“Darius accusing us and the Eretrians of the attack on Sardis, on that pretext sent five hundred thousand men in long ships and transports, and three hundred long ships, and ordered Datis, their general, as he would save his head, to bring the Athenians and Eretrians back with him. Datis sailed to Eretria, against men reputed then among the most warlike of the Greeks, not few in number, and overcame them in three days, and carefully searched their whole land, that none should escape. His soldiers marched to the boundary of the country; they formed a line along it from sea to sea; they joined hands, and thus passed over the whole of it, that they might tell the king that none had escaped.[12] With the same design they sailed from Eretria to Marathon, as to a ready prey, thinking to carry off the Athenians enyoked with the Eretrians in the same fated evils. These things then being in part accomplished, and the rest in progress, no Greek succoured the Eretrians, none but the Lacedæmonians marched to Athens, and they arrived not till the day after the battle. The rest, stupified with alarm, remained at home, content with present safety. By this a man may appreciate the courage of those who met the power of the barbarians at Marathon, and chastised the insolent presumption of all Asia, and there first erected trophies over the barbarians; becoming thus examples and masters to prove the might of Persia not invincible, and show that all multitude and riches yield to valour. I say then that those men were the fathers not only of our bodies, but of our freedom, and the freedom of all on this mainland; for, by looking to that action, the Greeks took courage to venture other battles for safety, becoming pupils of the men of Marathon. The first prize of valour, then, we must bestow on them: the second on those who fought at Artemisium, and round the Isle of Salamis.”[13] The battle of Marathon marks an important crisis in the history of Greece, and of the civilized world. The later contests of the Persian war at Thermopylæ and Salamis and Platæa, important as they were, were not played for so deep a stake; for the chief of the Grecian nations were then pledged to the war, and were besides encouraged by knowing the Persian power not insuperable. The panegyric of Plato is not overcharged. We have given the frank confession of Herodotus, that up to that time the very name of the Medes was a terror to the Greeks; and if the Athenians had yielded to this panic, or had been defeated, European as well as Asiatic Greece would probably have become a province of the Persian empire. The contest, therefore, was that of liberty against despotism; of mental activity against the unimproving and unreflecting apathy in which the greatest part of Asia has slept, from the commencement of history; and a more important object has never been at hazard, unless where the cause of religion has depended on an appeal to arms.