United States or Albania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The valor of their troops in the great combats of Platsea and Thermopylae extorted the admiration of their enemies, who have left on record their belief that, "in boldness and warlike spirit, the Persians were not a whit behind the Greeks," and that their defeat was "wholly owing to the inferiority of their equipment and training."
But, understanding that Pyrrhus had made an incursion into Thessaly, and that he was advanced as far as Thermopylae, leaving Antigonus to continue the siege, he marched with the rest of his army to oppose this enemy. Pyrrhus, however, made a quick retreat.
You behold the occupation of Athens, and the battle of Thermopylae, and other points still more characteristic of the great Persian war, rivers drunk up and disappearing from the face of the earth, and a bridge stretched across the sea, and a canal cut through Athos.... One chamber for the men has a roof fashioned into a vault like the heaven, composed entirely of sapphires, which are the bluest of stones, and resemble the sky in color.
The army, which ought to have mustered in full force at Thermopylae and Callidromus, and which, after those passes were forced, might have defended Cithseron and Parnes, had never ventured beyond the Isthmus of Corinth, and was there engaged in building a wall across the neck of land from sea to sea.
Enjolras, as the reader knows, had something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He would have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda with Cromwell. "Grantaire," he shouted, "go get rid of the fumes of your wine somewhere else than here. This is the place for enthusiasm, not for drunkenness. Don't disgrace the barricade!"
The youth of Abingdon speak glibly of Shepherd Kings, Constitution of Lycurgus, Thermopylae, Consul Duilius, or the Licinian Laws; the more advanced are even as far down as Elizabeth.
Three hundred to protect some sixty-five broad acres within the walls! But the place was a Thermopylae, and there was a fine old Leonidas at the head of its three hundred. He was enough to make Spartans of them. Colonel Dimmick was the man, a quiet, modest, shrewd, faithful, Christian gentleman; and he held all Virginia at bay.
"The legions of Marshal Ney are charging again, but General Barclay, with his Russians, has occupied the Windmill-knoll, near Gleime, and will repulse him as we shall Napoleon's columns. The heights of Kreckwitz are the Thermopylae of the Prussians, and we will fall to a man rather than surrender!" "Yes, that we will do!" cried the officers, enthusiastically, and the soldiers echoed their shouts.
The barbarian army passed the whole day in flight. During the ensuing night a new access of terror seized them they again took to flight, and four days after the passage of Thermopylae some scattered bands, forming scarcely a third of those who had marched on Delphi, rejoined the division which had remained behind, some leagues from the town, in the plains watered by the Cephissus.
Budd was on his way to "The Pocket" the voting place of one faction where he had never been, where the hostility against him was most bitter, and, that day, he knew he was "up against" Waterloo, the crossing of the Rubicon, holding the pass at Thermopylae, or any other historical crisis in the history of man.
Word Of The Day