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The moon failed, even the stars were clouded. A kind of brute instinct guided him. At last—he guessed it was nearly midnight—he caught once more the flashings of a shallow river and the dim outlines of shrubbery beside the bank—again the Asopus. He must take care or he would wander straight into Mardonius’s camp.
Could a life of a hundred years add to his glory more than he could win this day? “Blow!” commanded Leonidas again, and again pealed the trumpet. The line moved beyond the wall toward Xerxes’s camp in the open beside the Asopus. Why wait for Hydarnes’s coming? They would meet the king of the Aryans face to face and show him the terrible manner in which the men of Lacedæmon knew how to die.
And away away It bounds in its freshening might. Silent and soon, Like a broadened moon, It passes in sheen, Asopus green, And bursts on Cithaeron gray. The warder wakes to the signal rays, And it swoops from the hill with a broader blaze, On on the fiery glory rode Thy lonely lake, Gorgopis, glowed To Megara's Mount it came; They feed it again, And it streams amain A giant beard of flame!
There was a rough mountain-path leading from Trachis up the gorge of the Asopus and across Callidromus to the rear of the Greek position, which had been unknown to the Greeks when they decided on making their first stand at Thermopylae, and which they only discovered when their plans no longer admitted of alteration.
The ground, broken in many steep and precipitous ridges, and intersected by the Asopus, whose sluggish stream winds over a broad and rushy bed, was unfavourable to the movements of cavalry, and the Persian foot advanced therefore on the Greeks.
At the foot of Mount Cithæron, one of the most beautiful of the mountains of Greece, winds the small river Asopus, and between, on a slope of the mountain, may to-day be seen the ruins of Platæa, one of the most memorable of the cities of ancient Greece. This city had its day of glory and its day of woe.
The image seems then to have been drawn to the bank of the river Asopus and back to the town, attended by a piping and dancing crowd.
The sentinel dropped his spear and ran breathless toward Platæa, where he knew was his general. Never since Salamis had Persian hopes been higher than that night. What if the Spartans were in the field at last, and the incessant skirmishing had been partly to Pausanias’s advantage? Secure in his fortified camp by the Asopus, Mardonius could confidently wait the turn of the tide.
Every sixty years the festival of the Great Daedala was celebrated by all the people of Boeotia; and at it all the images, fourteen in number, which had accumulated at the lesser festivals, were dragged on wains in procession to the river Asopus and then to the top of Mount Cithaeron, where they were burnt on a great pyre.
The Syrians held it, descended from Syrus, as is the story, the son of Apollo, and Sinope the daughter of Asopus. Which as soon as Lucullus heard, he remembered the admonition of Sylla, whose advice it is in his Memoirs, to treat nothing as so certain and so worthy of reliance as an intimation given in dreams.
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