. The Athenians charged the
enemy in serried ranks, but the Persians seeing them advancing without
cavalry and without archers, thought them fools. It was the first time
that the Greeks had dared to face the Persians in battle array. The
Athenians began by turning both flanks, and then engaged the centre,
driving the Persians in disorder to the sea and forcing them to
reembark on their ships.

The victory of Marathon delivered the Athenians and made them famous
in all Greece (490).

=Second Persian War.=--The second war began ten years later with an
invasion. Xerxes united all the peoples of the empire, so that the
land force amounted, as some say, to 1,700,000 men.[75] There were
Medes and Persians clad in sleeved tunics, armed with cuirasses of
iron, bucklers, bows and arrows; Assyrians with cuirass of linen,
armed with clubs pointed with iron; Indians clad in cotton with bows
and arrows of bamboo; savages of Ethiopia with leopard skins for
clothing; nomads armed only with lassos; Phrygians armed with short
pikes; Lydians equipped like Greeks; Thracians carrying javelins and
daggers. The enumeration of these fills twenty chapters in
Herodotus.[76] These warriors brought with them a crowd equally
numerous of non-combatants, of servants, slaves, women, together with
a mass of mules, horses, camels, and baggage wagons.

This horde crossed the Hellespont by a bridge of boats in the spring
of 480. For seven days and nights it defiled under the lash. Then
traversing Thrace, it marched on Greece, conquering the peoples whom
it met.

The Persian fleet, 1,200 galleys strong, coasted the shores of Thrace,
passing through the canal at Mount Athos which Xerxes had had built
for this very purpose.

The Greeks, terrified, submitted for the most part to the Great King
and joined their armies to the Persian force. The Athenians sent to
consult the oracle of Delphi, but received only the reply; "Athens
will be destroyed from base to summit." The god being asked to give a
more favorable response, replied, "Zeus accords to Pallas [protectress
of Athens] a wall of wood which alone shall not be taken; in that
shall you and your children find safety." The priests of whom they
asked the interpretation of this oracle bade the Athenians quit Attica
and go to establish themselves elsewhere. But Themistocles explained
the "wall of wood" as meaning the ships; they should retire to the
fleet and fight the Persians on sea.

Athens and Spa