With such a stimulus for effort, every young Greek was straining every nerve and every muscle to win the olive wreath. He was training his body to the finest perfection for the one prize, and his powers of intellect and his genius for the others. This goes far to account for the physical beauty and the supreme excellence which made this race like their own progenitors of the Heroic Age, more like a race of gods than of men.
But they were great in other things besides athletics and accomplishments. The shores of Asia Minor and of the Mediterranean were soon fringed with rich Greek colonies. Every place they touched blossomed into beauty, with temples and houses adorned with sculpture and painting. One of their cities on the coast of Italy was called Sybaris, and it has given us the word "sybarite," which means a person who abandons himself to luxury.
We may form some idea of these Greek cities from Pompeii, which was still existing on the coast of Italy at the time of the Christian era, and which has been
preserved in its bed of ashes as if to show to a later age refinements of luxury, so far exceeding its own.
While during five hundred years Greece had been thus developing, its separate and discordant states were held firmly together by just three things: They all had the same religion and sacred rites, they were all striving for the same prizes at the Olympic Games, and all alike revered their poet Homer. The "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were, in fact, the Greek Bible. It was the final appeal in matters of religion, and it was the history of their divine origin and ancestry. Boys studied it in school, and men never ceased to study it—many Athenians being able to recite both poems from beginning to end.
At the time the Greeks were thus becoming a great nation, there was in Asia an old and powerful empire called Persia. Some of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor were accused by the great King Darius of inciting his own people in Asia Minor to revolt. And he sent an army, which punished and subdued the offending Greeks. King Darius then decided that he would invade Greece itself. He thought he could easily master that little scrap of territory, and capture its straggling colonies along the Mediterranean coast, and thus extend his own dominion into Europe.
Athens and Sparta were, as usual, engaged in a small war; but at the news of a threatened Persian invasion, the Greek States sprang solidly together.
The armies met on the field of Marathon (490 b.c.), and the Asiatic host, after a desperate conflict, turned and fled. So confident had the Persians been of victory, that they had brought a mass of white marble with which to erect a monument on the plain
of Marathon. This Phidias, the great Greek sculptor, carved into a gigantic figure of Nemesis, to represent Divine vengeance.
The proud and arrogant Persians were not used to defeat. For ten years they brooded over it and prepared to wipe it out by an overwhelming victory. Darius was dead; but his son Xerxes, in the year 480 b.c.., appeared on the coast of Greece with a vast army, which he himself led.