The conquest of this great horde by two small peoples appeared at that time as a prodigy. The gods, said the Greeks, had fought for them. But there is less wonder when we examine the two antagonists more closely: the Persian army was innumerable, and Xerxes had thought that victory was a matter of numbers. But this multitude was an embarrassment to itself. It did not know where to secure food for itself, it advanced but slowly, and it choked itself on the day of combat. Likewise the ships arranged in too close order drove their prows into neighboring ships and shattered their oars. Then in this immense crowd there were, according to Herodotus, many men but few soldiers. Only the Persians and Medes, the flower of the army, fought with energy; the rest advanced only under the lash, they had come under pressure to a war which had no interest for them, ill-armed and without discipline, ready to desert as soon as no one was watching them. At Platæa the Medes and Persians were the only ones to do any fighting; the subjects kept aloof.
The Persian soldiers were ill-equipped; they were embarrassed by their long robes, the head was poorly protected by a felt hat, the body ill-defended by a shield of wicker-work. For arms they had a bow, a dagger, and a very short pike; they could fight only at a great distance or hand-to-hand. The Spartans and their allies, on the contrary, secure in the protection of great buckler, helmet and greaves, marched in solid line and were irresistible; they broke the enemy with their long pikes and at once the battle became a massacre.
Results of the Persian Wars.—Sparta had commanded the troops, but as Herodotus says,[77] it was Athens who had delivered Greece by setting an example of resistance and constituting the fleet of Salamis. It was Athens who profited by the victory. All the Ionian cities of the Archipelago and of the coast of Asia revolted and formed a league against the Persians. The Spartans, men of the mountains, could not conduct a maritime war, and so withdrew; the Athenians immediately became chiefs of the league. In 476[78] Aristides, commanding the fleet, assembled the delegates of the confederate cities. They decided to continue the war against the Great King, and engaged to provide ships and warriors and to pay each year a contribution of 460 talents ($350,000). The treasure was deposited at Delos in the temple of Apollo, god of the Ionians. Athens was charged with the leadership of the military force and with collecting the tax. To make the agreement irrevocable Aristides had a mass of hot iron cast into the sea, and all swore to maintain the oaths until the day that the iron should mount to the surface.
A day came, however, when the war ceased, and the Greeks, always the victors, concluded a peace, or at least a truce,[79] with the Great King. He surrendered his claim on the Asiatic Greeks (about 449).
What was to become of the treaty of Aristides? Were the confederate cities still to pay their contribution now that there was no more fighting? Some refused it even before the war was done. Athens asserted that the cities had made their engagements in perpetuity and forced them to pay them.
The war finished, the treasury at Delos had no further use; the Athenians transferred the money to Athens and used it in building their monuments. They maintained that the allies paid for deliverance from the Persians; they, therefore, had no claim against Athens so long as she defended them from the Great King. The allies had now become the tributaries of Athens: they were now her subjects. Athens increased the tax on them, and required their citizens to bring their cases before the Athenian courts; she even sent colonists to seize a part of their lands. Athens, mistress of the league, was sovereign over more than three hundred cities spread over the islands and the coasts of the Archipelago, and the tribute paid her amounted to six hundred talents a year.
STRIFE AMONG THE GREEK STATES
The Peloponnesian War.—After the foundation of the Athenian empire in the Archipelago the Greeks found themselves divided between two leagues—the maritime cities were subject to Athens; the cities of the interior remained under the domination of Sparta. After much preliminary friction war arose between Sparta and her continental allies on the one side and Athens and her maritime subjects on the other. This was the Peloponnesian War. It continued twenty-seven years (431-404), and when it ceased, it was revived under other names down to 360.
These wars were complicated affairs. They were fought simultaneously on land and sea, in Greece, Asia, Thrace, and Sicily, ordinarily at several points at once. The Spartans had a better army and ravaged Attica; the Athenians had a superior fleet and made descents on the coasts of the Peloponnesus. Then Athens sent its army to Sicily where it perished to the last man (413); Lysander, a Spartan general, secured a fleet from the Persians and destroyed the Athenian fleet in Asia (405). The Athenian allies who fought only under compulsion abandoned her. Lysander took Athens, demolished its walls, and burnt its ships.
Wars against Sparta.—Sparta was for a time mistress on both land and sea. "In those days," says Xenophon, "all cities obeyed when a Spartan issued his orders." But soon the allies of Sparta, wearied of her domination, formed a league against her. The Spartans, driven at first from Asia, still maintained their power in Greece for some years by virtue of their alliance with the king of the Persians (387). But the Thebans, having developed a strong army under the command of Epaminondas, fought them at Leuctra (371) and at Mantinea (362). The allies of Sparta detached themselves from her, but the Thebans could not secure from the rest of the Greeks the recognition of their supremacy. From this time no Greek city was sovereign over the others.