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The Greeks landed on the very day on which the battle of Plataea was fought. A supernatural presentiment of that decisive victory, conveyed by a herald's staff which floated over the AEgean from the shores of Greece, is said to have pervaded the Grecian ranks at Mycale as they marched to the attack.
The battle of Platæa freed Greece altogether of the invaders. The battle of Mycale rescued the Ionian cities. Sparta continued to take the lead of the military States, to which Athens had generously submitted.
The Persians, distrusting these messages, though uttered in a tongue they understood not, and suspecting the Samians, took their arms from the latter; and, desirous of removing the Milesians to a distance, intrusted them with the guard of the paths to the heights of Mycale. Using these precautions against the desertion of their allies, the Persians prepared for battle.
It is said that the battle was fought on the same day as that of Plataea and that a divine rumour ran through the Greek army that their brothers had gained the day. In the action at Mycale the Athenians took the palm of valour, bursting the enemy's line and storming his entrenchments. This victory freed Ionia; it remained only to open the Dardanelles.
Laotychides, the Spartan admiral, having sailed across the AEgean, found the Persian fleet at Mycale a promontory of Asia Minor near Miletus. Their former reverses seem completely to have discouraged the Persians from hazarding another naval engagement. The ships were hauled ashore and surrounded with a rampart, whilst an army of 60,000 Persians lined the coast for their defence.
Mycale is the proof that they remembered it well. This same consciousness of superiority animated two other Greek armies, one deserted in the middle of Asia Minor, yet led unmolested by Xenophon through a hostile country to the shores of the Black Sea the other commanded by Alexander the Great who planted Greek civilisation over every part of his conquests, from the coast to the very gates of Persia itself.
The Athenians accordingly withdrew to Samos, and the Peloponnesians put in at Mycale, and encamped with the land forces of the Milesians and the people of the neighbourhood. The next day they were about to sail against Samos, when tidings reached them of the arrival of Strombichides with the squadron from the Hellespont, upon which they immediately sailed back to Miletus.
It is well known that the victory obtained by the Greeks over the Persians, at the sea-fight of Mycale, was chiefly owing to the Samians. The commerce of the Black Sea was of so much importance and value to the Greeks, that we cannot be surprised that they founded several colonies on its shores, and in the adjacent countries.
Xanthippus, his father, who defeated the king of Persia's generals in the battle at Mycale, took to wife Agariste, the grandchild of Clisthenes, who drove out the sons of Pisistratus, and nobly put an end to their tyrannical usurpation, and moreover made a body of laws, and settled a model of government admirably tempered and suited for the harmony and safety of the people.
Thus concluding their victories, the Athenians returned to Greece, carrying with them a vast treasure, and, not the least precious relics, the fragments and cables of the Hellespontic bridge, to be suspended in their temples. XXVIII. Lingering at Sardis, Xerxes beheld the scanty and exhausted remnants of his mighty force, the fugitives of the fatal days of Mycale and Plataea.
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