The greatest story in the world, period 1 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

The first great battle of the war made it more terrible still.

Command of the united land forces of Greece fell, naturally, into the hands of Sparta. The utmost that they were able to gather was but little over 5000 men, of which no more than 500 were actually Spartans. The smallness of the force may give us an idea of the small population of those city states of Greece.

Thermopylæ

With this gallant body of defenders Leonidas, the Spartan general, encountered the Persian host in the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylæ. It was a situation in which the Persian could make little or no use of his strongest arm, the cavalry, and he was held back, with heavy loss to his soldiers, so much less heavily armed than the Greeks. How that battle would have gone had it been prolonged, we cannot know, for a traitor, one of the great traitors of history, revealed to the Persians another pass across the mountains. They had partly traversed that other pass, and were already threatening the flank and rear of his army, when Leonidas was informed of their movement. He knew his position to be hopeless. He bade the allied troops, who were not his countrymen, retreat and find safety if they could. As for himself and his devoted band of Spartans, they sallied out of the pass, threw themselves on the Persian masses, and went down fighting to the death, an example of gallantry to all future ages.

And Athens, Athens lying, as you see, right before the victors once they had come through the difficult pass—what hope was there for her? None. Her doom seemed certain.

The Athenians saved themselves by a sacrifice that has perhaps only been equalled by the Russians when they burnt their capital of Moscow at the approach of Napoleon's grand army. They quitted their loved city; they left it to be destroyed by the Persians, and moved themselves and their households to islands nearest the coast where they would be under the protection of their ships, which had not yet encountered the Persian fleet. Of these islands one was named Salamis, and between the island and the mainland the Greeks and Persians met in that naval battle which saved Greece. The Persian fleet was utterly defeated. The danger from the sea had vanished. The army of the Persians remained, victorious, in possession of all the territory of Athens. But it had lost the support of its ships.

It was an age of heroes. I do not suppose that any other great victory was due so largely to the genius and determination of one single man as this at Salamis to the Athenian admiral Themistocles. The King of Kings, however, did not behave in any very heroic manner. He scuttled back with the broken remnants of his fleet to his own shores.

Platæa

The following year made the repulse of the Persians complete. Their army was defeated in a great battle at Platæa, and on the very same day the Grecian fleet engaged and again badly beat the fleet which the Persians had managed to reform. But this time it was not the Persian fleet that was threatening the coast of Greece. This second naval fight was off the coast of Asia Minor, by a headland from which the battle had its name—Mycale.

That day made an end of the Persian threat to Greece. It did more; it gave the Greeks a sense that they were a stronger folk than the Persians, if they met in conditions and numbers at all equal. And that feeling of strength always makes a people that can feel it actually stronger. It helped to make their greatness. The result of the battle at Platæa had been very doubtful in the midst of the fight. The Greeks had been saved only by the steadfast courage of the Spartans. But its conclusion was decisive. Persia was a real danger to Greece no more. On the contrary, it is Greece that we now find carrying the war into Asia Minor and freeing those Ionian coast cities from the yoke of Persia. Perpetual jealousies between the states still prevented Greece from extending her power far. The Persian could still set one combination of states against another. The wonder only is that, in the midst of their fights with each other, they were able to engage in schemes of foreign attack at all.