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Old soldiers of Lacedæmon fighting their battles in the after days, when a warrior of Platæa was as a god to each youth in Hellas, would tell how the Persian cavalrymen rode their phalanx down.
“And say never,” they always added, “the Barbarians know not how to fight and how to die. Fools say it, not we of Platæa. For our first line seemed broken in a twinkling. The Pitanate mora was cut to pieces; Athena Pro[pg 433]machus and Ares the City-Waster alone turned back that charge when Mardonius led the way.”
But turned it was. And the thousand horse, no thousand now, drifted to the cover of their shield wall, raging, undaunted, yet beaten back.
Then at last the phalanx locked with the Persian footmen and their rampart of wicker shields. At short spear length men grinned in each other’s faces, while their veins were turned to fire. Many a soldier—Spartan, Aryan—had seen his twenty fights, but never a fight like this. And the Persians—those that knew Greek—heard words flung through their foemen’s helmets that made each Hellene fight as ten.
“Remember Leonidas! Remember Thermopylæ!”
Orders there were none; the trumpets were drowned in the tumult. Each man fought as he stood, knowing only he must slay the man before him, while slowly, as though by a cord tighter and ever tighter drawn, the Persian shield wall was bending back before the unrelenting thrusting of the Spartans. Then as a cord snaps so broke the barrier. One instant down and the Hellenes were sweeping the light-armed Asiatic footmen before them, as the scythe sweeps down the standing grain. So with the Persian infantry, for their scanty armour and short spears were at terrible disadvantage, but the strength of the Barbarian was not spent. Many times Mardonius led the cavalry in headlong charge, each repulse the prelude to a fiercer shock.
“For Mazda, for Eran, for the king!”
The call of the Prince was a call that turned his wild horsemen into demons, but demons who strove with gods. The phalanx was shaken, halted even, broken never; and foot by foot, fathom by fathom, it brushed the Barbarian horde back across the blood-bathed plain,—and to Mardonius’s shout, a more terrible always answered:—
“Remember Leonidas! Remember Thermopylæ!”