With the capture of the stockaded camp the battle ended. Two Greek contingents arrived on the scene after the fighting was over, the Mantineans and Eleians. The incident is chiefly remarkable as showing how extraordinarily difficult it was to instil into the population of the Peloponnese the necessity of prompt united action against the common foe. Their delay does not seem to have been due to cowardice, but to an absolute failure to appreciate the necessities of warfare waged beyond their own borders, with an enemy who was prepared to keep the field for an indefinite length of time. Their disappointment in not sharing in the victory was no doubt genuine enough,—the Mantineans are even reported to have offered to pursue the retreating army of Artabazos as far as Thessaly,—but it is significant for the trustworthiness of Greek official records that the Eleians, probably owing to their close and friendly relations to Sparta at this time, got their name engraved on the official lists both at Olympia and at Delphi of those who had taken part in the battle.
H. ix. 77.
Many tales told by Herodotus of individual exploits display all the traces of the embellishment of later tradition. One of them, however, is notable. It may be true, or it may be an invention, for an Æginetan plays the part of villain in the plot; but it shows in any case the incorruptible character of a not unimportant side of Greek civilization. An Æginetan of rank, named Lampon, is represented as having advised Pausanias to requite on the dead body of Mardonius the outrages which the barbarians had inflicted on the corpse of Leonidas after his death at Thermopylæ. Pausanias’ striking answer lays down the law that, even under circumstances of the greatest provocation, Hellenic civilization should never imitate the barbarism of the foreigner. It was, perhaps, owing to the very vagueness of their ideas as to the afterworld, and to the prevalence of the old Homeric view that in any case the future life could be at best but a shadow of the present, that they regarded the mortality of the body with most touching sympathy. To a people who lived, enjoyed, and appreciated every moment of their vivid life amid the light and colour of the East, the dead body, whether of Greek or Barbarian, was the material presentment of the loss of all they valued most.
AFTER THE BATTLE.
The spoil which the Greeks collected from the Persian camp seemed to them of enormous value; and Pausanias took special precautions for its collection, employing the helots alone for this purpose. If Herodotus is to be believed, these precautions were not entirely successful; for the Æginetans persuaded the helots to sell them many of the valuables for a mere nothing, and by that means acquired considerable wealth. The tale, however, must be read in the light of after-history, when the long-standing enmity between Athens and Ægina reached its culminating point.
A tithe of the plunder was dedicated to Delphi, offerings being also made at Olympia and the Isthmus. It belongs to the romance of history that, amid the wholesale and irreparable destruction of the monuments of the great ages of Greece, the most remarkable of the memorials of the battle survives at the present day. Near the great altar at Delphi was set up a golden tripod upon a lofty stand of three entwined snakes, on which was engraved the names of the Greek states which had sent contingents to Platæa. This most interesting and most important monument of antiquity still in part remains. The snake pillar was removed by Constantine to Constantinople. Amid all the vicissitudes in the subsequent history of the great city it has survived. It still stands in a mutilated form, the heads of the snakes having been broken off, exposed, alas! to the weather in front of the great Mosque of Sultan Achmet.
The burial of those who had died in the battle was next carried out. The body of Mardonius had vanished—how, no one could say; but Herodotus thinks that some Greeks had been paid to give it sepulture, and he knows that many subsequently claimed and received money from the son of Mardonius for having so done. The Greek dead were placed in graves, according to their nationality, Paus. ix. 2, 5. and centuries later Pausanias saw those graves by the side of the Platæa-Megara road, just before it entered the town of Platæa. There are numerous rock-hewn tombs remaining at the present day in the same locality; and it would seem as if a cemetery had in later times been established on the ground in which the heroes of the battle were buried. Among the Spartan dead was Amompharetos, whose obstinacy had been so largely instrumental in bringing about the victory. Some of the Greeks, says Herodotus, who had no dead to bury, owing to the inglorious part they had played, raised tombs there “for the sake of posterity.” The unfortunate Æginetans, of whom the historian in this part of his history has no good word to say, are reported to have caused such a tomb to be raised at Platæa ten years after the event.[230]
The Greeks spent ten days over the distribution of the spoil and the disposal of the dead. Before leaving Bœotia they determined to settle the long account standing against the Thebans and the Bœotians generally. They can hardly be blamed for the bitter feeling which the policy of that people had aroused in their breasts. The treason of Bœotia to the national cause had indeed been beyond forgiveness. From the very outset its attitude had been doubtful and suspicious, even before the time when the desertion of Thermopylæ afforded it some excuse for an unpatriotic policy. It is very difficult to form any certain idea of the motives which prompted the Bœotians to medize at all in the first instance, and to medize so energetically in the end. It is probable, however, that from the very beginning the oligarchs in the various cities, adopting the policy of the feudal lords in Thessaly, thought that they could best secure the permanence of their own selfish interests by submission to Persia; and that subsequently the determination of the other Greeks to make no attempt to defend the land north of Geraneia caused the mass of the population to side with a policy which afforded them some possibility of saving their rich lands from wholesale ruin. The decision once taken, they displayed at least the merit of thoroughness. PUNISHMENT OF THE THEBANS. Their medism was by no means passive. They had staked all on the Persian success, and could expect far less mercy from the Greek patriots than, as a fact, they actually received. That being so, they remained faithful to their new allies after Salamis, and showed no disposition to revolt during that winter of 480–479, while Mardonius was far away north in Thessaly. It may be that they were acquainted with that alternative design of conquest whose conjectured existence can alone account for the strategy of Greek and Persian alike previous to the battle of Platæa. They had so thoroughly identified themselves with the invaders, that the success of the Greek in the war might be expected to prove far more dangerous to them than that of the Persian. Moreover, public opinion in Bœotia was that of the few rather than that of the many; and the few evidently conceived that their interests in the present and future alike were intimately bound up in the success of Persia, whose Government had shown in its treatment of the Ionians that it was sufficiently civilized to appreciate the advisability of ruling Greeks by means of Greeks.
The patriots seem to have recognized that the responsibility for the treason of Bœotia rested not so much with the whole population as with its leaders; H. ix. 86. for they aimed not at a wide measure of revenge, but at the punishment of those prominent men who had led the people astray. They marched on Thebes, and demanded the surrender of the medizing party, and especially of the prime instigators, Timegenides and Attaginos. The town was blockaded, but still the Thebans refused to give up the men; so the wall was attacked and the lands in the neighbourhood laid waste. On the ninth day of the siege Timegenides proposed that, in order to save the country, the assailants, if they wanted money, should be bought off; or, if they persisted in their demand for the surrender of himself and his fellow culprits, they should give themselves up, and take their chance of a trial. His hope was, evidently, that bribery would do its work. The Thebans gave up all save Attaginos, who escaped. It is a strange commentary on Greek character that Pausanias did not entrust the prisoners to the judgment of a pan-Hellenic court, fearing, as Herodotus plainly hints, that bribery might secure their acquittal, but took them away to Corinth, where he had them executed. It is, perhaps, a still stranger commentary on Greek character that a Greek historian should have dared to insert such a suspicion into an account of what was in many respects the crowning incident in the national history.
Of the fate of the defeated Persians Herodotus says nothing. They probably streamed back to Asia in a miserable and ever diminishing train. H. ix. 89. Even Artabazos, who made good his escape, thought it necessary to conceal from the Thessalians what had happened in Bœotia, and himself suffered severe losses in a retreat which must have been a counterpart on a smaller scale of that of Xerxes the year before. He did not venture along the coast route, but took an inland course, and finally reached Asia across the Bosphorus by way of Byzantion.