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The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to Waterloo

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Title: The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to Waterloo

Author: Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy


        
Release date: May 1, 2003 [eBook #4061]
                Most recently updated: August 7, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTEEN DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD: FROM MARATHON TO WATERLOO ***




Produced by John Hill







THE FIFTEEN DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD FROM MARATHON TO WATERLOO

By Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

(Late Chief Justice of Ceylon) Author of 'The Rise and Progress of the
English Constitution'




Dedicated to ROBERT GORDON LATHAM, M.D., F.R.S. Late Fellow of King's
College Cambridge; Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London.

Member of the Ethnological Society, New York; Late Professor of the
English Language and Literature, in University College, London.

By his Friend THE AUTHOR.




Transcriber's Notes:

Capital letters have been used to replace text in italics in the printed
text. Accents have been omitted.

Footnotes have been inserted into the text enclosed in square '[]'
brackets, near the point where they were indicated by a suffix in the
text.

Greek words in the text have been crudely translated into Western
European capital letters. Sincere apologies to Greek scholars! Longer
passages in Greek have been omitted and where possible replaced with a
reference to the original from which they were taken.




PREFACE.

It is an honourable characteristic of the Spirit of this Age, that
projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civilized states
with gradually increasing aversion. The Universal Peace Society
certainly does not, and probably never will, enrol the majority of
statesmen among its members. But even those who look upon the Appeal
of Battle as occasionally unavoidable in international controversies,
concur in thinking it a deplorable necessity, only to be resorted to
when all peaceful modes of arrangement have been vainly tried; and when
the law of self-defence justifies a State, like an individual, in using
force to protect itself from imminent and serious injury. For a writer,
therefore, of the present day to choose battles for his favourite topic,
merely because they were battles, merely because so many myriads of
troops were arrayed in them, and so many hundreds or thousands of human
beings stabbed, hewed, or shot each other to death during them, would
argue strange weakness or depravity of mind. Yet it cannot be denied
that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of
carnage. There is undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and
in the love of honour, which make the combatants confront agony and
destruction. And the powers of the human intellect are rarely more
strongly displayed than they are in the Commander, who regulates,
arrays, and wields at his will these masses of armed disputants; who,
cool yet daring, in the midst of peril reflects on all, and provides for
all, ever ready with fresh resources and designs, as the vicissitudes of
the storm of slaughter require. But these qualities, however high they
may appear, are to be found in the basest as well as in the noblest of
mankind. Catiline was as brave a soldier as Leonidas, and a much better
officer. Alva surpassed the Prince of Orange in the field; and Suwarrow
was the military superior of Kosciusko. To adopt the emphatic words of
Byron:--

     "'Tis the Cause makes all,
      Degrades or hallows courage in its fall."

There are some battles, also, which claim our attention, independently
of the moral worth of the combatants, on account of their enduring
importance, and by reason of the practical influence on our own social
and political condition, which we can trace up to the results of those
engagements. They have for us an abiding and actual interest, both
while we investigate the chain of causes and effects, by which they have
helped to make us what we are; and also while we speculate on what we
probably should have been, if any one of those battles had come to
a different termination. Hallam has admirably expressed this in his
remarks on the victory gained by Charles Martel, between Tours and
Poictiers, over the invading Saracens.

He says of it, that "it may justly be reckoned among those few battles
of which a contrary event would have essentially varied the drama of the
world in all its subsequent scenes: with Marathon, Arbela, the Metaurus,
Chalons, and Leipsic." It was the perusal of this note of Hallam's that
first led me to the consideration of my present subject. I certainly
differ from that great historian as to the comparative importance of
some of the battles which he thus enumerates, and also of some which he
omits. It is probable, indeed, that no two historical inquirers would
entirely agree in their lists of the Decisive Battles of the World.
Different minds will naturally vary in the impressions which particular
events make on them; and in the degree of interest with which they
watch the career, and reflect on the importance, of different historical
personages. But our concurrence in our catalogues is of little moment,
provided we learn to look on these great historical events in the spirit
which Hallam's observations indicate. Those remarks should teach us
to watch how the interests of many states are often involved in the
collisions between a few; and how the effect of those collisions is not
limited to a single age, but may give an impulse which will sway the
fortunes of successive generations of mankind. Most valuable also is the
mental discipline which is thus acquired, and by which we are trained
not only to observe what has been, and what is, but also to ponder on
what might have been. [See Bolingbroke, On the Study and Use of History,
vol. ii. p. 497 of his collected works.]

We thus learn not to judge of the wisdom of measures too exclusively by
the results. We learn to apply the juster standard of seeing what the
circumstances and the probabilities were that surrounded a statesman or
a general at the time when he decided on his plan: we value him not by
his fortune, but by his PROAIRESIZ, to adopt the expressive Greek word,
for which our language gives no equivalent.

The reasons why each of the following Fifteen Battles has been selected
will, I trust, appear when it is described. But it may be well to
premise a few remarks on the negative tests which have led me to
reject others, which at first sight may appear equal in magnitude and
importance to the chosen Fifteen.

I need hardly remark that it is not the number of killed and wounded in
a battle that determines its general historical importance. It is not
because only a few hundreds fell in the battle by which Joan of Arc
captured the Tourelles and raised the siege of Orleans, that the effect
of that crisis is to be judged: nor would a full belief in the largest
number which Eastern historians state to have been slaughtered in any
of the numerous conflicts between Asiatic rulers, make me regard the
engagement in which they fell as one of paramount importance to mankind.
But, besides battles of this kind, there are many of great consequence,
and attended with circumstances which powerfully excite our feelings,
and rivet our attention, and yet which appear to me of mere secondary
rank, inasmuch as either their effects were limited in area, or they
themselves merely confirmed some great tendency or bias which an earlier
battle had originated. For example, the encounters between the Greeks
and Persians, which followed Marathon, seem to me not to have been
phenomena of primary impulse. Greek superiority had been already
asserted, Asiatic ambition had already been checked, before Salamis and
Platea confirmed the superiority of European free states over Oriental
despotism. So, AEgos-Potamos, which finally crushed the maritime
power of Athens, seems to me inferior in interest to the defeat before
Syracuse, where Athens received her first fatal check, and after which
she only struggled to retard her downfall. I think similarly of Zama
with respect to Carthage, as compared with the Metaurus: and, on the
same principle, the subsequent great battles of the Revolutionary
war appear to me inferior in their importance to Valmy, which first
determined the military character and career of the French Revolution.

I am aware that a little activity of imagination, and a slight exercise
of metaphysical ingenuity, may amuse us, by showing how the chain of
circumstances is so linked together, that the smallest skirmish, or the
slightest occurrence of any kind, that ever occurred, may be said to
have been essential, in its actual termination, to the whole order of
subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of
the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of
remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the
other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those,
who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country,
recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena,
which follow inevitably one upon the other. But when, in this work,
I speak of probabilities, I speak of human probabilities only. When I
speak of Cause and Effect, I speak of those general laws only, by which
we perceive the sequence of human affairs to be usually regulated; and
in which we recognise emphatically the wisdom and power of the Supreme
Lawgiver, the design of The Designer.

MITRE COURT CHAMBERS, TEMPLE, June 26, 1851.


CONTENTS.


CHAP. I.

THE BATTLE OF MARATHON

Explanatory Remarks on some of the circumstances of the Battle of
Marathon.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Marathon, B.C. 490, and the
Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse, B.C. 413.


CHAP. II.

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

Synopsis of Events between the Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse and
the Battle of Arbela.


CHAP. III.

THE BATTLE OF ARBELA, B.C. 331.

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


CHAP. IV.

THE BATTLE OF THE METAURUS, B.C. 207.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of the Metaurus, B.C. 207, and
Arminius's Victory over the Roman Legions under Varus. A.D. 9.


CHAP. V.

VICTORY OF ARMINIUS OVER THE ROMAN LEGIONS UNDER VARUS, A.D. 9.

Arminius. Synopsis of Events between Arminius's Victory over Varus and
the Battle of Chalons.


CHAP. VI.

THE BATTLE OF CHALONS, A.D. 451.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Chalons, A.D. 451, and the
Battle of Tours, 732.


CHAP. VII.

THE BATTLE OF TOURS, A.D. 732.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Tours, A.D. 732 and the Battle
of Hastings, 1066.


CHAP. VIII.

THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS, A.D. 1066.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Hastings, A.D. 1066, and Joan
of Arc's Victory at Orleans, 1429.


CHAP. IX.

JOAN OF ARC'S VICTORY OVER THE ENGLISH AT ORLEANS, A.D. 1429.

Synopsis of Events between Joan of Arc's Victory at Orleans, A.D. 1429,
and the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588.


CHAP. X.

THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA, A.D. 1588.

Synopsis of events between the Defeat of the Spanish Armada A.D. 1588,
and the Battle of Blenheim, 1704.


CHAP. XI.

THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM, A.D. 1704.

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


CHAP. XII.

THE BATTLE OF PULTOWA, A.D. 1709.

Synopsis of Events between the Battle of Pultowa, 1709, and the Defeat
of Burgoyne at Saratoga, 1777.


CHAP. XIII.

VICTORY OF THE AMERICANS OVER BURGOYNE AT SARATOGA, A.D. 1777.

Synopsis of Events between the Defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga, 1777, and
the Battle of Valmy, 1792.


CHAP. XIV.

THE BATTLE OF VALMY.

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


CHAP. XV.

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO, 1815.





THE FIFTEEN DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD.




CHAPTER I.--THE BATTLE OF MARATHON.

     "Quibus actus uterque
     Europae atque Asiae fatis concurrerit orbis."

Two thousand three hundred and forty years ago, a council of Athenian
officers was summoned on the slope of one of the mountains that
look over the plain of Marathon, on the eastern coast of Attica. The
immediate subject of their meeting was to consider whether they should
give battle to an enemy that lay encamped on the shore beneath them; but
on the result of their deliberations depended not merely the fate of two
armies, but the whole future progress of human civilization.

There were eleven members of that council of war. Ten were the generals,
who were then annually elected at Athens, one for each of the local
tribes into which the Athenians were divided. Each general led the men
of his own tribe, and each was invested with equal military authority.
One also of the Archons was associated with them in the joint command
of the collective force. This magistrate was termed the Polemarch or
War-Ruler: he had the privilege of leading the right wing of the army
in battle, and of taking part in all councils of war. A noble Athenian,
named Callimachus, was the War-Ruler of this year; and as such, stood
listening to the earnest discussion of the ten generals. They had,
indeed, deep matter for anxiety, though little aware how momentous to
mankind were the votes they were about to give, or how the generations
to come would read with interest that record of their debate. They saw
before them the invading forces of a mighty empire, which had in the
last fifty years shattered and enslaved nearly all the kingdoms and
principalities of the then known world. They knew that all the resources
of their own country were comprised in the little army entrusted to
their guidance. They saw before them a chosen host of the Great King
sent to wreak his special wrath on that country, and on the other
insolent little Greek community, which had dared to aid his rebels
and burn the capital of one of his provinces. That victorious host
had already fulfilled half its mission of vengeance. Eretria, the
confederate of Athens in the bold march against Sardis nine years
before, had fallen in the last few days; and the Athenian generals could
discern from the heights the island of AEgilia, in which the Persians
had deposited their Eretrian prisoners, whom they had reserved to be led
away captives into Upper Asia, there to hear their doom from the lips of
King Darius himself. Moreover, the men of Athens knew that in the camp
before them was their own banished tyrant, Hippias, who was seeking to
be reinstated by foreign scimitars in despotic sway over any remnant of
his countrymen that might survive the sack of their town, and might be
left behind as too worthless for leading away into Median bondage.

The numerical disparity between the force which the Athenian commanders
had under them, and that which they were called on to encounter, was
fearfully apparent to some of the council. The historians who wrote
nearest to the time of the battle do not pretend to give any detailed
statements of the numbers engaged, but there are sufficient data for
our making a general estimate. Every free Greek was trained to military
duty: and, from the incessant border wars between the different states,
few Greeks reached the age of manhood without having seen some service.
But the muster-roll of free Athenian citizens of an age fit for military
duty never exceeded thirty thousand, and at this epoch probably did not
amount to two-thirds of that number. Moreover, the poorer portion
of these were unprovided with the equipments, and untrained to the
operations of the regular infantry. Some detachments of the best armed
troops would be required to garrison the city itself, and man the
various fortified posts in the territory; so that it is impossible to
reckon the fully equipped force that marched from Athens to Marathon,
when the news of the Persian landing arrived, at higher than ten
thousand men. [The historians who lived long after the time of the
battle, such as Justin, Plutarch and others, give ten thousand as the
number of the Athenian army. Not much reliance could be placed on their
authority, if unsupported by other evidence; but a calculation made from
the number of the Athenian free population remarkably confirms it. For
the data of this, see Boeck's "Public Economy of Athens," vol. i. p. 45.
Some METOIKOI probably served as Hoplites at Marathon, but the number of
resident aliens at Athens cannot have been large at this period.]

