Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold,
Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon.
—Byron.
Curtius in the well-known passage which begins his celebrated history asks where is the division between Asia and Europe, pointing out that the islands of the Ægean Sea are practically stepping-stones between Asia Minor and Greece, and that from one point of view the intervening bits of water are rather connecting links than a severing barrier. This claim has much to support it in the view of a maritime people; yet from another point of view a very tangible barrier does exist between the two continents. The Persians, as is well known, having their native seat far inland had a standing dread of water. For them the Ægean Sea was unquestionably a barrier, not a bridge. It would probably have been long before they attempted to cross this barrier had not the initiative been taken from the other side. But while it was far from Asia to Europe, it was not far, in the point of view of the sea-faring Greek, from Europe to Asia. To him the sea was a bridge.
No one knows how early the Greeks themselves crossed the various “bridges” of the Ægean and began to make settlements in Asia Minor, but it is known that in a very early day these settlements on the eastern shore had come to play a most important part in Grecian life. It is supposed that in the early day the inhabitants of Asia Minor welcomed the Greek colonist who became valuable to them as a manufacturer, and, in particular, as a trader.
It was long before there seemed anything menacing in the growth of these scattered colonies, and, before the powers of Asia Minor had aroused to a right understanding of the political import of the colonisation that had gone on under their eyes, the whole coast had come practically under the control of these peaceful invaders from the West. Then indeed the Lydians, in particular, were aroused to a realisation of what they had permitted, and sought to make amends by subjecting the colonies that had hitherto been their own masters. The attempt was first made on a large scale by Crœsus, but, before he had completed the task, he was himself overthrown by Cyrus, and the standing broil with the Greek colonies of the coast was one of the perquisites of war which Crœsus handed over to the Persians.
Cyrus himself seems to have thought the Greeks of small importance, as he left a subordinate to dispose of them, while he turned his personal attention to the more powerful Babylonians, but the Greeks were supported by the memory of some generations of freedom, and they did not prove the contemptible foe that they seemed. Cities once conquered were prone to revolt, and the indomitable spirit of the Greeks on this western border of the Persian territory proved a standing source of annoyance. At last Darius determined to put an end to the Grecians once for all, and it was his general who for the first time led a Persian host across the Hellespont and into the precincts of Greece itself. The repulse of this host by the Athenians on the field of Marathon was an event which the Greeks of a later time never tired of celebrating, and which has taken its place in later history as one of the half-dozen great decisive battles of the world. Subjected to a critical view this battle of Marathon, as we shall have occasion to see presently, was not quite so decisive an event as the Athenians were disposed to think it. Still it turned the Persian horde back from Greece for a decade. Then under Xerxes came that stupendous half-organised army that has been the wonder of all after-times; and the glorious events of Thermopylæ, Salamis, Platæa, and Mycale in rapid succession added to the glory of Greek prowess and saved the life of Greece as a nation—saved it from an outer foe that it might die by its own hand. The events of this memorable epoch are among the most important in all Grecian history, and we must view them in detail, drawing largely for our knowledge of them on the great original source, Herodotus, but noting also the impression which they have made upon many generations of historians of other times and other lands.[a]