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 X@рiç inπeiç is said to have originated from some Ionian Greeks who were serving compulsorily in the army of Datis, contriving to inform Miltiades that the Persian cavalry had gone away, whereupon Miltiades immediately joined battle and gained the victory. There may probably be a gleam of truth in this legend. If Datis's cavalry was numerous, as the abundant pastures of Eubœa were close at hand, the Persian general, when he thought, from the inaction of his enemy, that they did not mean to come down from the heights and give battle, might naturally send the larger part of his horse back across the channel to the neighborhood of Eretria, where he had already left a detachment, and where his military stores must have been deposited. The knowledge of such a movement would of course confirm Miltiades in his resolution to bring on a speedy engagement.

But, in truth, whatever amount of cavalry we suppose Datis to have had with him on the day of Marathon, their inaction in the battle is intelligible, if we believe the attack of the Athenian spearmen to have been as sudden as it was rapid. The Persian horse-soldier, on an alarm being given, had to take the shackles off his horse, to strap the saddle on, and bridle him, besides equipping himself (see Xenoph., “Anab.," lib. iii., c. 4); and when each individual horseman was ready, the line had to be formed; and the time that it takes to form the Oriental cavalry in line for a charge has, in all ages, been observed by Europeans.

The wet state of the marshes at each end of the plain, in the time of year when the battle was fought, has been adverted to by Mr. Wordsworth, and this would hinder the Persian general from arranging and employing his horsemen on his extreme wings, while it also enabled the Greeks, as they came forward, to occupy the whole breadth of the practicable ground with an unbroken line of leveled spears, against which, if any Persian horse advanced, they would be driven back in confusion upon their own foot.

Even numerous and fully-arrayed bodies of cavalry have been repeatedly broken, both in ancient and modern warfare, by resolute charges of infantry. For instance, it was by an attack of some picked cohorts that Cæsar routed the Pompeian 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 "Vespa," 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 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. Themistocles persuades the Athenians to leave off dividing the proceeds of their silver mines among themselves, and to employ the money in strengthening their navy.

487. Egypt revolts from the Persians, and delays the expedition against Greece.

485. Darius dies, and Xerxes his son becomes King of Persia in his stead.

484. The Persians recover Egypt.

480. Xerxes invades Greece. Indecisive actions between the Persian and Greek fleets at Artemisium. Destruction of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopyla. 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 Platæa.

The Greeks land in Asia Minor, and defeat a Persian force

at Mycale. In this and the following years the Persians lose all their conquests in Europe, and many on the coast of Asia.

477. Many of the Greek maritime states take Athens as their leader instead of Sparta.

466. Victories of Cimon over the Persians at the Eurymedon. 464. Revolt of the Helots against Sparta. Third Messenian

war.

460. Egypt again revolts against Persia. The Athenians send a powerful armament to aid the Egyptians, which, after gaining some successes, is destroyed; and Egypt submits. This war lasted six years.

457. Wars in Greece between the Athenian and several Peloponnesian states. Immense exertions of Athens at this time. "There is an original inscription still preserved in the Louvre which attests the energies of Athens at this crisis, when Athens, like England in modern wars, at once sought conquests abroad and repelled enemies at home. At the period we now advert to (B.C. 457), an Athenian armament of two hundred galleys was engaged in a bold though unsuccessful expedition against Egypt. The Athenian crews had landed, had won a battle; they had then re-embarked and sailed up the Nile, and were busily besieging the Persian garrison in Memphis. As the complement of a trireme galley was at least two hundred men, we 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 Cecryphalæ and Ægina, capturing in the last engagement seventy galleys. This last fact may give us some idea of the strength of the Athenian home fleet that gained the victory ; and by adopting the same ratio of multiplying whatever number of galleys we suppose to have been employed by two hundred, so as to gain the aggregate number of the crews, we may form some estimate of the forces which this little Greek state then kept on foot. Between sixty and seventy thousand men must have served in her fleets during that year. Her tenacity of purpose was equal to her boldness of enterprise. Sooner than yield or withdraw from any of their expeditions, the Athenians at this very time, when Corinth sent an army to attack their garrison at Megara, did not recall a single crew or a single soldier from

Ægina or from abroad; but the lads and old men, who had been left to guard the city, fought and won a battle against these new assailants. The inscription which we have referred to is graven on a votive tablet to the memory of the dead, erected in that year by the 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 Phœnicia, at Haliæ, in Ægina, and in Megara, in the same year.'

*

445. A thirty years' truce concluded between Athens and Lacedæmon.

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 Baotians 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 severe defeat in Boeotia, and the Spartan general, Brasidas, leads an expedition to the Thracian coasts, and conquers many of the most valuable Athenian possessions in those regions.

421. Nominal truce for thirty years between Athens and Sparta, but hostilities continue on the Thracian coast and in other quarters.

415. The Athenians send an expedition to conquer Sicily.

* Pæans of the Athenian Navy.

CHAPTER II.

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

The Romans knew not, and could not know, how deeply the greatness of their own posterity, and the fate of the whole Western world, were involved in the destruction of the fleet of Athens in the 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 during ancient and medieval times than has the city of Syracuse. Athenian, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Saracen, and Norman, have in turns beleaguered her walls; and the resistance which she successfully opposed to some of her early assailants was of the deepest importance, not only to the fortunes of the generations then in being, but to all the subsequent current of human events. To adopt the eloquent expressions of Arnold respecting the check which she gave to the Carthaginian arms, Syracuse was a breakwater which God's providence raised up to protect the yet immature strength of Rome." And her triumphant repulse of the great Athenian expedition against her was of even more wide-spread and enduring importance. It forms a decisive epoch in the strife for universal empire, in which all the great states of antiquity successively engaged and failed.

The present city of Syracuse is a place of little or no military strength, as the fire of artillery from the 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 offense which then were employed by besieging armies.

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,