With one exception, the other Greeks held back from aiding them. Sparta
had promised assistance; but the Persians had landed on the sixth day
of the moon, and a religious scruple delayed the march of Spartan troops
till the moon should have reached its full. From one quarter only, and
that a most unexpected one, did Athens receive aid at the moment of her
great peril.

For some years before this time, the little state of Plataea in Boeotia,
being hard pressed by her powerful neighbour, Thebes, had asked the
protection of Athens, and had owed to an Athenian army the rescue of her
independence. Now when it was noised over Greece that the Mede had
come from the uttermost parts of the earth to destroy Athens, the brave
Plataeans, unsolicited, marched with their whole force to assist in the
defence, and to share the fortunes of their benefactors. The general
levy of the Plataeans only amounted to a thousand men: and this little
column, marching from their city along the southern ridge of Mount
Cithaeron, and thence across the Attic territory, joined the Athenian
forces above Marathon almost immediately before the battle. The
reinforcement was numerically small; but the gallant spirit of the men
who composed it must have made it of tenfold value to the Athenians: and
its presence must have gone far to dispel the cheerless feeling of being
deserted and friendless, which the delay of the Spartan succours was
calculated to create among the Athenian ranks.

This generous daring of their weak but true-hearted ally was never
forgotten at Athens. The Plataeans were made the fellow-countrymen
of the Athenians, except the right of exercising certain political
functions; and from that time forth in the solemn sacrifices at Athens,
the public prayers were offered up for a joint blessing from Heaven upon
the Athenians, and the Plataeans also. [Mr. Grote observes (vol. iv. p.
484), that "this volunteer march of the whole Plataean force to Marathon
is one of the most affecting incidents of all Grecian history." In
truth, the whole career of Plataea, and the friendship, strong even unto
death, between her and Athens, form one of the most affecting episodes
in the history of antiquity. In the Peloponnesian War the Plataeans
again were true to the Athenians against all risks and all calculation
of self-interest; and the destruction of Plataea was the consequence.
There are few nobler passages in the classics than the speech in which
the Plataean prisoners of war, after the memorable siege of their city,
justify before their Spartan executioners their loyal adherence to
Athens. (See Thucydides, lib. iii. secs. 53-60.)]

After the junction of the column from Plataea, the Athenians commanders
must have had under them about eleven thousand fully-armed and
disciplined infantry, and probably a larger number of irregular
light-armed troops; as, besides the poorer citizens who went to
the field armed with javelins, cutlasses, and targets, each regular
heavy-armed soldier was attended in the camp by one or more slaves, who
were armed like the inferior freemen. [At the battle of Plataea, eleven
years after Marathon, each of the eight thousand Athenian regular
infantry who served there, was attended by a light-armed slave. (Herod.
lib. viii. c. 28,29.)] Cavalry or archers the Athenians (on this
occasion) had none: and the use in the field of military engines was not
at that period introduced into ancient warfare.

Contrasted with their own scanty forces, the Greek commanders saw
stretched before them, along the shores of the winding bay, the tents
and shipping of the varied nations that marched to do the bidding of the
King of the Eastern world. The difficulty of finding transports and
of securing provisions would form the only limit to the numbers of a
Persian army. Nor is there any reason to suppose the estimate of Justin
exaggerated, who rates at a hundred thousand the force which on this
occasion had sailed, under the satraps Datis and Artaphernes, from the
Cilician shores, against the devoted coasts of Euboea and Attica.
And after largely deducting from this total, so as to allow for mere
mariners and camp followers, there must still have remained fearful odds
against the national levies of the Athenians. Nor could Greek generals
then feel that confidence in the superior quality of their troops which
ever since the battle of Marathon has animated Europeans in conflicts
with Asiatics; as, for instance, in the after struggles between Greece
and Persia, or when the Roman legions encountered the myriads of
Mithridates and Tigranes, or as is the case in the Indian campaigns of
our own regiments. On the contrary, up to the day of Marathon the Medes
and Persians were reputed invincible. They had more than once met Greek
troops in Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in Egypt, and had invariably beaten
them. Nothing can be stronger than the expressions used by the early
Creek writers respecting the terror which the name of the Medes
inspired, and the prostration of men's spirits before the apparently
resistless career of the Persian arms. It is therefore, little to be
wondered at, that five of the ten Athenian generals shrank from the
prospect of fighting a pitched battle against an enemy so superior in
numbers, and so formidable in military renown. Their own position on the
heights was strong, and offered great advantages to a small defending
force against assailing masses. They deemed it mere foolhardiness
to descend into the plain to be trampled down by the Asiatic horse,
overwhelmed with the archery, or cut to pieces by the invincible
veterans of Cambyses and Cyrus. Moreover, Sparta, the great war-state of
Greece, had been applied to, and had promised succour to Athens, though
the religious observance which the Dorians paid to certain times and
seasons had for the present delayed their march. Was it not wise, at
any rate, to wait till the Spartans came up, and to have the help of the
best troops in Greece, before they exposed themselves to the shock of
the dreaded Medes?

Specious as these reasons might appear, the other five generals were for
speedier and bolder operations. And, fortunately for Athens and for the
world, one of them was a man, not only of the highest military genius,
but also of that energetic character which impresses its own type and
ideas upon spirits feebler in conception.

Miltiades was the head of one of the noblest houses at Athens: he ranked
the AEacidae among his ancestry, and the blood of Achilles flowed in
the veins of the hero of Marathon. One of his immediate ancestors had
acquired the dominion of the Thracian Chersonese, and thus the family
became at the same time Athenian citizens and Thracian princes. This
occurred at the time when Pisistratus was tyrant of Athens. Two of the
relatives of Miltiades--an uncle of the same name, and a brother named
Stesagoras--had ruled the Chersonese before Miltiades became its prince.
He had been brought up at Athens in the house of his father Cimon,
[Herodotus, lib. vi. c. 102] who was renowned throughout Greece for his
victories in the Olympic chariot-races, and who must have been possessed
of great wealth. The sons of Pisistratus, who succeeded their father in
the tyranny at Athens, caused Cimon to be assassinated, but they treated
the young Miltiades with favour and kindness; and when his brother
Stesagoras died in the Chersonese, they sent him out there as lord of
the principality. This was about twenty-eight years before the battle
of Marathon, and it is with his arrival in the Chersonese that our first
knowledge of the career and character of Miltiades commences. We
find, in the first act recorded of him, proof of the same resolute and
unscrupulous spirit that marked his mature age. His brother's authority
in the principality had been shaken by war and revolt: Miltiades
determined to rule more securely. On his arrival he kept close within
his house, as if he was mourning for his brother. The principal men
of the Chersonese, hearing of this, assembled from all the towns and
districts, and went together to the house of Miltiades on a visit of
condolence. As soon as he had thus got them in his power, he made
them all prisoners. He then asserted and maintained his own absolute
authority in the peninsula, taking into his pay a body of five hundred
regular troops, and strengthening his interest by marrying the daughter
of the king of the neighbouring Thracians.

When the Persian power was extended to the Hellespont and its
neighbourhood, Miltiades, as prince of the Chersonese, submitted to King
Darius; and he was one of the numerous tributary rulers who led their
contingents of men to serve in the Persian army in the expedition
against Scythia. Miltiades and the vassal Greeks of Asia Minor were left
by the Persian king in charge of the bridge across the Danube, when
the invading army crossed that river, and plunged into the wilds of
the country that now is Russia, in vain pursuit of the ancestors of the
modern Cossacks. On learning the reverses that Darius met with in the
Scythian wilderness, Miltiades proposed to his companions that they
should break the bridge down, and leave the Persian king and his army
to perish by famine and the Scythian arrows. The rulers of the Asiatic
Greek cities whom Miltiades addressed, shrank from this bold and
ruthless stroke against the Persian power, and Darius returned in
safety. But it was known what advice Miltiades had given; and the
vengeance of Darius was thenceforth specially directed against the man
who had counselled such a deadly blow against his empire and his person.
The occupation of the Persian arms in other quarters left Miltiades
for some years after this in possession of the Chersonese; but it
was precarious and interrupted. He, however, availed himself of the
opportunity which his position gave him of conciliating the goodwill
of his fellow-countrymen at Athens, by conquering and placing under
Athenian authority the islands of Lemnos and Imbros, to which Athens had
ancient claims, but which she had never previously been able to
bring into complete subjection. At length, in 494 B.C., the complete
suppression of the Ionian revolt by the Persians left their armies and
fleets at liberty to act against the enemies of the Great King to the
west of the Hellespont. A strong squadron of Phoenician galleys was sent
against the Chersonese. Miltiades knew that resistance was hopeless; and
while the Phoenicians were at Tenedos, he loaded five galleys with all
the treasure that he could collect, and sailed away for Athens. The
Phoenicians fell in with him, and chased him hard along the north of
the AEgean. One of his galleys, on board of which was his eldest son,
Metiochus, was actually captured; but Miltiades, with the other four,
succeeded in reaching the friendly coast of Imbros in safety. Thence
he afterwards proceeded to Athens, and resumed his station as a free
citizen of the Athenian commonwealth.

The Athenians at this time had recently expelled Hippias, the son of
Pisistratus, the last of their tyrants. They were in the full glow
of their newly-recovered liberty and equality; and the constitutional
changes of Cleisthenes had inflamed their republican zeal to the utmost.
Miltiades had enemies at Athens; and these, availing themselves of the
state of popular feeling, brought him to trial for his life for having
been tyrant of the Chersonese. The charge did not necessarily import any
acts of cruelty or wrong to individuals: it was founded on so specific
law; but it was based on the horror with which the Greeks of that age
regarded every man who made himself compulsory master of his fellow-men,
and exercised irresponsible dominion over them. The fact of Miltiades
having so ruled in the Chersonese was undeniable; but the question which
the Athenians, assembled in judgment, must have tried, was, whether
Miltiades, by becoming tyrant of the Chersonese, deserved punishment as
an Athenian citizen. The eminent service that he had done the state in
conquering Lemnos and Imbros for it, pleaded strongly in his favour. The
people refused to convict him. He stood high in public opinion; and when
the coming invasion of the Persians was known, the people wisely elected
him one of their generals for the year.

Two other men of signal eminence in history, though their renown was
achieved at a later period than that of Miltiades, were also among the
ten Athenian generals at Marathon. One was Themistocles, the future
founder of the Athenian navy and the destined victor of Salamis: the
other was Aristides, who afterwards led the Athenian troops at Plataea,
and whose integrity and just popularity acquired for his country, when
the Persians had finally been repulsed, the advantageous pre-eminence of
being acknowledged by half of the Greeks as their impartial leader and
protector. It is not recorded what part either Themistocles or Aristides
took in the debate of the council of war at Marathon. But from the
character of Themistocles, his boldness, and his intuitive genius for
extemporizing the best measures in every emergency (a quality which the
greatest of historians ascribes to him beyond all his contemporaries),
we may well believe that the vote of Themistocles was for prompt and
decisive action. [See the character of Themistocles in the 138th section
of the first book of Thucydides, especially the last sentence.] On
the vote of Aristides it may be more difficult to speculate. His
predilection for the Spartans may have made him wish to wait till they
came up; but, though circumspect, he was neither timid as a soldier
nor as a politician; and the bold advice of Miltiades may probably have
found in Aristides a willing, most assuredly it found in him a candid,
hearer.

Miltiades felt no hesitation as to the course which the Athenian
army ought to pursue: and earnestly did he press his opinion on his
brother-generals. Practically acquainted with the organization of the
Persian armies, Miltiades was convinced of the superiority of the Greek
troops, if properly handled: he saw with the military eye of a great
general the advantage which the position of the forces gave him for
a sudden attack, and as a profound politician he felt the perils of
remaining inactive, and of giving treachery time to ruin the Athenian
cause.

One officer in the council of war had not yet voted. This was
Callimachus, the War-Ruler. The votes of the generals were five and
five, so that the voice of Callimachus would be decisive.

On that vote, in all human probability, the destiny of all the nations
of the world depended. Miltiades turned to him, and in simple soldierly
eloquence, the substance of which we may read faithfully reported in
Herodotus, who had conversed with the veterans of Marathon, the great
Athenian thus adjured his countryman to vote for giving battle:--

"It now rests with you, Callimachus, either to enslave Athens, or, by
assuring her freedom, to win yourself an immortality of fame, such as
not even Harmodius and Aristogeiton have acquired. For never, since the
Athenians were a people, were they in such danger as they are in at this
moment. If they bow the knee to these Medes, they are to be given up to
Hippias, and you know what they then will have to suffer. But if Athens
comes victorious out of this contest, she has it in her to become the
first city of Greece. Your vote is to decide whether we are to join
battle or not. If we do not bring on a battle presently, some factious
intrigue will disunite the Athenians, and the city will be betrayed to
the Medes. But if we fight, before there is anything rotten in the state
of Athens, I believe that, provided the Gods will give fair play and
no favour, we are able to get the best of it in the engagement."
[Herodotus, lib. vi. sec. 209. The 116th section is to my mind clear
proof that Herodotus had personally conversed with Epizelus, one of the
veterans of Marathon. The substance of the speech of Miltiades would
naturally become known by the report of some of his colleagues.]

