Napoleon's account of the cavalry fights between the French and the Mamelukes. " Two Mamelukes were able to make head against three Frenchmen, because they were better armed, better mounted, and better trained ; they had two pair of pistols, a blunderbuss, a carabine, a helmet with a visor, and a coat of mail ; they had several horses, and several attendants on foot. One hundred cuirassiers, however, were not afraid of one hun- dred Mamelukes; three hundred could beat an equal number, and one thousand could easily put to the rout fifteen hundred, so great is the in- fluence of tactics, order, and evolutions ! Leclerc and Lasalle presented their men to the Mamelukes in several lines. When the^ Arabs were on the point of overwhelming the first, the second came to its assistance on the right and left ; the Mamelukes then halted and wheeled, in order to turn the wings of this new line ; this moment was always seized upon to charge them, and they were uniformly broken." — Montholon's "History of Captivity of Napoleon," vol. iv., p. 70.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 77

it, with the view of gaining the flank of his army. At the critical moment, when their own flanks were exposed by this evolution. Aretes dashed on the Persian squadrons with his horsemen from Alexander's second line. While Alexander thus met and baffled all the flanking attacks of the enemy with troops brought up from his second line, he kept his own horse-guards and the rest of the front line of his wing fresh, and ready to take advantage of the first opportunity for striking a decisive blow. This soon came. A large body of horse, who were posted on the Persian left wing nearest to the centre, quitted their station, and rode off to help their comrades in the cavalry fight, that still was going on at the extreme right of Alexander's wing against the detachments from his second line. This made a huge gap in the Persian array, and into this space Alexander instantly charged with his guard and all the cavalry of his wing; and then pressing toward his left, he soon began to make havoc in the left flank of the Persian centre. The shield- bearing infantry now charged also among the reeling masses of the Asiatics ; and five of the brigades of the phalanx, with the irresistible might of their sarissas, bore down the Greek mercenaries of Darius, and dug their way through the Per- sian centre. In the early part of the battle Darius had showed skill and energy ; and he now, for some time, encouraged his men, by voice and example, to keep firm. But the lances of Alexa^ider's cavalry and the pikes of the phalanx now pressed nearer and nearer to him. His charioteer was struck down by a javeHn at his side; and at last Darius' nerve failed him, and, descending from his chariot, he mounted on a fleet horse and galloped from the plain, regardless of the state of the battle in other parts of the field, where matters were going on much more favorably for his cause, and where his presence might have done much toward gaining a victory.

Alexander's operations with his right and centre had exposed his left to an immensely preponderating force of the enemy. Parmenio kept out of action as long as possible ; but Mazseus, who commanded the Persian right wing, advanced against him, completely outflanked him, and pressed him severely with re- iterated charges by superior numbers. Seeing the distress of Parmenio's wing, Simmias, who commanded the sixth brigade of the phalanx, which was next to the left wing, did not advance with the other brigades in the great charge upon the Persian

78 DECISIVE BATTLES

centre, but kept back to cover Parmenio's troops on their right flank, as otherwise they would have been completely sur- rounded and cut off from the rest of the Macedonian army. By so doing, Simmias had unavoidably opened a gap in the Macedonian left centre ; and a large column of Indian and Persian horse, from the Persian right centre, had galloped for- ward through this interval, and right through the troops of the Macedonian second line. Instead of then wheeling round upon Parmenio, or upon the rear of Alexander's conquering wing, the Indian and Persian cavalry rode straight on to the Macedonian camp, overpowered the Thracians who were left in charge of it, and began to plunder. This was stopped by the phalangite troops of the second line, who, after the enemy's horsemen had rushed by them, faced about, counter-marched upon the camp, killed many of the Indians and Persians in the act of plundering, and forced the rest to ride off again. Just at this crisis, Alexander had been recalled from his pursuit of Darius by tidings of the distress of Parmenio and of his inabil- ity to bear up any longer against the hot attacks of Mazseus. Taking his horse-guards with him, Alexander rode toward the part of the field where his left wing was fighting; but on his way thither he encountered the Persian and Indian cavalry, on their return from his camp.

