579 Thucydides, v. 70. 1. The use of the music, Thucydides tells us, was not to inspire the men, but to enable them to keep step, and so to march in close order. Without music a long line of battle was apt to straggle in advancing to the charge. As missiles were little used in Greek warfare, there was no need to hurry the advance over the intervening ground; so it was made deliberately and with the bands playing. The air to which the Spartans charged was called Castor’s tune. It was the king in person who gave the word for the flutes to strike up. See Plutarch, _Lycurgus_, 22. 580 Xenophon, _Respublica Lacedaem_. xi. 3; Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, 1140; Aristotle, cited by a scholiast on Aristophanes, _Acharn._ 320; Plutarch, _Instituta Laconica_, 24. When a great earthquake had destroyed the city of Sparta and the Messenians were in revolt, the Spartans sent a messenger to Athens asking for help. Aristophanes (_Lysistrata_, 1138 _sqq._) describes the man as if he had seen him, sitting as a suppliant on the altar with his pale face and his red coat. 581 I have assumed that the sun shone on the Spartans at Thermopylae. For the battle was fought in the height of summer, when the Greek sky is generally cloudless, and on that particular morning the weather was very still. The evening before, the Persians had sent round a body of troops by a difficult pass to take the Spartans in the rear; day was breaking when they neared the summit, and the first intimation of their approach which reached the ears of the Phocian guards posted on the mountain was the loud crackling of leaves under their feet in the oak forest. Moreover, the famous Spartan saying about fighting in the shade of the Persian arrows, which obscured the sun, points to bright, hot weather. It was at high noon, and therefore probably in the full blaze of the mid-day sun, that the last march-out took place. See Herodotus, vii. 215-226; and as to the date of the battle (about the time of the Olympic games) see Herodotus, vii. 206, viii. 12 and 26; G. Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_, ii.2 (Gotha, 1895) p. 673, note 9. M147 Modes of stopping an earthquake by informing the god or giant that there are still men on the earth.