or its ships.

The marshes swallowed up many of the fleeing host. Hundreds fell before
the arms of the victors. Into the ships poured in terror those who had
escaped, followed hotly by the victorious Greeks, who made strenuous
efforts to set the ships on fire and destroy the entire host. In this
they failed. The Persians, made desperate by their peril, drove them
back. The fleet hastily set sail, leaving few prisoners, but abandoning
a rich harvest of tents and equipments to the victorious Greeks. Of the
Persian host, some sixty-four hundred lay dead on the field, the ships
having saved them from further slaughter. The Greek loss in dead was
only one hundred and ninety-two.

Yet, despite this signal victory, Greece was still in imminent danger.
Athens was undefended. The fleeing fleet might reach and capture it
before the army could return. In truth, the ships had sailed in this
direction, and from the top of a lofty hill Miltiades saw the polished
surface of a shield flash in the sunlight, and quickly guessed what it
meant. It was a signal made by some traitor to the Persian fleet.
Putting his army at once under march, despite the weariness of the
victors, he hastened back over the long twenty-two miles at all possible
speed, and the worn-out troops reached Athens barely in time to save it
from the approaching fleet.

The triumph of Miltiades was complete. Only for his quickness in
guessing the meaning of the flashing shield, and the rapidity of his
march, all the results of his great victory would have been lost, and
Athens fallen helpless into Persian arms. But Datis, finding the city
amply garrisoned, and baffled at every point, turned his ships and
sailed in defeat away, leaving the Athenians masters of city and field.

And now the Spartans--to whom the full moon had come too late--appeared,
two thousand strong, only in time to congratulate the victors and view
the dead Persians on the field. They had marched the whole distance in
less than three days. As for the Athenian dead, they were buried with
great ceremony on the plain where they fell, and the great mound which
covers them is visible there to this day.

_XERXES AND HIS ARMY._

The defeat of the Persian army at Marathon redoubled the wrath of King
Darius against the Athenians. He resolved in his autocratic mind to
sweep that pestilent city and all whom it contained from the face of the
earth. And he perhaps would have done so had he not met a m