But though they are rightly famous, for the reason which I have spoken of, a good deal of their fame is due to the splendid way in which their story has been told {132} to us by the great historian Herodotus, and, as you know, the best story in the world can be made to seem very poor if it is badly told; and a poor story can be made interesting by good telling. These people, these Greeks, with their extraordinary accomplishments, had the power of telling stories very well, and the stories really were good in themselves. They were good stories, and stories of important events, but the events are rather apt to appear even more important than they really were, just because their story is told so very well. That is the word of warning which I want to give you about all these stories of the glorious days of Greece. In giving you the outlines of the great story of the world, as I am trying to do in this book, there is no space for an account of these battles. You must read about them elsewhere, and all I can do is to tell you how they fit into the big story, where they come, and how it was that they happened. The Greeks, at this battle of Marathon, defeated the Persians and utterly demolished any chance of the success which this first invasion of Greece by the Persians could have had. The Persians returned again to the attack, but it was not until ten years later; and then it was attempted in a different manner. There had been an effort at the invasion of Greece even before that which was defeated at Marathon. Those Ionian cities along the coast of Asia Minor had revolted against the Persian rule, and had been aided by the Athenians, who were closely related to them. A Persian expedition had set out four years before the Marathon enterprise to punish the Athenians for helping the Ionians in that revolt which the Persians {133} had easily repressed. It set out both by land and sea, with the intention that the fleet should support the land army, but the fleet was caught and shattered in a storm, and although the Persian power was supposed to be established over Thrace and even as far west as Macedonia, their land army was fallen upon and broken up by attacks of the wild tribes on the borders of Thrace without ever reaching Greek territory at all. But though this expedition, thus planned to act together by land and sea, had been a failure, it was just the same kind of enterprise, only on a far larger scale, that was attempted by Xerxes, then King of Kings, ten years after the Persian overthrow at Marathon. King Xerxes himself was the leader. [Sidenote: Xerxes]