Marathon was sufficiently glorious to its victors to render any exaggeration of the success attained superfluous. For the first time in history the Greek had beaten the Persian on his own element, the land. The army of a little state, possessed of no military reputation worth speaking of, had defeated a superior force of the conquerors of a continent. The Greek had shown himself able to face the best soldiers of his age; and the consciousness of this fact, rapidly permeating through the whole of the Hellenic world in Europe, gave the Greek confidence,—nay, even rendered him all but callous and careless,—in face of the great danger which threatened him ten years later. Marathon was a greater Vimiero in that war which was to be fought out in the Greek peninsula. CHAPTER V. THE ENTR’ACTE: B.C. 490–480. ◆H. vi. 132.◆ The victory of Marathon greatly increased the reputation of the man to whose strategy the success was due. If the dispositions before and during the battle are to be taken as a criterion of Miltiades’ military capacity, he must be given the highest place among those who led Greek troops in the land warfare of this century. Never, indeed, until Leuktra, did any Greek general display such ability for command; and it may even be doubted whether the genius shown by Epaminondas in his dispositions for that battle was superior to that of Miltiades in dealing with the infinitely more complicated political and strategical situation of the year 490. He was now at the zenith of his reputation. The decline was fated to be rapid. It was a feature in his life’s history which Herodotus could not fail to emphasize. The greatness, the suddenness of the fall seemed to illustrate in the most marked manner the uncertainty of human fortune. By predilection Herodotus was almost as much a philosopher as an historian. He was not satisfied with merely recording facts; he wished to point their moral; and, consequently, in those cases in which a story exemplifies in the concrete some important article of his philosophical creed, he displays a tendency to emphasize that side, and those features of it which have the most direct bearing on the moral which he wishes it to convey. The relief of his picture aims rather at philosophical than at historical effect.