It has been said that never in the history of the world has such a motley array of soldiers been gathered together under one commander. All nations subservient to Persia were represented, and while Herodotus may have overstated their number, we may accept his statement that it was the largest force ever thus far marshalled together. At the defense of Thermopylæ the Persians learned the character of their opponents. A little band of three hundred Spartans under command of Leonidas held the entire Persian army at bay in a narrow pass for two days. When the army spread out over the land, the Greeks realized their inability to cope with it and decided to hazard all on a naval engagement. The famous battle of Salamis followed, in which 1,000 men-of-war belonging to the Persians were destroyed or put to flight by 300 Greek vessels. Xerxes watched the fight from a throne hastily constructed for him on the shore. When at night his naval forces withdrew to Asia, he could scarcely credit the outcome. Byron has immortalized the occasion in a stanza: "A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis; And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations--all were his! He counted them at break of day-- And when the sun set where were they?" Leaving a strong land force to conquer the Greeks the next year, Xerxes returned to Persia. By the following spring the Greeks had gathered their forces, and inspired by their glorious victory at Salamis, they defeated the Persian army in the battle of Platæa. Thereupon the Greek cities in Asia Minor asserted their freedom, and Greek independence shone forth triumphantly before the world. "But this glorious struggle and triumph of the few lifted to superhuman heroism by an ennobling moral principle, as against the merely brutal force of numbers, does not properly belong any more to the history of the East, nor to that of remote antiquity; it is the dawn of a new star in the West, and of times which, from their spirit, actors, and achievements, may almost be called modern. At the bottom of the new departure lies the difference between the ideals--the conceptions of beauty and dignity of the political and social life--set up by the Oriental and Western man: 'A good master!' is the prayer and ideal of the Asiatic. 'No master! Liberty at any price, as the highest good in itself!' is that of the Greek. And the Greek wins the day, for his own time, and for his own race, and for future times and races to come."[1]