The vote of the brave War-Ruler was gained; the council determined
to give battle; and such was the ascendancy and military eminence of
Miltiades, that his brother-generals, one and all, gave up their days of
command to him, and cheerfully acted under his orders. Fearful, however,
of creating any jealousy, and of so failing to obtain the co-operation
of all parts of his small army, Miltiades waited till the day when the
chief command would have come round to him in regular rotation, before
he led the troops against the enemy.

The inaction of the Asiatic commanders, during this interval, appears
strange at first sight; but Hippias was with them, and they and he were
aware of their chance of a bloodless conquest through the machinations
of his partisans among the Athenians. The nature of the ground also
explains, in many points, the tactics of the opposite generals
before the battle, as well as the operations of the troops during the
engagement.

The plain of Marathon, which is about twenty-two miles distant from
Athens, lies along the bay of the same name on the north-eastern coast
of Attica. The plain is nearly in the form of a crescent, and about six
miles in length. It is about two miles broad in the centre, where the
space between the mountains and the sea is greatest, but it narrows
towards either extremity, the mountains coming close down to the water
at the horns of the bay. There is a valley trending inwards from the
middle of the plain, and a ravine comes down to it to the southward.
Elsewhere it, is closely girt round on the land side by rugged limestone
mountains, which are thickly studded with pines, olive-trees, and
cedars, and overgrown with the myrtle, arbutus, and the other low
odoriferous shrubs that everywhere perfume the Attic air. The level of
the ground is now varied by the mound raised over those who fell in the
battle, but it was an unbroken plain when the Persians encamped on it.
There are marshes at each end, which are dry in spring and summer, and
then offer no obstruction to the horseman, but are commonly flooded with
rain, and so rendered impracticable for cavalry, in the autumn, the time
of year at which the action took place.

The Greeks, lying encamped on the mountains, could watch every movement
of the Persians on the plain below, while they were enabled completely
to mask their own. Miltiades also had, from his position, the power of
giving battle whenever he pleased, or of delaying it at his discretion,
unless Datis were to attempt the perilous operation of storming the
heights.

If we turn to the map of the old world, to test the comparative
territorial resources of the two states whose armies were now about to
come into conflict, the immense preponderance of the material power of
the Persian king over that of the Athenian republic is more striking
than any similar contrast which history can supply. It has been truly
remarked, that, in estimating mere areas, Attica, containing on
its whole surface only seven hundred square miles, shrinks into
insignificance if compared with many a baronial fief of the Middle
Ages, or many a colonial allotment of modern times. Its antagonist, the
Persian empire, comprised the whole of modern Asiatic and much of modern
European Turkey, the modern kingdom of Persia, and the countries of
modern Georgia, Armenia, Balkh, the Punjaub, Affghanistan, Beloochistan,
Egypt, and Tripoli.

Nor could a European, in the beginning of the fifth century before our
era, look upon this huge accumulation of power beneath the sceptre of a
single Asiatic ruler, with the indifference with which we now observe on
the map the extensive dominions of modern Oriental sovereigns. For, as
has been already remarked, before Marathon was fought, the prestige
of success and of supposed superiority of race was on the side of
the Asiatic against the European. Asia was the original seat of human
societies and long before any trace can be found of the inhabitants of
the rest of the world having emerged from the rudest barbarism, we can
perceive that mighty and brilliant empires flourished in the Asiatic
continent. They appear before us through the twilight of primeval
history, dim and indistinct, but massive and majestic, like mountains in
the early dawn.

Instead, however, of the infinite variety and restless change which
have characterised the institutions and fortunes of European states
ever since the commencement of the civilization of our continent, a
monotonous uniformity pervades the histories of nearly all Oriental
empires, from the most ancient down to the most recent times. They are
characterised by the rapidity of their early conquests; by the immense
extent of the dominions comprised in them; by the establishment of a
satrap or pacha system of governing the provinces; by an invariable
and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate
nurslings of the seraglio succeeding to the warrior-sovereigns reared in
the camp; and by the internal anarchy and insurrections, which indicate
and accelerate the decline and fall of those unwieldy and ill-organized
fabrics of power. It is also a striking fact that the governments of all
the great Asiatic empires have in all ages been absolute despotisms.
And Heeren is right in connecting this with another great fact, which is
important from its influence both on the political and the social life
of Asiatics. "Among all the considerable nations of Inner Asia, the
paternal government of every household was corrupted by polygamy; where
that custom exists, a good political constitution is impossible. Fathers
being converted into domestic despots, are ready to pay the same abject
obedience to their sovereign which they exact from their family and
dependants in their domestic economy." We should bear in mind also the
inseparable connexion between the state religion and all legislation,
which has always prevailed in the East, and the constant existence of a
powerful sacerdotal body, exercising some check, though precarious and
irregular, over the throne itself, grasping at all civil administration,
claiming the supreme control of education, stereotyping the lines in
which literature and science must move, and limiting the extent to which
it shall be lawful for the human mind to prosecute its inquiries.

With these general characteristics rightly felt and understood, it
becomes a comparatively easy task to investigate and appreciate the
origin, progress, and principles of Oriental empires in general, as well
as of the Persian monarchy in particular. And we are thus better enabled
to appreciate the repulse which Greece gave to the arms of the East,
and to judge of the probable consequences to human civilization, if the
Persians had succeeded in bringing Europe under their yoke, as they had
already subjugated the fairest portions of the rest of the then known
world.

The Greeks, from their geographical position, formed the natural
vanguard of European liberty against Persian ambition; and they
pre-eminently displayed the salient points of distinctive national
character, which have rendered European civilization so far superior
to Asiatic. The nations that dwelt in ancient times around and near
the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, were the first in our
continent to receive from the East the rudiments of art and literature,
and the germs of social and political organization. Of these nations,
the Greeks, through their vicinity to Asia Minor, Phoenicia, and Egypt,
were among the very foremost in acquiring the principles and habits of
civilized life; and they also at once imparted a new and wholly original
stamp on all which they received. Thus, in their religion they received
from foreign settlers the names of all their deities and many of their
rites, but they discarded the loathsome monstrosities of the Nile, the
Orontes, and the Ganges;--they nationalized their creed; and their
own poets created their beautiful mythology. No sacerdotal caste ever
existed in Greece. So, in their governments they lived long under
hereditary kings, but never endured the permanent establishment of
absolute monarchy. Their early kings were constitutional rulers,
governing with defined prerogatives. And long before the Persian
invasion the kingly form of government had given way in almost all the
Greek states to republican institutions, presenting infinite varieties
of the balancing or the alternate predominance of the oligarchical and
democratical principles. In literature and science the Greek intellect
followed no beaten track, and acknowledged no limitary rules. The Greeks
thought their subjects boldly out; and the novelty of a speculation
invested it in their minds with interest, and not with criminality.
Versatile, restless, enterprising and self-confident, the Greeks
presented the most striking contrast to the habitual quietude and
submissiveness of the Orientals. And, of all the Greeks, the Athenians
exhibited these national characteristics in the strongest degree. This
spirit of activity and daring, joined to a generous sympathy for the
fate of their fellow-Greeks in Asia, had led them to join in the last
Ionian war; and now, mingling with their abhorrence of the usurping
family of their own citizens, which for a period had forcibly seized on
and exercised despotic power at Athens, it nerved them to defy the wrath
of King Darius, and to refuse to receive back at his bidding the tyrant
whom they had some years before driven from their land.

The enterprise and genius of an Englishman have lately confirmed by
fresh evidence, and invested with fresh interest, the might of the
Persian monarch, who sent his troops to combat at Marathon. Inscriptions
in a character termed the Arrow-headed, or Cuneiform, had long been
known to exist on the marble monuments at Persepolis, near the site of
the ancient Susa, and on the faces of rocks in other places formerly
ruled over by the early Persian kings. But for thousands of years
they had been mere unintelligible enigmas to the curious but baffled
beholder: and they were often referred to as instances of the folly of
human pride, which could indeed write its own praises in the solid rock,
but only for the rock to outlive the language as well as the memory of
the vain-glorious inscribers. The elder Niebuhr, Grotefend, and Lassen
had made some guesses at the meaning of the Cuneiform letters; but Major
Rawlinson, of the East India Company's service, after years of labour,
has at last accomplished the glorious achievement of fully revealing
the alphabet and the grammar of this long unknown tongue. He has, in
particular, fully deciphered and expounded the inscriptions on the
sacred rock of Behistun, on the western frontiers of Media. These
records of the Achaemenidae have at length found their interpreter; and
Darius himself speaks to us from the consecrated mountain, and tells
us the names of the nations that obeyed him, the revolts that he
suppressed, his victories, his piety, and his glory. [See the tenth
volume of the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society."]

Kings who thus seek the admiration of posterity are little likely to
dim the record of their successes by the mention of their occasional
defeats; and it throws no suspicion on the narrative of the Greek
historians, that we find these inscriptions silent respecting the
overthrow of Datis and Artaphernes, as well as respecting the reverses
which Darius sustained in person during his Scythian campaigns. But
these indisputable monuments of Persian fame confirm, and even increase,
the opinion with which Herodotus inspires us, of the vast power which
Cyrus founded and Cambyses increased; which Darius augmented by Indian
and Arabian conquests, and seemed likely, when he directed his arms
against Europe, to make the predominant monarchy of the world.

With the exception of the Chinese empire, in which, throughout all ages
down to the last few years, one-third of the human race has dwelt almost
unconnected with the other portions, all the great kingdoms which we
know to have existed in Ancient Asia, were, in Darius's time, blended
with the Persian. The northern Indians, the Assyrians, the Syrians, the
Babylonians, the Chaldees, the Phoenicians, the nations of Palestine,
the Armenians, the Bactrians, the Lydians, the Phrygians, the Parthians,
and the Medes,--all obeyed the sceptre of the Great King: the Medes
standing next to the native Persians in honour, and the empire being
frequently spoken of as that of the Medes, or as that of the Medes and
Persians. Egypt and Cyrene were Persian provinces; the Greek colonists
in Asia Minor and the islands of the AEgean were Darius's subjects; and
their gallant but unsuccessful attempts to throw off the Persian yoke
had only served to rivet it more strongly, and to increase the general
belief: that the Greeks could not stand before the Persians in a field
of battle. Darius's Scythian war, though unsuccessful in its immediate
object, had brought about the subjugation of Thrace and the submission
of Macedonia. From the Indus to the Peneus, all was his.

We may imagine the wrath with which the lord of so many nations must
have heard, nine years before the battle of Marathon, that a strange
nation towards the setting sun, called the Athenians, had dared to help
his rebels in Ionia against him, and that they had plundered and burnt
the capital of one of his provinces. Before the burning of Sardis,
Darius seems never to have heard of the existence of Athens; but his
satraps in Asia Minor had for some time seen Athenian refugees at their
provincial courts imploring assistance against their fellow-countrymen.
When Hippias was driven away from Athens, and the tyrannic dynasty of
the Pisistratidae finally overthrown in 510 B.C., the banished tyrant
and his adherents, after vainly seeking to be restored by Spartan
intervention, had betaken themselves to Sardis, the capital city of
the satrapy of Artaphernes. There Hippias (in the expressive words
of Herodotus) [Herod. lib. v. c. 96.] began every kind of agitation,
slandering the Athenians before Artaphernes, and doing all he could to
induce the satrap to place Athens in subjection to him, as the tributary
vassal of King Darius. When the Athenians heard of his practices, they
sent envoys to Sardis to remonstrate with the Persians against taking up
the quarrel of the Athenian refugees. But Artaphernes gave them in reply
a menacing command to receive Hippias back again if they looked for
safety. The Athenians were resolved not to purchase safety at such a
price; and after rejecting the satrap's terms, they considered that they
and the Persians were declared enemies. At this very crisis the Ionian
Greeks implored the assistance of their European brethren, to enable
them to recover their independence from Persia. Athens, and the city of
Eretria in Euboea, alone consented. Twenty Athenian galleys, and five
Eretrian, crossed the AEgean Sea; and by a bold and sudden march upon
Sardis the Athenians and their allies succeeded in capturing the capital
city of the haughty satrap, who had recently menaced them with servitude
or destruction. The Persian forces were soon rallied, and the Greeks
were compelled to retire. They were pursued, and defeated on their
return to the coast, and Athens took no further part in the Ionian war.
But the insult that she had put upon the Persian power was speedily made
known throughout that empire, and was never to be forgiven or forgotten.
In the emphatic simplicity of the narrative of Herodotus, the wrath of
the Great King is thus described:--"Now when it was told to King Darius
that Sardis had been taken and burnt by the Athenians and Ionians, he
took small heed of the Ionians, well knowing who they were, and that
their revolt would soon be put down: but he asked who, and what manner
of men, the Athenians were. And when he had been told, he called for his
bow; and, having taken it, and placed an arrow on the string, he let the
arrow fly towards heaven; and as he shot it into the air, he said, 'O
Supreme God! grant me that I may avenge myself on the Athenians.' And
when he had said this, he appointed one of his servants to say to him
every day as he sat at meat, 'Sire, remember the Athenians.'"

