The defeat of Persia not only gave a fresh impulse to the Panhellenic festivals: it raised athletic training into a national duty. The consciousness of a great danger safely past arouses a nation to a sense of its military and physical needs. We can remember only a few years ago the growth of rifle clubs, the cry for military and physical training that followed the Boer war. The danger, it is felt at such times, may occur again, and it behoves every citizen to be ready to play his part. Among the Greeks this feeling gathered force not from any consciousness of their own shortcomings, but from a consciousness of their superiority. At Marathon the Greeks of the mainland had for the first time found themselves face to face with the Orientals, and for the first time realized the gulf that separated them from themselves. Their triumph was the triumph of freedom and law over slavery and despotism. A handful of free citizens had defeated a horde of slaves, and this result was due in no small degree to their athletic training. Witness the famous charge of Marathon. Critics may throw doubt on its truth: it is sufficient that Herodotus supposed it possible. An army charging a distance of eight furlongs over ground that would try any cross-country runner! No wonder the Persians regarded the Greeks as madmen. The mere existence of such a story is proof enough of the athletic training of the nation. Moreover, the sight of the long-haired, effeminate Persians, whose bodies were not hardened by exercise and tanned by exposure to the air, seems to have impressed itself indelibly on the national imagination. Hence the extraordinary popularity during the years that followed of all those military and athletic exercises which we see so constantly depicted on the red-figured vases. We must remember that at Athens this training was for the most part voluntary. It was only during the two years’ training of the epheboi that the state undertook the education of its members. Yet from this time the palaestra and gymnasium became the resort of all classes and all ages. And what was true of Athens, was true, we may feel sure, of the rest of Greece. For a time Athenian influence prevailed everywhere. The old Spartan pre-eminence had passed away, and even in athletics Athens had become the school of Greece. If Athens produced few victors in the games, she at least set an example in physical training. “Meet is it that from Athens a fashioner of athletes come,” says Pindar of the Athenian Menander who trained Pytheas of Aegina for a Nemean victory, won probably in 481 or 479 B.C.[114] The effect of this national athletic movement is seen in the great games. The lists of the victors at Olympia, or the lists of those for whom Bacchylides and Pindar sang, are representative of the length and breadth of Greece from Rhodes to Agrigentum, from Cyrene to Thasos.[115] Finally, the national rejoicing over the victory of Plataea