“Helicon maidens, the Muses! Their name be my prelude in singing! They in their keeping have Helicon’s mountain, majestical, sacred. There they go threading the dances by violet pools of the fountain, Soft are their feet as they circle the altar of mighty Cronīon.” HESIOD, _Theogony_. Epaminondas told the Bœotians that their country was the stage of Ares, and several battles fought on their soil were of national significance. At Leuctra Epaminondas defeated Sparta. At Tanagra Athenians and Spartans first tried their strength against each other. At Delium the Athenians were defeated by the Bœotians in a struggle in which Alcibiades and Socrates took part. Alcibiades, who saved his master’s life, afterwards told their friends that in the retreat Socrates behaved exactly as he did in the streets of Athens, “turning his eyes observantly from side to side, though drenched with rain, and calmly looking about on friend and foe.” Above all, at Chæronea and Platæa occurred momentous events. Late in September of the year 479 B. C., one hundred and forty-one years before Greek liberty was surrendered at Chæronea, there was fought near Platæa, in the plain between Cithæron and the Asopus, the last of the battles “wherein the Medes of the crooked bows were overthrown.” The work begun at Marathon was here completed. “The rest of the army died in Bœotia” was an Æschylean line calculated to arouse an Athenian audience. And an exquisite Herodotean story was fostered if not created by the desire of the Greeks to believe that the Persians had a foreboding of their disaster. Herodotus had the story from Thersander of Orchomenus. A Theban gave a dinner to Mardonius and fifty Persian nobles. The Persian who shared Thersander’s couch said to him:— “‘Since here at table thou hast shared my food and my libation, I would leave with thee a memorial of my judgment that thou too, informed beforehand, mayest know how to plan for thy advantage. Dost see these Persians feasting here, and that host which we left encamping by the river? Of all these within brief space of time thou wilt behold a few survivors only.’ And as the Persian spoke these words he let fall many tears. Whereat Thersander, struck with wonder at his speech, replied: ‘Well, then, ’t were fitting to say this to Mardonius and to those next after him in honour.’ To that the other said: ‘My friend, what needs must happen by the will of God it is not possible for man to turn aside, and then, too, none is wont to yield to warnings, however credible, and many of us Persians, although our eyes are opened, follow on, constrained by necessity. This pang is bitterest of all, for men to know much and to have power over naught.’”