Some years were occupied in the complete reduction of Ionia. But when
this was effected, Darius ordered his victorious forces to proceed to
punish Athens and Eretria, and to conquer European Greece. The first
armament sent for this purpose was shattered by shipwreck, and nearly
destroyed off Mount Athos, But the purpose of King Darius was not
easily shaken. A larger army was ordered to be collected in Cilicia; and
requisitions were sent to all the maritime cities of the Persian empire
for ships of war, and for transports of sufficient size for carrying
cavalry as well as infantry across the AEgean. While these preparations
were being made, Darius sent heralds round to the Grecian cities
demanding their submission to Persia. It was proclaimed in the
market-place of each little Hellenic state (some with territories not
larger than the Isle of Wight), that King Darius, the lord of all men,
from the rising to the setting sun, required earth and water to be
delivered to his heralds, as a symbolical acknowledgment that he was
head and master of the country. [Aeschines in Ctes. p. 622, ed. Reiske.
Mitford, vol. i. p. 485. AEschines is speaking of Xerxes, but Mitford
is probably right in considering it as the style of the Persian kings
in their proclamations. In one of the inscriptions at Persepolis, Darius
terms himself "Darius the great king, king of kings, the king of the
many peopled countries, the supporter also of this great world." In
another, he styles himself "the king of all inhabited countries."
(See "Asiatic Journal" vol. X pp. 287 and 292, and Major Rawlinson's
Comments.)] Terror-stricken at the power of Persia and at the severe
punishment that had recently been inflicted on the refractory Ionians,
many of the continental Greeks and nearly all the islanders submitted,
and gave the required tokens of vassalage. At Sparta and Athens an
indignant refusal was returned: a refusal which was disgraced by outrage
and violence against the persons of the Asiatic heralds.

Fresh fuel was thus added to the anger of Darius against Athens, and the
Persian preparations went on with renewed vigour. In the summer of 490
B.C., the army destined for the invasion was assembled in the Aleian
plain of Cilicia, near the sea. A fleet of six hundred galleys and
numerous transports was collected on the coast for the embarkation
of troops, horse as well as foot. A Median general named Datis, and
Artaphernes, the son of the satrap of Sardis, and who was also nephew of
Darius, were placed in titular joint command of the expedition. That the
real supreme authority was given to Datis alone is probable, from the
way in which the Greek writers speak of him. We know no details of the
previous career of this officer; but there is every reason to believe
that his abilities and bravery had been proved by experience, or his
Median birth would have prevented his being placed in high command by
Darius. He appears to have been the first Mede who was thus trusted by
the Persian kings after the overthrow of the conspiracy of the Median
Magi against the Persians immediately before Darius obtained the throne.
Datis received instructions to complete the subjugation of Greece, and
especial orders were given him with regard to Eretria and Athens. He
was to take these two cities; and he was to lead the inhabitants away
captive, and bring them as slaves into the presence of the Great King.

Datis embarked his forces in the fleet that awaited them; and coasting
along the shores of Asia Minor till he was off Samos, he thence sailed
due westward through the AEgean Sea for Greece, taking the islands in
his way. The Naxians had, ten years before, successfully stood a siege
against a Persian armament, but they now were too terrified to offer any
resistance, and fled to the mountain-tops, while the enemy burnt their
town and laid waste their lands. Thence Datis, compelling the Greek
islanders to join him with their ships and men, sailed onward to the
coast of Euboea. The little town of Carystus essayed resistance, but was
quickly overpowered. He next attacked Eretria. The Athenians sent four
thousand men to its aid. But treachery was at work among the Eretrians;
and the Athenian force received timely warning from one of the leading
men of the city to retire to aid in saving their own country, instead
of remaining to share in the inevitable destruction of Eretria. Left to
themselves, the Eretrians repulsed the assaults of the Persians against
their walls for six days; on the seventh day they were betrayed by two
of their chiefs and the Persians occupied the city. The temples were
burnt in revenge for the burning of Sardis, and the inhabitants were
bound and placed as prisoners in the neighbouring islet of AEgylia,
to wait there till Datis should bring the Athenians to join them in
captivity, when both populations were to be led into Upper Asia, there
to learn their doom from the lips of King Darius himself.

Flushed with success, and with half his mission thus accomplished, Datis
reimbarked his troops, and crossing the little channel that separates
Euboea from the mainland, he encamped his troops on the Attic coast
at Marathon, drawing up his galleys on the shelving beach, as was the
custom with the navies of antiquity. The conquered islands behind him
served as places of deposit for his provisions and military stores. His
position at Marathon seemed to him in every respect advantageous; and
the level nature of the ground on which he camped was favourable for
the employment of his cavalry, if the Athenians should venture to
engage him. Hippias, who accompanied him, and acted as the guide of the
invaders, had pointed out Marathon as the best place for a landing,
for this very reason. Probably Hippias was also influenced by the
recollection, that forty-seven years previously he, with his father
Pisistratus, had crossed with an army from Eretria to Marathon, and
had won an easy victory over their Athenian enemies on that very plain,
which had restored them to tyrannic power. The omen seemed cheering.
The place was the same; but Hippias soon learned to his cost how great a
change had come over the spirit of the Athenians.

But though "the fierce democracy" of Athens was zealous and true against
foreign invader and domestic tyrant, a faction existed in Athens, as
at Eretria, of men willing to purchase a party triumph over their
fellow-citizens at the price of their country's ruin. Communications
were opened between these men and the Persian camp, which would have led
to a catastrophe like that of Eretria, if Miltiades had not resolved,
and had not persuaded his colleagues to resolve, on fighting at all
hazards.

When Miltiades arrayed his men for action, he staked on the arbitrement
of one battle not only the fate of Athens, but that of all Greece; for
if Athens had fallen, no other Greek state, except Lacedaemon, would
have had the courage to resist; and the Lacedaemonians, though they
would probably have died in their ranks to the last man, never could
have successfully resisted the victorious Persians, and the numerous
Greek troops, which would have soon marched under the Persian satraps,
had they prevailed over Athens.

Nor was there any power to the westward of Greece that could have
offered an effectual opposition to Persia, had she once conquered
Greece, and made that country a basis for future military operations.
Rome was at this time in her season of utmost weakness. Her dynasty of
powerful Etruscan kings had been driven out, and her infant commonwealth
was reeling under the attacks of the Etruscans and Volscians from
without, and the fierce dissensions between the patricians and plebeians
within. Etruria, with her Lucumos and serfs, was no match for Persia.
Samnium had not grown into the might which she afterwards put forth: nor
could the Greek colonies in South Italy and Sicily hope to survive when
their parent states had perished. Carthage had escaped the Persian
yoke in the time of Cambyses, through the reluctance of the Phoenician
mariners to serve against their kinsmen. But such forbearance could not
long have been relied on, and the future rival of Rome would have become
as submissive a minister of the Persian power as were the Phoenician
cities themselves. If we turn to Spain, or if we pass the great mountain
chain which, prolonged through the Pyrenees, the Cevennes, the Alps, and
the Balkan, divides Northern from Southern Europe, we shall find nothing
at that period but mere savage Finns, Celts, Slaves, and Teutons. Had
Persia beaten Athens at Marathon, she could have found no obstacle to
prevent Darius, the chosen servant of Ormuzd, from advancing his sway
over all the known Western races of mankind. The infant energies of
Europe would have been trodden out beneath universal conquest; and the
history of the world, like the history of Asia, would have become a mere
record of the rise and fall of despotic dynasties, of the incursions
of barbarous hordes, and of the mental and political prostration of
millions beneath the diadem, the tiara, and the sword.

Great as the preponderance of the Persian over the Athenian power
at that crisis seems to have been, it would be unjust to impute wild
rashness to the policy of Miltiades, and those who voted with him in the
Athenian council of war, or to look on the after-current of events as
the mere result of successful indiscretion, as before has been remarked,
Miltiades, whilst prince of the Chersonese, had seen service in the
Persian armies; and he knew by personal observation how many elements of
weakness lurked beneath their imposing aspect of strength. He knew that
the bulk of their troops no longer consisted of the hardy shepherds and
mountaineers from Persia Proper and Kurdistan, who won Cyrus's battles:
but that unwilling contingents from conquered nations now largely filled
up the Persian muster rolls, fighting more from compulsion than from
any zeal in the cause of their masters. He had also the sagacity and
the spirit to appreciate the superiority of the Greek armour and
organization over the Asiatic, notwithstanding former reverses. Above
all, he felt and worthily trusted the enthusiasm of the men under his
command.

The Athenians, whom he led, had proved by their new-born valour in
recent wars against the neighbouring states, that "Liberty and Equality
of civic rights are brave spirit-stirring things: and they who, while
under the yoke of a despot, had been no better men of war than any of
their neighbours, as soon as they were free, became the foremost men of
all; for each felt that in fighting for a free commonwealth, he fought
for himself, and, whatever he took in hand, he was zealous to do the
work thoroughly." So the nearly contemporaneous historian describes the
change of spirit that was seen in the Athenians after their tyrants were
expelled; [Herod. lib. v. c. 87.] and Miltiades knew that in leading
them against the invading army, where they had Hippias, the foe they
most hated, before them, he was bringing into battle no ordinary men,
and could calculate on no ordinary heroism. As for traitors, he was
sure, that whatever treachery might lurk among some of the higher-born
and wealthier Athenians, the rank and file whom he commanded were ready
to do their utmost in his and their own cause. With regard to future
attacks from Asia, he might reasonably hope that one victory would
inspirit all Greece to combine against common foe; and that the latent
seeds of revolt and disunion in the Persian empire would soon burst
forth and paralyse its energies, so as to leave Greek independence
secure.

With these hopes and risks, Miltiades, on the afternoon of a September
day, 490 B.C., gave the word for the Athenian army to prepare for
battle. There were many local associations connected with those mountain
heights, which were calculated powerfully to excite the spirits of the
men, and of which the commanders well knew how to avail themselves in
their exhortations to their troops before the encounter. Marathon itself
was a region sacred to; Hercules. Close to them was the fountain of
Macaria, who had in days of yore devoted herself to death for the
liberty of her people. The very plain on which they were to fight was
the scene of the exploits of their national hero, Theseus; and there,
too, as old legends told, the Athenians and the Heraclidae had routed
the invader, Eurystheus. These traditions were not mere cloudy myths, or
idle fictions, but matters of implicit earnest faith to the men of that
day: and many a fervent prayer arose from the Athenian ranks to the
heroic spirits who while on earth had striven and suffered on that very
spot, and who were believed to be now heavenly powers, looking down with
interest on their still beloved country, and capable of interposing with
superhuman aid in its behalf.

According to old national custom, the warriors of each tribe were
arrayed together; neighbour thus fighting by the side of neighbour,
friend by friend, and the spirit of emulation and the consciousness of
responsibility excited to the very utmost. The War-Ruler, Callimachus,
had the leading of the right wing; the Plataeans formed the extreme
left; and Themistocles and Aristides commanded the centre. The line
consisted of the heavy-armed spearmen only. For the Greeks (until the
time of Iphicrates) took little or no account of light-armed soldiers in
a pitched battle, using them only in skirmishes or for the pursuit of a
defeated enemy. The panoply of the regular infantry consisted of a long
spear, of a shield, helmet, breast-plate, greaves, and short sword. Thus
equipped, they usually advanced slowly and steadily into action in an
uniform phalanx of about eight spears deep. But the military genius
of Miltiades led him to deviate on this occasion from the commonplace
tactics of his countrymen. It was essential for him to extend his line
so as to cover all the practicable ground, and to secure himself from
being outflanked and charged in the rear by the Persian horse. This
extension involved the weakening of his line. Instead of an uniform
reduction of its strength, he determined on detaching principally from
his centre, which, from the nature of the ground, would have the best
opportunities for rallying if broken; and on strengthening his wings, so
as to insure advantage at those points; and he trusted to his own skill,
and to his soldiers' discipline, for the improvement of that advantage
into decisive victory.

[It is remarkable that there is no other instance of a Greek general
deviating from the ordinary mode of bringing a phalanx of spearmen into
action, until the battles of Leuctra and Mantineia, more than a century
after Marathon, when Epaminondas introduced the tactics (which Alexander
the Great in ancient times, and Frederic the Great in modern times, made
so famous) of concentrating an overpowering force on some decisive point
of the enemy's line, while he kept back, or, in military phrase, refused
the weaker part of his own.]

