Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
When the twain on Athena’s day
Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.
“For aye shall your fame in the land be told,
Harmodius and Aristogeiton bold,
Who, striking the tyrant down,
Made Athens a freeman’s town.”[[7]]
With the victory at Marathon Athens came of age. The struggle between Orientalism and Hellenism was just begun. Salamis and Platæa and Eurymedon were yet to be. But the Greeks with a divine improvidence discounted their ultimate success. Their twenty years of democratic education made impossible any compromise with despotism. Whatever necessary vagueness may still have existed at Athens in the attempted fusion of polytheistic tradition with the awakening conception of monotheism, there now stands forth in a law-abiding conscience the barrier of Law, clear and bold as the outline of Pentelicus above Marathon. The contemporary Athenian feeling is reflected by Æschylus in the answer of the old Persian men to Darius’s widowed queen, who has asked about the Greeks:—
ATOSSA
“‘And who’s their herdsman? Who the people’s overlord?’