[258] Herodot. viii, 83; Plutarch (Themistoklês, c. 13; Aristeidês, c. 9; Pelopidas, c. 21). Plutarch tells a story out of Phanias respecting an incident in the moment before the action, which it is pleasing to find sufficient ground for rejecting. Themistoklês, with the prophet Euphrantidês, was offering sacrifice by the side of the admiral’s galley, when three beautiful youths, nephews of Xerxes, were brought in prisoners. As the fire was just then blazing brilliantly, and sneezing was heard from the right, the prophet enjoined Themistoklês to offer these three prisoners as a propitiatory offering to Dionysus Omêstês: which the clamor of the bystanders compelled him to do against his will. This is what Plutarch states in his life of Themistoklês; in his life of Aristeidês, he affirms that these youths were brought prisoners from Psyttaleia, when Aristeidês attacked _it at the beginning of the action_. Now Aristeidês did not attack Psyttaleia until the naval combat was nearly over, so that no prisoners can have been brought from thence at the commencement of the action: there could therefore have been no Persian prisoners to sacrifice, and the story may be dismissed as a fiction. The Greeks rowed forward from the shore to attack with the usual pæan, or war-shout, which was confidently returned by the Persians; and the latter were the most forward of the two to begin the fight: for the Greek seamen, on gradually nearing the enemy, became at first disposed to hesitate,—and even backed water for a space, so that some of them touched ground on their own shore: until the retrograde movement was arrested by a supernatural feminine figure hovering over them, who exclaimed with a voice that rang through the whole fleet,—“Ye worthies, how much farther are ye going to back water?” The very circulation of this fable attests the dubious courage of the Greeks at the commencement of the battle.[259] The brave Athenian captains Ameinias and Lykomêdês (the former, brother of the poet Æschylus) were the first to obey either the feminine voice or the inspirations of their own ardor: though according to the version current at Ægina, it was the Æginetan ship, the carrier of the Æakid heroes, which first set this honorable example.[260] The Naxian Demokritus was celebrated by Simonides as the third ship in action. Ameinias, darting forth from the line, charged with the beak of his ship full against a Phenician, and the two became entangled so that he could not again get clear: other ships came in aid on both sides, and the action thus became general. Herodotus, with his usual candor, tells us that he could procure few details about the action, except as to what concerned Artemisia, the queen of his own city: so that we know hardly anything beyond the general facts. But it appears that, with the exception of the Ionic Greeks, many of whom—apparently a greater number than Herodotus likes to acknowledge—were lukewarm, and