In this order, and availing himself probably of the inequalities of the
ground, so as to conceal his preparations from the enemy till the last
possible moment, Miltiades drew up the eleven thousand infantry whose
spears were to decide this crisis in the struggle between the European
and the Asiatic worlds. The sacrifices, by which the favour of Heaven
was sought, and its will consulted, were announced to show propitious
omens. The trumpet sounded for action, and, chanting the hymn of battle,
the little army bore down upon the host of the foe. Then, too, along the
mountain slopes of Marathon must have resounded the mutual exhortation
which AEschylus, who fought in both battles, tells us was afterwards
heard over the waves of Salamis,--"On, sons of the Greeks! Strike for
the freedom of your country! strike for the freedom of your children
and of your wives--for the shrines of your fathers' gods, and for the
sepulchres of your sires. All--all are now staked upon the strife!"

Instead of advancing at the usual slow pace of the phalanx, Miltiades
brought his men on at a run. They were all trained in the exercises of
the palaestra, so that there was no fear of their ending the charge in
breathless exhaustion: and it was of the deepest importance for him
to traverse as rapidly as possible the space of about a mile of level
ground, that lay between the mountain foot and the Persian outposts, and
so to get his troops into close action before the Asiatic cavalry could
mount, form, and manoeuvre against him, or their archers keep him long
under bow-shot, and before the enemy's generals could fairly deploy
their masses.

"When the Persians," says Herodotus, "saw the Athenians running down on
them, without horse or bowmen, and scanty in numbers, they thought them
a set of madmen rushing upon certain destruction." They began, however,
to prepare to receive them and the Eastern chiefs arrayed, as quickly
as time and place allowed, the varied races who served in their motley
ranks. Mountaineers from Hyrcania and Affghanistan, wild horsemen from
the steppes of Khorassan, the black archers of Ethiopia, swordsmen from
the banks of the Indus, the Oxus, the Euphrates, and the Nile, made
ready against the enemies of the Great King. But no national cause
inspired them, except the division of native Persians; and in the large
host there was no uniformity of language, creed, race, or military
system. Still, among them there were many gallant men, under a veteran
general; they were familiarized with victory; and in contemptuous
confidence their infantry, which alone had time to form, awaited
the Athenian charge. On came the Greeks, with one unwavering line of
levelled spears, against which the light targets, the short lances and
scymetars of the Orientals offered weak defence. The front rank of the
Asiatics must have gone down to a man at the first shock. Still they
recoiled not, but strove by individual gallantry, and by the weight of
numbers, to make up for the disadvantages of weapons and tactics, and
to bear back the shallow line of the Europeans. In the centre, where the
native Persians and the Sacae fought, they succeeded in breaking through
the weaker part of the Athenian phalanx; and the tribes led by Aristides
and Themistocles were, after a brave resistance, driven back over
the plain, and chased by the Persians up the valley towards the inner
country. There the nature of the ground gave the opportunity of rallying
and renewing the struggle: and meanwhile, the Greek wings, where
Miltiades had concentrated his chief strength, had routed the Asiatics
opposed to them; and the Athenian and Plataean officers, instead of
pursuing the fugitives, kept their troops well in hand, and wheeling
round they formed the two wings together. Miltiades instantly led them
against the Persian centre, which had hitherto been triumphant, but
which now fell back, and prepared to encounter these new and unexpected
assailants. Aristides and Themistocles renewed the fight with their
re-organized troops, and the full force of the Greeks was brought into
close action with the Persian and Sacian divisions of the enemy. Datis's
veterans strove hard to keep their ground, and evening [ARISTOPH. Vesvoe
1085.] was approaching before the stern encounter was decided.

But the Persians, with their slight wicker shields, destitute of
body-armour, and never taught by training to keep the even front and
act with the regular movement of the Greek infantry, fought at grievous
disadvantage with their shorter and feebler weapons against the compact
array of well-armed Athenian and Plataean spearmen, all perfectly
drilled to perform each necessary evolution in concert, and to preserve
an uniform and unwavering line in battle. In personal courage and in
bodily activity the Persians were not inferior to their adversaries.
Their spirits were not yet cowed by the recollection of former defeats;
and they lavished their lives freely, rather than forfeit the fame which
they had won by so many victories. While their rear ranks poured
an incessant shower of arrows over the heads of their comrades, the
foremost Persians kept rushing forward, sometimes singly, sometimes
in desperate groups of twelve or ten upon the projecting spears of the
Greeks, striving to force a lane into the phalanx, and to bring their
scimetars and daggers into play. But the Greeks felt their superiority,
and though the fatigue of the long-continued action told heavily on
their inferior numbers, the sight of the carnage that they dealt amongst
their assailants nerved them to fight still more fiercely on.

[See the description, in the 62nd section of the ninth book of
Herodotus, of the gallantry shown by the Persian infantry against the
Lacedaemonians at Plataea. We have no similar detail of the fight at
Marathon, but we know that it was long and obstinately contested (see
the 113th section of the sixth book of Herodotus, and the lines from the
"Vespae" already quoted), and the spirit of the Persians must have been
even higher at Marathon than at Plataea. In both battles it was only the
true Persians and the Sacae who showed this valour; the other Asiatics
fled like sheep.]

At last the previously unvanquished lords of Asia turned their backs and
fled, and the Greeks followed, striking them down, to the water's edge,
where the invaders were now hastily launching their galleys, and seeking
to embark and fly. Flushed with success, the Athenians dashed at the
fleet.


     [The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow;
      The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;
      Mountains above, Earth's, Ocean's plain below,
      Death in the front, Destruction in the rear!
      Such was the scene.--Byron's CHILDE HARROLD.]


"Bring fire, bring fire," was their cry; and they began to lay hold of
the ships. But here the Asiatics resisted desperately, and the principal
loss sustained by the Greeks was in the assault on the fleet. Here
fell the brave War-Ruler Callimachus, the general Stesilaus, and other
Athenians of note. Conspicuous among them was Cynaegeirus, the brother
of the tragic poet AEschylus. He had grasped the ornamental work on
the stern of one of the galleys, and had his hand struck off by an axe.
Seven galleys were captured; but the Persians succeeded in saving the
rest. They pushed off from the fatal shore: but even here the skill of
Datis did not desert him, and he sailed round to the western coast of
Attica, in hopes to find the city unprotected, and to gain possession
of it from some of the partisans of Hippias. Miltiades, however, saw
and counteracted his manoeuvre. Leaving Aristides, and the troops of his
tribe, to guard the spoil and the slain, the Athenian commander led
his conquering army by a rapid night-march back across the country to
Athens. And when the Persian fleet had doubled the Cape of Sunium and
sailed up to the Athenian harbour in the morning, Datis saw arrayed on
the heights above the city the troops before whom his men had fled on
the preceding evening. All hope of further conquest in Europe for the
time was abandoned, and the baffled armada returned to the Asiatic
coasts.

After the battle had been fought, but while the dead bodies were yet on
the ground, the promised reinforcement from Sparta arrived. Two thousand
Lacedaemonian spearmen, starting immediately after the full moon, had
marched the hundred and fifty miles between Athens and Sparta in the
wonderfully short time of three days. Though too late to share in
the glory of the action, they requested to be allowed to march to the
battle-field to behold the Medes. They proceeded thither, gazed on the
dead bodies of the invaders, and then, praising the Athenians and what
they had done, they returned to Lacedaemon.

The number of the Persian dead was six thousand four hundred; of the
Athenians, a hundred and ninety-two. The number of Plataeans who fell is
not mentioned, but as they fought in the part of the army which was not
broken, it cannot have been large.

The apparent disproportion between the losses of the two armies is not
surprising, when we remember the armour of the Greek spearmen, and the
impossibility of heavy slaughter being inflicted by sword or lance on
troops so armed, as long as they kept firm in their ranks. [Mitford
well refers to Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, as instances of similar
disparity of loss between the conquerors and the conquered.]

The Athenian slain were buried on the field of battle. This was contrary
to the usual custom, according to which the bones of all who fell
fighting for their country in each year were deposited in a public
sepulchre in the suburb of Athens called the Cerameicus. But it was felt
that a distinction ought to be made in the funeral honours paid to the
men of Marathon, even as their merit had been distinguished over that of
all other Athenians. A lofty mound was raised on the plain of Marathon,
beneath which the remains of the men of Athens who fell in the battle
were deposited. Ten columns were erected on the spot, one for each of
the Athenian tribes; and on the monumental column of each tribe were
graven the names of those of its members whose glory it was to have
fallen in the great battle of liberation. The antiquary Pausanias read
those names there six hundred years after the time when they were first
graven. The columns have long perished, but the mound still marks the
spot where the noblest heroes of antiquity, the MARATHONOMAKHOI repose.
[Pausanias states, with implicit belief, that the battlefield was
haunted at night by supernatural beings, and that the noise of
combatants and the snorting of horses were heard to resound on it. The
superstition has survived the change of creeds, and the shepherds of the
neighbourhood still believe that spectral warriors contend on the
plain at midnight, and they say that they have heard the shouts of the
combatants and the neighing of the steeds. See Grote and Thirlwall.]

A separate tumulus was raised over the bodies of the slain Plataeans,
and another over the light-armed slaves who had taken part and had
fallen in the battle. [It is probable that the Greek light-armed
irregulars were active in the attack on the Persian ships and it was in
this attack that the Greeks suffered their principal loss.] There was
also a distinct sepulchral monument to the general to whose genius
the victory was mainly due. Miltiades did not live long after his
achievement at Marathon, but he lived long enough to experience a
lamentable reverse of his popularity and good fortune. As soon as the
Persians had quitted the western coasts of the AEgean, he proposed to
an assembly of the Athenian people that they should fit out seventy
galleys, with a proportionate force of soldiers and military stores,
and place them at his disposal; not telling them whither he meant to
proceed, but promising them that if they would equip the force he asked
for, and give him discretionary powers, he would lead it to a land where
there was gold in abundance to be won with ease. The Greeks of that time
believed in the existence of Eastern realms teeming with gold, as firmly
as the Europeans of the sixteenth century believed in Eldorado of the
West. The Athenians probably thought that the recent victor of Marathon,
and former officer of Darius, was about to guide them on a secret
expedition against some wealthy and unprotected cities of treasure in
the Persian dominions. The armament was voted and equipped, and sailed
eastward from Attica, no one but Miltiades knowing its destination,
until the Greek isle of Paros was reached, when his true object
appeared. In former years, while connected with the Persians as prince
of the Chersonese, Miltiades had been involved in a quarrel with one of
the leading men among the Parians, who had injured his credit and caused
some slights to be put upon him at the court of the Persian satrap,
Hydarnes. The feud had ever since rankled in the heart of the Athenian
chief, and he now attacked Paros for the sake of avenging himself on his
ancient enemy. His pretext, as general of the Athenians, was, that the
Parians had aided the armament of Datis with a war-galley. The Parians
pretended to treat about terms of surrender, but used the time which
they thus gained in repairing the defective parts of the fortifications
of their city; and they then set the Athenians at defiance. So far, says
Herodotus, the accounts of all the Greeks agree. But the Parians, in
after years, told also a wild legend, how a captive priestess of a
Parian temple of the Deities of the Earth promised Miltiades to give him
the means of capturing Paros: how, at her bidding, the Athenian general
went alone at night and forced his way into a holy shrine, near the city
gate, but with what purpose it was not known: how a supernatural awe
came over him, and in his flight he fell and fractured his leg: how
an oracle afterwards forbad the Parians to punish the sacrilegious and
traitorous priestess, "because it was fated that Miltiades should come
to an ill end, and she was only the instrument to lead him to evil."
Such was the tale that Herodotus heard at Paros. Certain it was that
Miltiades either dislocated or broke his leg during an unsuccessful
siege of that city, and returned home in evil plight with his baffled
and defeated forces.

The indignation of the Athenians was proportionate to the hope and
excitement which his promises had raised. Xanthippus, the head of one
of the first families in Athens, indicted him before the supreme popular
tribunal for the capital offence of having deceived the people.
His guilt was undeniable, and the Athenians passed their verdict
accordingly. But the recollections of Lemnos and Marathon, and the sight
of the fallen general who lay stretched on a couch before them, pleaded
successfully in mitigation of punishment, and the sentence was commuted
from death to a fine of fifty talents. This was paid by his son, the
afterwards illustrious Cimon, Miltiades dying, soon after the trial, of
the injury which he had received at Paros.

