Modern history will never cease to ring with grateful praises of the Athenians and Platæans for their defence of Greece against Persia. They were the bulwark of the Occident against the Orient, of Europe against Asia. The Persian scholar can see many ways in which, to his mind at least, it would have been best if the Asiatic conquest of Greece had not thus been postponed for centuries. We of to-day shall always be glad that events fashioned themselves as they did until Europe was ready to resist any general enforcement of Asiatic ideals and customs.
Granting the importance, then, of the victory to its fullest extent, it cannot but make for truth to realise how little the Greeks knew all they were doing, how selfish and mutually jealous they were, and in what a humble manner they accomplished so much more than they dreamed or desired.[a] The realism of this glorious feat could not be more vividly phrased than by Prof. J. P. Mahaffy in his Rambles and Studies in Greece:
“Byron may well be excused for raving about the liberty of the Greeks, for truly their old conflict at Marathon where a thousand ill-disciplined men repulsed a larger number of still worse disciplined Orientals, without any recondite tactics,—perhaps even without any very extraordinary heroism,—how is it that this conflict has maintained a celebrity which has not been equalled by all the great battles of the world, from that day down to our own? The courage of the Greeks was not of the first order. Herodotus praises the Athenians in this very battle for being the first Greeks that dared to look the Persians in the face. Their generals all through history seem never to feel sure of victory, and always endeavour to harangue their soldiers into a fury. Instead of advising coolness, they specially incite to rage—ὀργῇ προσμίξωμεν, says one of them in Thucydides—as if any man not in this state would be sure to estimate the danger fully, and run away.
“It is, indeed, true that the ancient battles were hand to hand, and therefore parallel to our charges of bayonets, which are said to be very seldom carried out by two opposing lines, as one of them almost always gives way before the actual collision takes place. This must often have taken place in Greek battles, for, at Amphipolis, Brasidas in a battle lost seven men; at a battle of Corinth, mentioned by Xenophon—an important battle, too—the slain amounted to eight; and these battles were fought before the days when whole armies were composed of mercenaries, who spared one another, as Ordericus Vitalis says, ‘for the love of God, and out of good feeling for the fraternity of arms.’ So, then, the loss of 192 Athenians, including some distinguished men, was rather a severe one. As to the loss of the Persians, I so totally disbelieve the Greek accounts of such things, that it is better to pass it by in silence.
“Perhaps most readers will be astonished to hear of the Athenian army as undisciplined, and of the science of war as undeveloped, in those times. Yet I firmly believe this was so. The accounts of battles by almost all the historians are so utterly vague, and so childishly conventional, that it is evident these gentlemen were not only quite ignorant of the science of war, but could not easily find any one to explain it to them. We know that the Spartans, the most admired of all Greek warriors, were chiefly so admired because they devised the system of subordinating officers to one another within the same detachment, like our gradation from colonel to corporal. So orders were passed down from officer to officer, instead of being bawled out by a herald to a whole army.
“But this superiority of the Spartans who were really disciplined, and went into battle coolly, like brave men, certainly did not extend to strategy, but was merely a question of better drill. As soon as any real strategist met them, they were helpless. Thus Iphicrates, when he devised Wellington’s plan of meeting their attacking column in line, and using missiles, succeeded against them, even without firearms. Thus Epaminondas, when he devised Napoleon’s plan of massing troops on a single point, while keeping his enemy’s line occupied, defeated them without any considerable struggle. As for that general’s great battle of Mantinea, which seems really to have been introduced by some complicated strategical movements, it is a mere hopeless jumble in our histories. But these men were in the distant future when the battle of Marathon was being fought.
“Yet what signifies all this criticism? In spite of all scepticism, in spite of all contempt, the battle of Marathon, whether badly or well fought, and the troops at Marathon, whether well or ill trained, will ever be more famous than any other battle or army, however important or gigantic its dimensions. Even in this very war, the battles of Salamis and Platæa were vastly more important and more hotly contested. The losses were greater, the results were more enduring, yet thousands have heard of Marathon to whom the other names are unknown. So much for literary ability—so much for the power of talking well about one’s deeds. Marathon was fought by Athenians; the Athenians eclipsed the other Greeks as far as the other Greeks eclipsed the rest of the world in literary power. This battle became the literary property of the city, hymned by poet, cited by orator, told by aged nurse, lisped by stammering infant; and so it has taken its position, above all criticism, as one of the great decisive battles which assured the liberty of the West against oriental despotism.”[j]
IF DARIUS HAD INVADED GREECE EARLIER
Had the first aggressive expedition of Darius, with his own personal command and fresh appetite for conquest, been directed against Greece instead of against Scythia (between 516-514 B.C.), Grecian independence would have perished almost infallibly. For Athens was then still governed by the Pisistratidæ. She had then no courage for energetic self-defence, and probably Hippias himself, far from offering resistance, would have found it advantageous to accept Persian dominion as a means of strengthening his own rule, like the Ionian despots: moreover the Grecian habit of co-operation was then only just commencing. But fortunately the Persian invader did not touch the shore of Greece until more than twenty years afterwards, in 490 B.C.; and during that precious interval, the Athenian character had undergone the memorable revolution which has been before described. Their energy and their organisation had been alike improved and their force of resistance had become decupled; moreover, their conduct had so provoked the Persians that resistance was then a matter of necessity with them and submission on tolerable terms an impossibility. When we come to the grand Persian invasion of Greece, we shall see that Athens was the life and soul of all the opposition offered. We shall see further, that with all the efforts of Athens, the success of the defence was more than once doubtful; and would have been converted into a very different result, if Xerxes had listened to the best of his own counsellors. But had Darius, at the head of the very same force which he conducted into Scythia, or even an inferior force, landed at Marathon in 514 B.C., instead of sending Datis in 490 B.C.—he would have found no men like the victors of Marathon to meet him. As far as we can appreciate the probabilities, he would have met with little resistance, except from the Spartans singly, who would have maintained their own very defensible territory against all his effort—like the Mysians and Pisidians in Asia Minor, or like the Mainots of Laconia in later days; but Hellas generally would have become a Persian satrapy.[k]