“Thespis am I, who the tragedy strain Shaped for the masque and was first to combine Charms that were new when Bacchus would fain Marshal his chorus, stained with wine. Figs Attic grown, or a goat was the prize Won in the contests, till new I devise. They that come after all this will revise, Myriad years reshape, refine, Little it troubles me—mine are mine.” Nothing adventitious is needed to call forth a certain solemn elation at the first sight of the plain of Marathon. But the sunlight of a February day, when the anemones are bright by the wayside, will blend an unforgettable natural beauty with the suggestions of a great moment in human history. The level plain is hemmed in by an amphitheatre of mountains; the promontory Cynosura runs down like a natural breakwater from the north, and the shore curves gracefully inward as if enticing seafarers to beach their galleys where the blue water breaks in soft white upon the shining sand. When we climb the isolated “soros,” the great mound heaped up over the dead warriors, and pass in review the vivid details of the battle as given by Herodotus, there emerges, even after all exaggeration has been neutralized by the strictures of some modern iconoclast, a grateful and redoubled admiration for the unflinching loyalty to liberty displayed by the individual soldiers and even more for the consummate skill of the commanders. The Athenians with the help of the Platæans repelled forever the reëstablishing of a despot in Attica, and Athens herself unconsciously entered upon what was to be the intellectual and moral trusteeship of Occidental civilization. Demosthenes, more than a century later, amidst the ruins of political liberty, could foreshadow a destiny greater than material success. He cites the great words of Simonides that had drifted down from Marathon and could be used with pathetic propriety of the dead at Chæronea. He bids his fellow citizens bow, if need be, under the strokes of unfeeling fortune, but reject all thought of having erred in their patriotic struggle against Macedon. He bursts forth with that impassioned oath by the dead heroes that thrills each generation born to cherish, or to long for liberty: “It cannot be, it cannot be, Athenians, that ye erred in braving danger on behalf of freedom and the safety of us all. No, by those of our fathers, fore-fighters in the battle’s brunt at Marathon! No, by those who stood shoulder unto shoulder at Platæa! No, by those who fought the naval fights at Salamis or in the ships off Artemisium!” Marathon, as opening the great contest with Persia, had given the Athenians the proud distinction of being champions in the van for Hellas. Simonides had so hailed them:— “Athenians, fore-fighters for the Hellenes all, laid low at Marathon the power of the gold-decked Medes.”