[The common-place calumnies against the Athenians respecting Miltiades
have been well answered by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton in his "Rise and
Fall of Athens," and Bishop Thirlwall in the second volume of his
"History of Greece;" but they have received their most complete
refutation from Mr. Grote in the fourth volume of his History, p.490 et
seq., and notes. I quite concur with him that, "looking to the practice
of the Athenian dicastery in criminal cases, fifty talents was the minor
penalty actually proposed by the defenders of Miltiades themselves as a
substitute for the punishment of death. In those penal cases at Athens,
where the punishment was not fixed beforehand by the terms of the law,
if the person accused was found guilty, it was customary to submit to
the jurors subsequently and separately, the question as to the amount
of punishment. First, the accuser named the penalty which he thought
suitable; next, the accused person was called upon to name an amount
of penalty for himself, and the jurors were constrained to take their
choice between these two; no third gradation of penalty being admissible
for consideration. Of course, under such circumstances, it was the
interest of the accused party to name, even in his own case, some real
and serious penalty, something which the jurors might be likely to deem
not wholly inadequate to his crime just proved; for if he proposed
some penalty only trifling, he drove them to far the heavier sentence
recommended by his opponent." The stories of Miltiades having been cast
into prison and died there, and of his having been saved from death only
by the interposition of the Prytanis of the day, are, I think, rightly
rejected by Mr. Grote as the fictions of after ages. The silence of
Herodotus respecting them is decisive. It is true that Plato, in the
Gorgias, says that the Athenians passed a vote to throw Miltiades into
the Barathrum, and speaks of the interposition of the Prytanis in his
favour; but it is to be remembered that Plato, with all his transcendent
genius, was (as Niebuhr has termed him) a very indifferent patriot, who
loved to blacken the character of his country's democratic institutions;
and if the fact was that the Prytanis, at the trial of Miltiades,
opposed the vote of capital punishment, and spoke in favour of the
milder sentence, Plato (in a passage written to show the misfortunes
that befell Athenian statesmen) would readily exaggerate this fact into
the story that appears in his text.]

The melancholy end of Miltiades, after his elevation to such a height
of power and glory, must often have been recalled to the mind of the
ancient Greeks by the sight of one, in particular, of the memorials of
the great battle which he won. This was the remarkable statue (minutely
described by Pausanias) which the Athenians, in the time of Pericles,
caused to be hewn out of a huge block of marble, which, it was believed,
had been provided by Datis to form a trophy of the anticipated victory
of the Persians. Phidias fashioned out of this a colossal image of the
goddess Nemesis, the deity whose peculiar function was to visit the
exuberant prosperity both of nations and individuals with sudden and
awful reverses. This statue was placed in a temple of the goddess at
Rhamnus, about eight miles from Marathon, Athens herself contained
numerous memorials of her primary great victory. Panenus, the cousin
of Phidias, represented it in fresco on the walls of the painted porch;
and, centuries afterwards, the figures of Miltiades and Callimachus at
the head of the Athenians were conspicuous in the fresco. The tutelary
deities were exhibited taking part in the fray. In the back-ground were
seen the Phoenician galleys; and nearer to the spectator, the Athenians
and the Plataeans (distinguished by their leathern helmets) were chasing
routed Asiatics into the marshes and the sea. The battle was sculptured
also on the Temple of Victory in the Acropolis; and even now there may
be traced on the frieze the figures of the Persian combatants with their
lunar shields, their bows and quivers, their curved scimetars, their
loose trowsers, and Phrygian tiaras. [Wordsworth's "Greece," p. 115.]

These and other memorials of Marathon were the produce of the meridian
age of Athenian intellectual splendour--of the age of Phidias and
Pericles. For it was not merely by the generation of men whom the battle
liberated from Hippias and the Medes, that the transcendent importance
of their victory was gratefully recognised. Through the whole epoch
of her prosperity, through the long Olympiads of her decay, through
centuries after her fall, Athens looked back on the day of Marathon as
the brightest of her national existence.

By a natural blending of patriotic pride with grateful piety, the very
spirits of the Athenians who fell at Marathon were deified by their
countrymen. The inhabitants of the districts of Marathon paid religious
rites to them; and orators solemnly invoked them in their most
impassioned adjurations before the assembled men of Athens. "Nothing was
omitted that could keep alive the remembrance of a deed which had first
taught the Athenian people to know its own strength, by measuring it
with the power which had subdued the greater part of the known world.
The consciousness thus awakened fixed its character, its station, and
its destiny; it was the spring of its later great actions and ambitious
enterprises." [Thirlwall.]

It was not indeed by one defeat, however signal, that the pride of
Persia could be broken, and her dreams of universal empire be dispelled.
Ten years afterwards she renewed her attempts upon Europe on a grander
scale of enterprise, and was repulsed by Greece with greater and
reiterated loss. Larger forces and heavier slaughter than had been
seen at Marathon signalised the conflicts of Greeks and Persians
at Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and the Eurymedon. But mighty and
momentous as these battles were, they rank not with Marathon in
importance. They originated no new impulse. They turned back no current
of fate. They were merely confirmatory of the already existing bias
which Marathon had created. The day of Marathon is the critical epoch in
the history of the two nations. It broke for ever the spell of Persian
invincibility, which had paralysed men's minds. It generated among
the Greeks the spirit which beat back Xerxes, and afterwards led on
Xenophon, Agesilaus, and Alexander, in terrible retaliation, through
their Asiatic campaigns. It secured for mankind the intellectual
treasures of Athens, the growth of free institutions the liberal
enlightenment of the Western world, and the gradual ascendency for many
ages of the great principles of European civilisation.


EXPLANATORY REMARKS ON SOME OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BATTLE OF
MARATHON.

Nothing is said by Herodotus of the Persian cavalry taking any part in
the battle, although he mentions that Hippias recommended the Persians
to land at Marathon, because the plain was favourable for cavalry
evolutions. In the life of Miltiades, which is usually cited as the
production of Cornelius Nepos, but which I believe to be of no authority
whatever, it is said that Miltiades protected his flanks from the
enemy's horse by an abattis of felled trees. While he was on the high
ground he would not have required this defence; and it is not likely
that the Persians would have allowed him to erect it on the plain.

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

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

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

Even numerous and fully-arrayed bodies of cavalry have been repeatedly
broken, both in ancient and modern warfare, by resolute charges of
infantry. For instance, it was by an attack of some picked cohorts that
Caesar routed the Pompeian cavalry, which had previously defeated his
own at Pharsalia.

I have represented the battle of Marathon as beginning in the afternoon,
and ending towards evening. If it had lasted all day, Herodotus would
have probably mentioned that fact. That it ended towards evening is, I
think, proved by the line from the "Vespae" which I have already quoted,
and to which my attention was called by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton's
account of the battle. I think that the succeeding lines in
Aristophanes, also already quoted, justify the description which I have
given of the rear-ranks of the Persians keeping up a flight of arrows
over the heads of their comrades against the Greeks.


SYNOPSIS OF EVENTS BETWEEN THE BATTLE OF MARATHON, B.C. 490, AND THE
DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS AT SYRACUSE, B.C. 413.

B.C. 490 to 487. All Asia is filled with the preparations made by King
Darius for a new expedition against Greece. Themistocles persuades the
Athenians to leave off dividing the proceeds of their silver mines among
themselves, and to employ the money in strengthening their navy.

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

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

484 The Persians recover Egypt.

480 Xerxes invades Greece. Indecisive actions between the Persian and
Greek fleets at Artemisium. Destruction of the three hundred Spartans
at Thermopyae. The Athenians abandon Attica and go on shipboard. Great
naval victory of the Greeks at Salamis. Xerxes returns to Asia, leaving
a chosen army under Mardonius, to carry on the war against the Greeks.

478. Mardonius and his army destroyed by the Greeks at Plataea The
Greeks land in Asia Minor, and defeat a Persian force at Mycale. In this
and the following years the Persians lose all their conquests in Europe,
and many on the coast of Asia.

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

466. Victories of Cimon over the Persians at the Eurymedon.

464. Revolt of the Helots against Sparta. Third Messenian war.

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

457. Wars in Greece between the Athenian and several Peloponnesian
states. Immense exertions of Athens at this time. There is an original
inscription still preserved in the Louvre, which attests the energies of
Athens at this crisis, when Athens, like England in modern wars, at once
sought conquests abroad, and repelled enemies at home. At the period we
now advert to (B.C. 457), an Athenian armament of two hundred galleys
was engaged in a bold though unsuccessful expedition against Egypt. The
Athenian crews had landed, had won a battle; they had then re-embarked
and sailed up the Nile, and were busily besieging the Persian garrison
in Memphis. As the complement of a trireme galley was at least two
hundred men, we cannot estimate the forces then employed by Athens
against Egypt at less than forty thousand men. At the same time she kept
squadrons on the coasts of Phoenicia and Cyprus, and yet maintained
a home-fleet that enabled her to defeat her Peloponnesian enemies
at Cecryphalae and AEgina, capturing in the last engagement seventy
galleys. This last fact may give us some idea of the strength of the
Athenian home-fleet that gained the victory; and by adopting the same
ratio of multiplying whatever number of galleys we suppose to have been
employed, by two hundred, so as to gain the aggregate number of the
crews, we may form some estimate of the forces which this little, Greek
state then kept on foot. Between sixty and seventy thousand men must
have served in her fleets during that year. Her tenacity of purpose was
equal to her boldness of enterprise. Sooner than yield or withdraw from
any of their expeditions the Athenians at this very time, when Corinth
sent an army to attack their garrison at Megara, did not recall a single
crew or a single soldier from AEgina or from abroad; but the lads and
old men, who had been left to guard the city, fought and won a battle
against these new assailants. The inscription which we have referred to
is graven on a votive tablet to the memory of the dead, erected in that
year by the Erecthean tribe, one of the ten into which the Athenians
were divided. It shows, as Thirlwall has remarked, "that the Athenians
were conscious of the greatness of their own effort;" and in it this
little civic community of the ancient world still "records to us with
emphatic simplicity, that 'its slain fell in Cyprus, in Egypt, in
Phoenicia, at Haliae, in AEgina, and in Megara, IN THE SAME YEAR.'"
[Paeans of the Athenian Navy.]

455. A thirty years' truce concluded between Athens and Lacedaemon.

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

431. Commencement of the great Peloponnesian war, in which Sparta,
at the head of nearly all the Peloponnesian states, and aided by the
Boeotians and some of the other Greeks beyond the Isthmus, endeavours
to reduce the power of Athens, and to restore independence to the
Greek maritime states who were the subject allies of Athens. At the
commencement of the war the Peloponnesian armies repeatedly invade and
ravage Attica, but Athens herself is impregnable, and her fleets secure
her the dominion of the sea.

430. Athens visited by a pestilence, which sweeps off large numbers of
her population.

426. The Athenians gain great advantages over the Spartans at
Sphacteria, and by occupying Cythera; but they suffer a severe defeat
in Boeotia, and the Spartan general Brasidas, leads an expedition to
the Thracian coasts, and conquers many of the most valuable Athenian
possessions in those regions.

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

415. The Athenians send an expedition to conquer Sicily.




CHAPTER II. -- DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS AT SYRACUSE, B.C.413.


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

  "The great expedition to Sicily, one of the most decisive events in
  the history of the world."--NIEBUHR.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The armament which the Athenians equipped against Syracuse was in every
way worthy of the state which formed such projects of universal empire;
and it has been truly termed "the noblest that ever yet had been sent
forth by a free and civilized commonwealth." [Arnold's History of Rome.]
The fleet consisted of one hundred and thirty-four war galleys, with
a multitude of store ships. A powerful force of the best heavy-armed
infantry that Athens and her allies could furnish was sent on board,
together with a smaller number of slingers and bowmen. The quality
of the forces was even more remarkable than the number. The zeal of
individuals vied with that of the republic 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 splendour as well as efficiency to the expedition, the fated fleet
began its voyage for the Sicilian shores in the summer of 415 B.C.

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 probability of an Athenian invasion was first publicly
discussed at Syracuse, 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 rumours of coming war and the proposals 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, [Lib. vi. sec. 36 et seq., Arnold's edition. I have
almost literally transcribed some of the marginal epitomes of the
original speech.] and many of its topics might, by a slight alteration
of names and details, serve admirably for the party among ourselves at
present which opposes the augmentation of our forces, and derides
the idea of our being in any peril from the sudden attack of a French
expedition. The Syracusan orator told his countrymen to dismiss
with scorn the visionary terrors which a set of designing men among
themselves strove to excite, in order to get power and influence thrown
into their own hands. He told them that Athens knew her own interest
too well to think of wantonly 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 BE EASY AND
INEVITABLE. THEIR SHIPS WILL HAVE ENOUGH TO DO TO GET TO OUR ISLAND
AT ALL, AND TO CARRY SUCH STORES OF ALL SORTS AS WILL BE NEEDED. THEY
CANNOT THEREFORE CARRY, BESIDES, AN ARMY LARGE ENOUGH TO COPE WITH SUCH
A POPULATION AS OURS. THEY WILL HAVE NO FORTIFIED PLACE FROM WHICH TO
COMMENCE THEIR OPERATIONS; BUT MUST REST THEM ON NO BETTER BASE THAN A
SET OF WRETCHED TENTS, AND SUCH MEANS AS THE NECESSITIES OF THE MOMENT
WILL ALLOW THEM. BUT IN TRUTH I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THEY WOULD EVEN BE
ABLE TO EFFECT A DISEMBARKATION. LET US, THEREFORE, SET AT NOUGHT THESE
REPORTS AS ALTOGETHER OF HOME MANUFACTURE; AND BE SURE THAT IF ANY ENEMY
DOES COME, THE STATE WILL KNOW HOW TO DEFEND ITSELF IN A MANNER WORTHY
OF THE NATIONAL HONOUR."

