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When the request from Sparta came, Ephialtes was against helping the rival of Athens; but Kimôn, who had friends in Laconia, declared that it would be unbecoming in Athens to let Greece be crippled in one of her two legs, or to lose her own yoke-fellow.
But a traitor by the name of Ephialtes who knew the little byways of Malis guided a regiment of Persians through the hills and made it possible for them to attack Leonidas in the rear. Near the Warm Wells the Thermopylae a terrible battle was fought. When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead under the corpses of their enemies.
The three greatest men in Athens were Pericles, the son of that Xanthippus who had impeached Miltiades; Kimôn, the son of Miltiades himself; and Ephialtes, a great orator, who was thought to be as upright as Aristides the Just.
Dreams, they observe, proceed from the humours and temperature of the body; we see the choleric dreams of fire, combats, yellow colours, etc. the phlegmatic of water baths, of sailing on the sea; the melancholies of thick fumes, deserts, fantasies, hideous faces, etc. they that have the hinder part of their brain clogged, with viscous humours, called by physicians Ephialtes incubus, dream that they are suffocated.
A recreant Greek, Ephialtes by name, sought Xerxes and told him of a mountain pass over which he could guide a band to attack the defenders of Thermopylæ in the rear. A strong Persian detachment was ordered to cross the pass, and did so under shelter of the night. At daybreak they reached the summit, where a thousand Greeks from Phocis had been stationed as a guard.
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