Marathon was a greater Vimiero in that war which was to be fought out in the Greek peninsula.
CHAPTER V.
THE ENTR’ACTE: B.C. 490–480.
H. vi. 132.
The victory of Marathon greatly increased the reputation of the man to whose strategy the success was due. If the dispositions before and during the battle are to be taken as a criterion of Miltiades’ military capacity, he must be given the highest place among those who led Greek troops in the land warfare of this century. Never, indeed, until Leuktra, did any Greek general display such ability for command; and it may even be doubted whether the genius shown by Epaminondas in his dispositions for that battle was superior to that of Miltiades in dealing with the infinitely more complicated political and strategical situation of the year 490.
He was now at the zenith of his reputation. The decline was fated to be rapid. It was a feature in his life’s history which Herodotus could not fail to emphasize. The greatness, the suddenness of the fall seemed to illustrate in the most marked manner the uncertainty of human fortune.
By predilection Herodotus was almost as much a philosopher as an historian. He was not satisfied with merely recording facts; he wished to point their moral; and, consequently, in those cases in which a story exemplifies in the concrete some important article of his philosophical creed, he displays a tendency to emphasize that side, and those features of it which have the most direct bearing on the moral which he wishes it to convey. The relief of his picture aims rather at philosophical than at historical effect.
It is so with his tale of the closing incident of Miltiades’ career. The striking reverse of fortune needed, indeed, no emphasizing. The catastrophe was sufficiently marked to point its moral even to the dullest intelligence. But the feature of the story which the world might fail to notice unless it were brought into high relief was the self-incurred nature of the disaster. It is characteristic of his philosophy that he regards Fate as acting on mortals internally rather than externally, making them the instruments of their own doom. The “agent provocateur” appears late on the stage. In the opening scene the victim is himself the instrument of Fate.
This faith of his dominates his narrative of Miltiades’ disastrous expedition against Paros. The man is alone responsible for the design. His folly and impiety cause its failure. Like many another prominent character who appears upon the stage of his history, he is one under a doom. The circumstances outside his own personal action which must have contributed so largely to the final catastrophe, are hardly apparent in the story.
H. vi. 132.
“After the defeat [of the Persians] at Marathon, Miltiades, who had previously enjoyed a great reputation at Athens, acquired a still greater fame.