Such assertions pleased the Syracusan assembly; and their counterparts
find favour now among some portion of the English 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 operations in other parts of the island, 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 factious and fanatic vote of his fellow-countrymen, 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 Epipolae, the completion of which
would certainly have been followed by capitulation.

Alcibiades, the most complete example of genius without principle that
history produces, the Bolingbroke of antiquity, but with high military
talents superadded to diplomatic and oratorical powers, on being
summoned home from his command in Sicily to take his trial before the
Athenian tribunal had escaped to Sparta; and he exerted himself there
with all the selfish rancour 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 loss whether most to admire or
abhor his subtile and traitorous 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
democracy, 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
Athenians 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. [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, a century afterwards, very nearly conquer Carthage.] If all
these projects succeeded (nor did we limit ourselves to them in these
quarters), we intended to increase 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, and others in those
regions, who are allowed to make the best possible soldiers. [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 carrying 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 afterwards was.] Then,
when we had done all this, we intended to assail Peloponnesus 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 we expected to storm and others we meant to take
by surrounding them with fortified lines. [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.] 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 neighbours.

"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 endeavour to carry out these plans.
And be sure that without your speedy interference they will all be
accomplished. The Sicilian Greeks are deficient in military training;
but still if they could be at once brought to combine in an organised
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." [THUC., lib. vi sec. 90,91.] The renegade
then proceeded to urge on them the necessity of encouraging their
friends in Sicily, by showing that they themselves were earnest in
hostility to Athens. He exhorted them not only to march their armies
into Attica again, but to take up a permanent fortified position in
the country: and he gave them in detail information of all that the
Athenians most dreaded, and how his country might receive the most
distressing and enduring injury at their hands.

The Spartans resolved to act on his advice, and appointed Gylippus to
the Sicilian command. Gylippus was a man who, to the national bravery
and military skill of a Spartan, united political sagacity that was
worthy of his great fellow-countryman Brasidas; but his merits were
debased by mean and sordid vice; 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 hurried 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 seemingly 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 harbour, and making her way
towards the town with all the speed that her rowers could supply. From
her shunning the part of the harbour 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 people, just in time to prevent the fatal vote
being put for a surrender.

Providentially for Syracuse, Gongylus, the commander of the galley, had
been prevented by an Athenian squadron from following Gylippus to South
Italy, and he had been obliged to push direct for Syracuse from Greece.

The sight of actual succour, 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 an unfinished space in the besiegers' lines through which it
was barely possible to introduce reinforcements 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, [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.] and such were his own abilities and activity, that he succeeded
in raising a force of about two thousand fully armed infantry, with a
larger number of irregular troops. Nicias, as if infatuated, made no
attempt to counteract his operations; nor, when Gylippus marched his
little army towards Syracuse, did the Athenian commander endeavour
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 towards the harbour, Gylippus turned their position by
occupying the high ground in the extreme rear of Epipolae. He then
marched through the unfortified interval of Nicias's lines into the
besieged town; and, joining his troops with the Syracusan forces, after
some engagements 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 harbour.

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 striking a deadly blow at her power.
Large reinforcements from Corinth, Thebes, and other cities, now reached
the Syracusans; while the baffled and dispirited Athenian general
earnestly besought 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, however desperate, for its
accomplishment. With indomitable pertinacity she now decreed, instead of
recalling her first armament 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 territory, 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 seventy galleys, and another army,
which seemed to drain the very last reserves of her military population,
to try if Syracuse could not yet be won, and the honour 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 whom 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 the great
men of the Athenian republic, 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 AEtolia he had shown some of the rashness of youth, and had received
a lesson of caution, by which he profited throughout the rest of his
career, but without losing any of his natural energy in enterprise or
in execution. He had performed the eminent 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 forces, and at their head
he had gained some important advantages over the enemies of Athens in
Western Greece. His most celebrated exploits had been the occupation
of Pylos on the Messenian coast, the successful defence of that place
against the fleet and armies of Lacedaemon, and the subsequent capture
of the Spartan forces on the isle of Sphacteria; which was the severest
blow dealt to Sparta throughout the war, and which had mainly caused
her to humble herself to make the truce with Athens. Demosthenes was
as honourably 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
interest 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 favour.
He had also the moral courage, not always combined with physical of
seeking to do his duty to his country, irrespectively of any odium that
he himself might incur, and unhampered by any petty jealousy of those
who were associated with him in command. There are few men named in
ancient history, of whom posterity would gladly know more, or whom we
sympathise with more deeply in the calamities that befel them, than
Demosthenes, the son of Alcisthenes, who, in the spring of the year 413
B.C., left Piraeus at the head of the second Athenian expedition against
Sicily.

His arrival was critically timed; for Gylippus had encouraged the
Syracusans to attack the Athenians under Nicias by sea as well as by
land, and by an 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 foe. Gylippus was
preparing to follow up his advantage by fresh attacks on the Athenians
on both elements, when the arrival of Demosthenes completely changed the
aspect of affairs, and restored the superiority to the invaders. With
seventy-three war-galleys in the highest state of efficiency, and
brilliantly equipped, with a force of five thousand picked men of the
regular infantry of Athens and her allies, and a still larger number of
bowmen, javelin-men, and slingers on board, Demosthenes rowed round the
great harbour with loud cheers and martial music, as if in defiance of
the Syracusans and their confederates. His arrival had indeed changed
their newly-born hopes into the deepest consternation. The resources of
Athens seemed inexhaustible, and resistance to her hopeless. They had
been told that she was reduced to the last extremities, and that her
territory was occupied by an enemy; and yet, here they saw her, as if in
prodigality of power, sending forth, to make foreign conquests, a second
armament, not inferior to that with which Nicias had first landed on the
Sicilian shores.

With the intuitive decision of a great commander, Demosthenes at once
saw that the possession of Epipolae was the key to the possession of
Syracuse, and he resolved to make a prompt and vigorous attempt
to recover that position, while his force was unimpaired, and the
consternation which its arrival had produced among the besieged remained
unabated. The Syracusans and their allies had run out an outwork along
Epipolae from the city walls, intersecting the fortified lines of
circumvallation which Nicias had commenced, but from which they 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 conqueror 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 besieged to the nature of
the main operations than with any expectation of succeeding in an open
assault, with every disadvantage of the ground to contend against. But,
when the darkness 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 towards the interior 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 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
Epipolae. Thence the Athenians marched eagerly down the slope towards
the town, routing some Syracusan detachments that were quartered in
their way, and vigorously assailing the unprotected part of the outwork.
All at first favoured them. The outwork was abandoned by its garrison,
and the Athenian engineers began to dismantle it. In vain Gylippus
brought up fresh troops to check the assault: the Athenians broke and
drove them back, and continued to press hotly forward, in the full
confidence of victory. But, amid the general consternation of the
Syracusans and their confederates, one body of infantry stood firm. This
was a brigade of their Boeotian allies, which was posted low down the
slope of Epipolae, outside the city walls. Coolly and steadily the
Boeotian infantry formed their line, and, undismayed by the current of
flight around them, advanced against the advancing Athenians. This was
the crisis of the battle. But the Athenian van was disorganized by its
own previous successes; and, yielding to the unexpected charge thus made
on it by troops in perfect order, and of the most obstinate courage, it
was driven back in confusion upon the other divisions of the army that
still continued 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
impracticable; and though many companies still fought on desperately,
wherever the moonlight showed them the semblance of a foe, [THUC. vii.
44. Compare Tacitus's description of the night engagement in the civil
war between Vespasian and Vitellius: "Neutro inclinaverat fortuna, donec
adulta nocte, LUNA OSTENDERET ACIES, FALERESQUE."--Hist. Lib. iii. sec.
23.] they fought without concert or subordination; and not unfrequently,
amid the deadly chaos, Athenian troops assailed each other. Keeping
their ranks close, the Syracusans and their allies pressed on against
the disorganized masses of the besiegers; and at length drove them, with
heavy slaughter, over the cliffs, which, scarce an hour before, they had
scaled full of hope, and apparently certain of success.

This defeat was decisive of the event of the siege. The Athenians
afterwards struggled only to protect themselves from the vengeance which
the Syracusans sought to wreak in the complete 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 in 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
for ever at an end. She, indeed, continued to struggle against her
combined enemies and revolted allies with unparalleled gallantry; and
many more years of varying warfare passed away before she surrendered
to their arms. But no success in subsequent conquests 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 Western Europe was left for Rome
and Carthage to dispute two centuries later, in conflicts still more
terrible, and with even higher displays of military daring and genius,
than Athens had witnessed either in her rise, her meridian, or her fall.


SYNOPSIS OF THE EVENTS BETWEEN THE DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS 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 of war is transferred to
the Hellespont and eastern side of the AEgean.

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 AEgospotamos.
Athens closely besieged. Rise of the power of Dionysius at Syracuse.

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

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

401. Cyrus the Younger commences his expedition into Upper Asia to
dethrone his brother Artaxerxes Mnemon. He takes with him an auxiliary
force of ten thousand Greeks. He in 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 Lacedaemonians under
Agesilaus and other commanders, carry on war against the Persian satraps
in Asia Minor.

396. Syracuse is besieged by the Carthaginians, and successfully
defended by Dionysius.

394. Rome makes her first great stride in the career of conquest 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 authentic
history. The Gauls overrun great part of Italy, and burn Rome. Rome
recovers from the blow, but her old enemies, the AEquians 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 extend over a period
of fifty years. The result of this obstinate contest 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 becomes king of
Macedon. He gains several victories over the northern barbarians who
had attacked Macedonia, and destroys 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 Macedonia?"--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 the Scythian
     or Chaldaean 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 AEgean 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 for
     ever."--ARNOLD.


A long and not uninstructive list might be made out of illustrious
men, whose characters have been vindicated during recent times from
aspersions which for centuries had been thrown on them. The spirit of
modern inquiry, and the tendency of modern scholarship, both of which
are often said to be solely negative and destructive, have, in truth,
restored to splendour, and almost created anew, far more than they have
assailed with censure, or dismissed from consideration as unreal. The
truth of many a brilliant narrative of brilliant exploits has of
late years been triumphantly demonstrated; and the shallowness of the
sceptical 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 comprehensive judgment, than formerly were
brought to bear on these subjects. The result has been at least as often
favourable as unfavourable to the persons and the states so scrutinized;
and many an oft-repeated slander against both measures and men has thus
been silenced, we may hope, for ever.

The veracity of Herodotus, the pure patriotism of Pericles, of
Demosthenes, and of the Gracchi, the wisdom of Cleisthenes 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 best historians of Germany, France, and England,
has been equally manifested in the spirit in which they have treated the
heroes of thought and the 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 amongst nations, has, until lately, been
comparatively unhonoured. 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 exploits 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 instigated by "that strongest of all antipathies, the
antipathy of a second-rate mind to a first-rate one," [De Stael.] 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 declamation and dogmatism was at
its full height, but who was himself, 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 manner 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 undisputed 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 become a familiar word. I
therefore hold that such a man, who was like no ordinary mortal was not
born into the world without some special providence." [Arrian, lib. vii.
AD FINEM.]

And one of the most distinguished soldiers and writers of our own
nation, Sir Walter Raleigh, though he failed to estimate 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 quotation:--"So much hath the spirit of some one man
excelled as it hath undertaken and effected the alteration of the
greatest states and commonwealths, the erection of monarchies, the
conquest 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 valour 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 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 marvellous, and would hardly have
been undertaken by any one else: and though his father had determined
to have invaded the Lesser Asia, it is like that he would have contented
himself with some part thereof, and not have discovered the river of
Indus, as this man did." ["The Historie of the World," by Sir Walter
Raleigh, Knight, p. 628.]

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 assertions are true, that his successes were the
mere results of fortunate 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 military 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 colonists, who dwelt on the borders of the Black Sea, and on the
Mediterranean, and in Smyrna, Ephesus, Tarsus, Miletus, &c. 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 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 Alexandria, 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 conquests to the
coasts of the Caspian, punished Bessus, the cowardly assassin of Darius,
penetrated into Scythia, and subdued the Scythians. In 328, he forced
the passage of the Oxus, received sixteen thousand recruits from
Macedonia, and reduced the neighbouring people to subjection. In 327,
he crossed the Indus, vanquished Poros 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,
Persepolis, 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." [See Count Montolon's Memoirs of Napoleon.]