These men now saw that their only chance of safety was to cut their way through, and in one huge column they charged desperately upon the Macedonian regiments. There was here a close hand-to-hand fight, which lasted some time, and sixty of the royal horse-guards fell, and three generals, who fought close to Alexander's side, were wounded. At length the Mace- donian discipline and valor again prevailed, and a large num- ber of the Persian and Indian horsemen were cut down, some few only succeeding in breaking through and riding away. Re- lieved of these obstinate enemies, Alexander again formed his regiments of horse-guards, and led them toward Parmenio; but by this time that general also was victorious. Probably the news of Darius' flight had reached Mazaeus, and had damped the ardor of the Persian right wing, while the tidings of their comrades' success must have proportionally encour- aged the Macedonian forces under Parmenio. His Thessalian cavalry particularly distinguished themselves by their gallantry and persevering good conduct; and by the time that Alex-

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA 79

ander had ridden up to Parmenio, the whole Persian army was in full flight from the field.

It was of the deepest importance to Alexander to secure the person of Darius, and he now urged on the pursuit. The River Lycus was between the field of battle and the city of Arbela, whither the fugitives directed their course, and the passage of this river was even more destructive to the Persians than the swords and spears of the Macedonians had been in the engagement.* The narrow bridge was soon choked up by the flying thousands who rushed toward it, and vast numbers of the Persians threw themselves, or were hurried by others, into the rapid stream, and perished in its waters, Darius had crossed it, and had ridden on through Arbela without halt- ing. Alexander reached the city on the next day, and made himself master of all Darius' treasure and stores ; but the Per- sian king, unfortunately for himself, had fled too fast for his conqueror, but had only escaped to perish by the treachery of his Bactrian satrap, Bessus.

A few days after the battle Alexander entered Babylon, " the oldest seat of earthly empire " then in existence, as its acknowl- edged lord and master. There were yet some campaigns of his brief and bright career to be accomplished. Central Asia was yet to witness the march of his phalanx. He was yet to effect that conquest of Afghanistan in which England since has failed. His generalship, as well as his valor, was yet to be signalized on the banks of the Hydaspes and the field of Chillianwallah ; and he was yet to precede the Queen of Eng- land in annexing the Punjaub to the dominions of a European sovereign. But the crisis of his career was reached ; the great object of his mission was accomplished ; and the ancient Per- sian empire, which once menaced all the nations of the earth with subjection, was irreparably crushed when Alexander had won his crowning victory at Arbela.

* I purposely omit any statement of the loss in the battle. There is a palpable error of the transcribers in the numbers which we find in our present manuscripts of Arrian, and Curtius is of no authority.

8o DECISIVE BATTLES

Synopsis of Events Between the Battle of Arbela and THE Battle of the Metaurus.

B.C. 330. The Lacedaemonians endeavor to create a rising in Greece against the Macedonian power; they are defeated by Antipater, Alexander's viceroy ; and their king, Agis, falls in the battle.

330 to 327. Alexander's campaigns in Upper Asia.

327, 326. Alexander marches through Afghanistan to the Punjaub. He defeats Porus. His troops refuse to march toward the Ganges and he commences the descent of the Indus. On his march he attacks and subdues several Indian tribes — among others, the Malli, in the storming of whose capital (Moortan) he is severely wounded. He directs his admiral, Nearchus, to sail round from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, and leads the army back across Scinde and Beloochistan.

324. Alexander returns to Babylon. " In the tenth year after he had crossed the Hellespont, Alexander, having won his vast dominion, entered Babylon ; and resting from his career in that oldest seat of earthly empire, he steadily surveyed the mass of various nations which owned his sovereignty, and re- solved in his mind the great work of breathing into this huge but inert body the living spirit of Greek civilization. In the bloom of youthful manhood, at the age of thirty-two, he paused from the fiery speed of his earlier course, and for the first time gave the nations an opportunity of offering their homage be- fore his throne. They came from all the extremities of the earth to propitiate his anger, to celebrate his greatness, or to solicit his protection. * * * History may allow us to think that Alexander and a Roman ambassador did meet at Baby- lon ; that the greatest man of the ancient world saw and spoke with a citizen of that great nation which was destined to suc- ceed him in his appointed work, and to found a wider and still more enduring empire. They met, too, in Babylon, almost be- neath the shadow of the Temple of Bel, perhaps the earliest monument ever raised by human pride and power in a city, stricken, as it were, by the word of God's heaviest judgment, as the symbol of greatness apart from <