This was the only disaster which befell any section of the Greek army on that eventful day. No doubt the Athenians and Lacedæmonians suffered severely—more severely than the Greeks ever admitted; but in any case they paid but a cheap price for their great victory.
H. ix. 63.
Herodotus is fully aware that it was to the superiority of their weapons that the Greeks owed their success. “The main cause of the Persian defeat was the fact that their equipment was devoid of defensive armour. They sought, exposed as they were, to compete with heavy armed infantry.”
The enthusiasm with which he hails the victory is rare with him. Salamis left him comparatively cold; but of Platæa he says that there “Pausanias the son of Kleombrotos the son of Anaxandrides gained the most glorious victory on record.”[228]
The historian was right in thus attributing to Pausanias and his Lacedæmonians the chief credit of the victory. The decisive conflict was fought beneath the shadow of the temple of Eleusinian Demeter.
The two defeated bodies of the enemy fled in different directions. The Persians retreated to their camp, where, thanks to the bravery of their cavalry in covering their rout, they had time to man the stockaded portion of it before the Greeks came up. The beaten Bœotians, on the other hand, fled straight to Thebes, probably striking the Platæa-Thebes road shortly after recrossing the Asopos.
H. ix. 66.
One division of the Persians, a body of forty thousand men, under the command of Artabazos, neither took part in the final struggle nor took refuge in the stockaded camp. With singular foresight, their commander was strongly opposed to the attack on the apparently retreating Greeks, apprehending that it could only end in disaster. He only brought up his men in time to meet the stream of fugitives from the battle, and then turned right about and departed without further ado for Phocis.
LOSSES IN THE BATTLE.
In the course of the pursuit the Lacedæmonians, as would be expected from their position in the field, arrived first at the stockaded camp; but, with that noteable incapacity in the attack on fortified places which is one of the most striking and least comprehensible features in Greek military history, they failed to make any impression on it, until the Athenians, who possessed more skill in this respect, came up. A successful assault was made, the Tegeans being the first to enter the stockade. Then ensued a massacre, in which it is reported that thirty thousand men perished. H. ix. 82, ad init. Plunder, too, of great value fell into the hands of the victors, for Xerxes, in his precipitate flight to the Hellespont, had left behind him much of the extraordinary paraphernalia which he, like other Oriental monarchs of other ages, thought necessary to bring with him on campaign.