The enduring importance of Alexander's conquests is to be estimated not
by the duration of his own life 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 Seleucids and the Ptolemies
imitated their great captain in blending schemes of civilization, 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 ascendancy of the Greek genius, so
wonderfully comprehensive and assimilating was the cultivation which
it introduced, that, within thirty years after Alexander crossed the
Hellespont, the language, the literature, and the arts of Hellas,
enforced and promoted by the arms of semi-Hellenic Macedon, predominated
in every country from the shores of that sea to the Indian waters. Even
sullen Egypt acknowledged the intellectual supremacy of Greece; and the
language of Pericles and Plato became the language of the statesmen
and the sages who dwelt in the mysterious land of the Pyramids and the
Sphinx. It is not to be supposed that this victory of the Greek tongue
was so complete as to exterminate the Coptic, the Syrian, the Armenian,
the Persian, or the other native languages of the numerous nations and
tribes between the AEgean, the Iaxertes, the Indus, and the Nile; they
survived as provincial dialects. Each probably was in use as the vulgar
tongue of its own district. But every person with the slightest pretence
to education spoke Greek. Greek was universally the State language, and
the exclusive language of all literature and science, It formed also
for the merchant, the trader, and the traveller, as well as for the
courtier, the government official, and the soldier, the organ of
intercommunication among the myriads of mankind inhabiting these large
portions of the Old World. [See Arnold, Hist. Rome, ii. 406.] Throughout
Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, the Hellenic character that was thus
imparted, remained in full vigour down to the time of the Mahometan
conquests. The infinite value of this to humanity in the highest and
holiest point of view has often been pointed out; and the workings of
the finger of Providence have been gratefully recognised by those who
have observed 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 ascendancy was more short-lived. Yet, during the existence of
the Hellenic kingdoms in these regions, especially of the Greek kingdom
of Bactria, the modern Bokhara, 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 Mahomet commenced their career in the East. It is
well 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. [See Humboldt's
Cosmos.]

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 retain 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
disputed. That ancient dominion, like the Turkish at the present time,
laboured under every cause of decay and dissolution. The satraps, like
the modern pachas, 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 principle 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 revived ascendancy of Persia in
the East, under the sceptres of the Arsacidae. A revolution that merely
substituted one Eastern power for another would have been utterly barren
and unprofitable to mankind.

Alexander's victory at Arbela not only overthrew an Oriental 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.

Arbela, the city which has furnished its name to the decisive battle
that gave Asia to Alexander, lies more than twenty miles from the actual
scene of conflict. The little village then named Gaugamela is close to
the spot where the armies met, but has ceded the honour of naming the
battle to its more euphonious neighbour. 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
track; but the ground is generally level, and admirably qualified for
the evolutions of cavalry, and also calculated 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 valour 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 invaders.
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 mountains, the river, and the sea, the numbers of the Persians
confused and clogged alike the general's skill and the soldiers'
prowess, so that their very strength became their weakness. 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 inevitable.

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 apparent career of destiny. He felt that the diadem was now either
to be firmly replaced on his own brow, or to be irrevocably transferred
to the head of his European conqueror. He, therefore, during the
long interval left him after the battle of Issus, while Alexander was
subjugating Syria and Egypt, assiduously busied himself in selecting the
best troops which his vast empire supplied, and in training his varied
forces to act together with some uniformity of discipline and system.

The hardy mountaineers of Affghanistan, Bokhara, Khiva, and Thibet, were
then, as at present, far different from the generality 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 supplied, as they do now, squadrons of horsemen,
strong, 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
Macedonians. 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 elephants fifteen in number. The amount of the
infantry is uncertain; 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 believing that many
myriads were prepared to fight, or to encumber 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 Alexander 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 now, utterly impracticable. Marching eastward from Syria, Alexander
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 his 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 remember
that three centuries afterwards a Roman army under Crassus was thus
actually destroyed by the Oriental archers and horsemen in these very
plains; [See Mitford.] 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 expected to find loyalty to his person, and a safe
refuge in case of defeat. [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 scholarship, have been exposed sufficiently to make him no
longer a dangerous guide as to Greek polities; 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 valuable as well as entertaining.]

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 advantage of deriving our information from two of Alexander's
generals of division, who bore an important part in all his enterprises.
Aristobulus and Ptolemy (who afterwards became king of Egypt) kept
regular journals of the military events which they witnessed; and these
journals were in the possession of Arrian, 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 believe to be genuine, and not
to be the coinage of a rhetorician, like those in Curtius. In fact, in
reading Arrian, we read General Aristobulus and General Ptolemy on the
campaigns of the Macedonians; and it is like reading General Jomini or
General Foy on the campaigns of the French.

The estimate which we find in Arrian of the strength of Alexander's
army, seems reasonable when we take into account both the losses which
he had sustained, and the reinforcements which he had received since he
left Europe. Indeed, to Englishmen, 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 incredible. The army which Alexander now led
was wholly composed of veteran troops in the highest possible state of
equipment 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 organized by his father Philip,
who on his accession to the Macedonian 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 tactic
of armed masses to the greatest efficiency of which it was capable with
such materials as he possessed. [See Niebuhr's Hist. of Rome, iii. 488.]
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 advance
of each front-rank man. The phalangite soldier was fully equipped in
the defensive armour 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 defects 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 could
obtain from them an accuracy of movement and steadiness of evolution,
such as probably the recruits of his father would only have floundered
in attempting, and such as certainly 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. [See Niebuhr.] Under
Alexander the phalanx 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 in the intervals of the regiments of his phalangites, troops
armed in a different manner, which could prevent their line from being
pierced, and their companies taken in flank, when the nature of the
ground prevented a close formation; and which could be withdrawn, when a
favourable 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.
These were principally supplied to him by the highlanders of Illyria and
Thracia. The main strength of his cavalry consisted in two chosen corps
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 defensive
armour. Other regiments of regular cavalry were less heavily armed, and
there were several bodies of light horsemen, whom Alexander's conquests
in Egypt and Syria had enabled him to mount superbly.

A little before the end of August, Alexander crossed the Euphrates
at Thapsacus, a small corps of Persian cavalry under Mazaeus retiring
before him. Alexander was too prudent to march down through the
Mesopotamian deserts, and continued 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, determined 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 advantage
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 rhetoricians of after ages have loved to describe Darius
Codomannus as a second Xerxes in ostentation and imbecility; but a fair
examination of his generalship in this his last campaign, shows that he
was worthy of bearing the same name as his great predecessor, 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 certain 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 remains of Nineveh, the great, city of
the primaeval conquerors of the human race. Neither the Macedonian king
nor any of his followers knew what those vast mounds had once been. They
had already become nameless masses of grass-grown ruins; and it is only
within the last few years that the intellectual energy of one of our own
countrymen has rescued Nineveh from its long centuries of oblivion. [See
Layard's "Nineveh," and also Vaux's "Nineveh and Persepolis," p. 16.]

On the fourth day of Alexander's southward march, his advanced 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
Macedonians made some prisoners, and from them Alexander found that
Darius was posted only a few miles off 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 unencumbered. After this halt, he moved forward, while it was
yet dark, with the intention of reaching the enemy, and attacking
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 suspected 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
attacking instantly at all hazards, but the more prudent opinion of
Parmenio prevailed, and it was determined not to advance farther 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 Macedonians on eminences which they occupied, and the two
armies remained until night without molesting each other. On Alexander's
return to his head-quarters, he summoned his generals and superior
officers together, and telling them that he well knew that THEIR
zeal wanted no exhortation, he besought 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 going 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 required no long words to excite
its ardour: 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 ordered 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 Persians. The King is said to have answered,
that he scorned to such 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 uncertainty 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 encourage him
to renew the contest. It was necessary for Alexander not only to beat
Darius, but to gain such a victory as should leave his rival without
apology for defeat, and without hope of recovery.

The Persians, in fact, expected, and were prepared to meet a night
attack. Such was the apprehension that Darius entertained 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 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's own station
was in the centre. This was composed of the Indians, the Carians, the
Mardian archers, and the division of Persians who were distinguished
by the golden apples that formed knobs of their spears. Here also were
stationed 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 were alone
considered fit to stand in 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
Sacesinae. 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 thousand 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. [See Clinton's "Fasti Hellenici." The battle was
fought eleven days after an eclipse of the moon, which gives the means
of fixing the precise date.]

There was deep need of skill, as well as of valour, on Alexander's side;
and few battle-fields have witnessed more consummate generalship than
was now displayed by the Macedonian king. There were no natural barriers
by which he could protect his flanks; and not only was he certain to
be overlapped on either wing by the vast lines of the Persian army, but
there was imminent risk of their circling round him and charging him in
the rear, while he advanced against their centre. 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 Alexander 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 troops of the royal horse-guards formed the right of
Alexander's line. Their captains were Cleitus (whose regiment was on the
extreme right, the post of peculiar danger), Graucias, Ariston, Sopolis,
Heracleides, Demetrias, Meleager, 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's
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's infantry were placed the cavalry regiments
of the allies, with Eriguius for their general. The Messalian cavalry,
commanded by Philippus, were next, and held the extreme left of
the whole army. The whole left wing was entrusted to the command of
Parmenio, who had round his person the Pharsalian troop of
cavalry, which was the strongest and best amid 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. 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 line, and behind the royal horse-guards,
Alexander placed half the Agrian light-armed infantry under Attalus, 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's squadron of
cavalry, and Aretes's and Ariston's light horse. Menidas was ordered to
watch if the enemy's cavalry tried to turn the flank, and if they did
so, to charge them before 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
was placed there, and Coeranus's regiment of the cavalry of the Greek
allies, and Agathon's troops of the Odrysian irregular horse.
The extreme left of the second line in this quarter was held by
Andromachus's 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 bowmen, with the
intention of warding off the charge of the armed chariots. [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's "Histoire du Consulat," &c. vol. ii. livre v.]

Conspicuous by the brilliancy of his armour, 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 towards 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 valour: and, in his subsequent campaigns, the love of the
excitement, of "the rapture of the strife," may have made him, like
Murat, continue from choice a custom which he commenced from duty.
But he never suffered the ardour of the soldier to make him lose the
coolness of the general; and at Arbela, in particular, he showed that he
could act up to his favourite Homeric maxim.

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 the phalanx would
attack, the ground had been carefully levelled 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 tactics 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 favourable terms as possible though the manoeuvre might
in some respects 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 on his extreme left, to charge round upon Alexander's right
wing, and check its further lateral progress. Against these assailants
Alexander sent from his second line Menidas's cavalry. As these proved
too few to make head against the enemy, he ordered Ariston also from the
second line with his light horse, and Cleander with his foot, in support
of Menidas. The Bactrians and Scythians now began to give way, but
Darius reinforced them by the mass of Bactrian 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 horseman
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. [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 carbine, a
helmet with a vizor, and a coat of mail; they had several horses, and
several attendants on foot. One hundred cuirassiers, however were not
afraid of one hundred Mamelukes; three hundred could beat; an equal
number, and one thousand could easily put to the rout fifteen hundred,
so great is the influence 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 THE CAPTIVITY OF NAPOLEON, iv. 70.]

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 Alexander had specially appointed for
the service, and who, wounding the horses and drivers with their missile
weapons, and running 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 it, with the view of
gaining the flank of his army. At the critical moment, Aretes, with his
horsemen from Alexander's second line, dashed on the Persian squadrons
when their own flanks were exposed by this evolution. 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
dashed with his guard; and then pressing towards 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 Persian 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 Alexander's cavalry, and the pikes of the phalanx now gleamed nearer
and nearer to him. His charioteer was struck down by a javelin at his
side; and at last Darius's 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 favourably for his cause, and where his
presence might have done much towards 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 Mazaeus, who commanded the Persian right
wing, advanced against him, completely outflanked him, and pressed
him severely with reiterated 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 centre, but kept
back to cover Parmenio's troops on their right flank; as otherwise they
would have been completely surrounded 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 forward through this
interval, and right through the troops of the Macedonian second line.
Instead of then wheeling round upon Sarmenio, 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, countermarched 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 inability to bear up any longer against the hot
attacks of Mazaeus. Taking his horse-guards with him, Alexander rode
towards 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
Macedonians. 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
Macedonian, discipline and valour again prevailed, and a large number of
the Persian and Indian horsemen were cut down; some few only succeeded
in breaking through and riding away. Relieved of these obstinate
enemies, Alexander again formed his horse-guards, and led them towards
Parmenio; but by this time that general also was victorious. Probably
the news of Darius's flight had reached Mazaeus, and had damped the
ardour of the Persian right wing; while the tidings of their comrades'
success must have proportionally encouraged the Macedonian forces under
Parmenio. His Thessalian cavalry particularly distinguished themselves
by their gallantry and persevering good conduct; and by the time that
Alexander 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. [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.] The narrow bridge was soon choked up by the flying
thousands who rushed towards 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 halting. Alexander reached that city on the next day, and
made himself master of all Darius's treasure and stores; but the P

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