r by the ships of the beaten and demoralized Persian
fleet, an operation which would have been impossible in the face
of the victorious Greeks.

Xerxes still held to the idea of conquering Greece; but the chance
was gone. Mardonius, it is true, remained in Thessaly with an army,
but it was no longer an army of millions. The Greeks assembled an
army of about 100,000 men and in the battle of Plataea the following
year utterly defeated it. On the same day the Greeks destroyed
what was left of the Persian fleet in the battle of Mycale, on
the coast of Asia Minor. This, strictly speaking, was not a naval
battle at all, for the Persians had drawn their ships up on shore
and built a stockade around them. The Greeks landed their crews,
took the stockade by storm and burnt the ships. These later victories
were the direct consequences of the earlier victory of Salamis.

Another phase of the Persian plan of conquering the Greeks must not
be overlooked. Xerxes had stirred up Carthage to undertake a naval
and military expedition against the Greeks of Sicily, in order that
all the independent Greek states might be crushed simultaneously.
Again the weather came to the rescue, for the greater part of the
Carthaginian fleet was wrecked by storms. The survivors of the
expedition laid siege to the city of Himera, but were eventually
driven back to their ships in rout with the loss of their general.
Thus the Greek civilization of Sicily was saved at the same time
as that of Athens.

East and west, therefore, the grandiose plan of the Persian despot
fell in ruin, and with it fell the prestige and the power of the
empire. The Ionians revolted and joined Athens as allies, and the
control of the AEgean passed from Persia to Athens. With this loss
of sea power began the decline of Persia as a world power.

The significance of this astounding defeat of the greatest military
and naval power of the time lies in the fact that European, or
more particularly Greek, civilization was spared to develop its
own individuality. Had Xerxes succeeded, the paralyzing regime of
an Asiatic despotism would have stifled the genius of the Greek
people. Self-government would never have had its beginnings in
Greece, and a subjugated Athens would never have produced the "Age
of Pericles." In the two generations following Salamis, Athens
made a greater original contribution to literature, philosophy,
science, and art than any other nation in any two centuries of