The corpses beached. They filled the ridges and the shores.”
Whether dead or alive the Persians found no refuge upon land. Aristides with his men, instead of the picked Persians, was now on Psyttaleia to save or to destroy. The chorus of Persian women, as they hear the news, imagine their dead now floating with the tide, now, like struggling swimmers, rising to the waves. The leader cries:—
“Woe, woe is me!
Our dear ones lost,
By the sea’s swell tossed
Their bodies, borne along the main,
Rise and dip, and rise again!”
It was not unnatural that the ineffaceable memory of the sea covered with wreckage and the dead should reappear, when Æschylus, in the “Agamemnon,” describes the morning after the storm that wrecked the ships returning from Troy:—
“When rose the brilliant light of Helios, we see
Th’ Ægean, spread out far and wide, a-blossoming