land--but fear,
jealousy, division, were within the walls. Ruin seemed certain, and a
chief of the Eretrians urged the colonists to quit a city which they
were unable to save. They complied with the advice, and reached
Attica in safety. Eretria, however, withstood a siege of six days; on
the seventh the city was betrayed to the barbarians by two of that
fatal oligarchical party, who in every Grecian city seem to have
considered no enemy so detestable as the majority of their own
citizens; the place was pillaged--the temples burnt--the inhabitants
enslaved. Here the Persians rested for a few days ere they embarked
for Attica.

II. Unsupported and alone, the Athenians were not dismayed. A
swift-footed messenger was despatched to Sparta, to implore its prompt
assistance. On the day after his departure from Athens, he reached
his destination, went straight to the assembled magistrates, and thus
addressed them:

"Men of Lacedaemon, the Athenians supplicate your aid; suffer not the
most ancient of the Grecian cities to be enslaved by the barbarian.
Already Eretria is subjected to their yoke, and all Greece is
diminished by the loss of that illustrious city."

The resource the Athenians had so much right to expect failed them.
The Spartans, indeed, resolved to assist Athens, but not until
assistance would have come too late. They declared that their
religion forbade them to commence a march till the moon was at her
full, and this was only the ninth day of the month [275]. With this
unsatisfying reply, the messenger returned to Athens. But, employed
in this arduous enterprise--his imagination inflamed by the greatness
of the danger--and its workings yet more kindled by the loneliness of
his adventure and the mountain stillness of the places through which
he passed, the Athenian messenger related, on his return, a vision
less probably the creation of his invention than of his excited fancy.
Passing over the Mount Parthenius, amid whose wild recesses gloomed
the antique grove dedicated to Telephus, the son of Hercules [276],
the Athenian heard a voice call to him aloud, and started to behold
that mystic god to whom, above the rest of earth, were dedicated the
hills and woods of Arcady--the Pelasgic Pan. The god bade him "ask at
Athens why the Athenians forgot his worship--he who loved them well--
and might yet assist them at their need."

Such was the tale of the messenger. The lively credulities of the
people b