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Now when I set before my eyes the brave achievements of Thrasybulus and Pelopidas, of Aristides engaged at Platea and Miltiades at Marathon, I am here constrained with Herodotus to declare it my opinion, that in an active state of life the pleasure far exceeds the glory.
During his stay in the Belgian capital lie paid a visit to the scene of Waterloo, wrote the famous stanzas beginning, "Stop, for thy tread is on an empire's dust!" and in unpatriotic prose, recorded his impressions of a plain which appeared to him to "want little but a better cause" to make it vie in interest with those of Platea and Marathon.
But the fire had been terrible. It had burnt Athens at least, down to the very roots. True, while Sophocles was dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at Salamis, as his father Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years before, was fleeing back to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of slaves and mercenaries to be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by sea at Mycale.
That reverence for the military abilities of Asiatic generals, so profoundly impressed on the Greeks by such engineering exploits as the bridging of the Hellespont, and the cutting of the isthmus at Mount Athos by Xerxes, had been obliterated at Salamis, Platea, Mycale. To plunder rich Persian provinces had become an irresistible temptation.
Multitudes of statues, bas-reliefs, and other sculptures have been found in these buried cities; also many fresco paintings, the most remarkable of which are Andromeda and Perseus, Diana and Endymion, the Education of Bacchus, the Battle of Platea, &c.
We have strength given us that makes the single champion of the cross, powerful against the legion of his adversaries. 'Very well said, nephew, broke in the vicar, 'Marathon, Thermopylæ, Platea 'I am afraid we are keeping you from your dinner, Mrs Prothero, interrupted Mr Gwynne, who had a nervous dread of the vicar's antiquities, whether in war or peace. 'Freda, I think we must go.
In this manner we lost our Captain Thrasileon, but he left not his fame and honour. When this was done wee packed up our treasure, which we committed to the sepulchre to keepe, and got out of the bounds of Platea, thus thinking with our selves, that there was more fidelity amongst the dead than amongst the living, by reason that our preyes were so surely kept in the sepulchre.
The story of this effort, ending at Salamis and Platea, and breaking for all time the power of Persia, belongs in the subsequent chapter that narrates the rise and fall of Athens as a sea power. At this point, it is worth pausing to consider in detail the war galley which the Phnicians had developed and which they handed down to the Greeks at this turning point in the world's history.
The territories of Athens, Sparta, and their allies, do not exceed a moderate province of France or England; but after the trophies of Salamis and Platea, they expand in our fancy to the gigantic size of Asia, which had been trampled under the feet of the victorious Greeks.
In its southwestern part was the famous Helicon, famed as the seat of Apollo and the Muses, and on the southern border was Mount Cithæron, to the north of which was Platea, where the Persians were defeated by the confederate Greeks under Pausanias. Bœotia contained the largest lake in Greece—Copaias, famed for eels.
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