[257] Herodot. viii, 85; Diodor. xi, 16.
[258] Herodot. viii, 83; Plutarch (Themistoklês, c. 13; Aristeidês, c. 9; Pelopidas, c. 21). Plutarch tells a story out of Phanias respecting an incident in the moment before the action, which it is pleasing to find sufficient ground for rejecting. Themistoklês, with the prophet Euphrantidês, was offering sacrifice by the side of the admiral’s galley, when three beautiful youths, nephews of Xerxes, were brought in prisoners. As the fire was just then blazing brilliantly, and sneezing was heard from the right, the prophet enjoined Themistoklês to offer these three prisoners as a propitiatory offering to Dionysus Omêstês: which the clamor of the bystanders compelled him to do against his will. This is what Plutarch states in his life of Themistoklês; in his life of Aristeidês, he affirms that these youths were brought prisoners from Psyttaleia, when Aristeidês attacked it at the beginning of the action. Now Aristeidês did not attack Psyttaleia until the naval combat was nearly over, so that no prisoners can have been brought from thence at the commencement of the action: there could therefore have been no Persian prisoners to sacrifice, and the story may be dismissed as a fiction.
[259] Herodot. viii, 84. φανεῖσαν δὲ διακελεύσασθαι, ὥστε καὶ ἅπαν ἀκοῦσαι τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων στρατόπεδον, ὀνειδίσασαν πρότερον τάδε· Ὦ δαιμόνιοι, μέχρι κόσου ἔτι πρύμναν ἀνακρούεσθε;
Æschylus (Pers. 396-415) describes finely the war-shout of the Greeks and the response of the Persians: for very good reasons, he does not notice the incipient backwardness of the Greeks, which Herodotus brings before us.
The war-shout, here described by Æschylus, a warrior actually engaged, shows us the difference between a naval combat of that day and the improved tactics of the Athenians fifty years afterwards, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. Phormio especially enjoins on his men the necessity of silence (Thucyd. ii, 89).
[260] Simonides, Epigram 138, Bergk; Plutarch, De Herodot. Malignitate, c. 36.
According to Plutarch (Themist. 12) and Diodorus (xi, 17), it was the Persian admiral’s ship which was first charged and captured: if the fact had been so, Æschylus would probably have specified it.
[261] Herodot. viii, 85; Diodor. xi, 16. Æschylus, in the Persæ, though he gives a long list of the names of those who fought against Athens, does not make any allusion to the Ionic or to any other Greeks as having formed part of the catalogue. See Blomfield ad Æschyl. Pers. 42. Such silence easily admits of explanation: yet it affords an additional reason for believing that the persons so admitted did not fight very heartily.
[262] Herodot. viii, 86; Diodor. xi, 17. The testimony of the former, both to the courage manifested by the Persian fleet, and to their entire want of order and system, is decisive, as well as to the effect of the personal overlooking of Xerxes.
[263] Simonides, Epigr. 138, Bergk.