It is not in this place that the war between the despotism and the freedom of the ancient world can be even sketched, much less described. The great empire matched itself against a few scanty cities, whose people together were scarcely so numerous as the army of their enemies. of their enemies. On one side, though it seemed so mighty, was the fear of oppression; on the other, though it seemed so feeble, was the love of liberty and love triumphed, as well as liberty, against the fear and the oppression, which fled away like guilty things. At first, Eretria, the helper of Ionia, fell, razed and wasted, and a shudder ran through Greece; but the battle at Marathon, the battle which Miltiades entreated might be fought, and which he and his Athenians, with their Platæan allies, gained, was enough for ten years. When the Persians came again with their king Xerxes himself, to make them sure of triumph, Thermopyla was their first welcome; and swift to repeat the example which Leonidas gave were the victories of Themistocles on the waves by Salamis, and of Pausanias, the Spartan, on the plains below Platea.190 Before the war was decided, the Athenians twice left their city empty to the invading hosts they could not alone. repel; more valiant in abandoning than in vainly defending, because the love of law was thus preserved, at the expense of the love of home. So, after the

189

A. C. 480; Platea in 479. See Herod., VII. 223 et seq., VIII. 84 et seq., IX. 53 et seq.; and Plutarch's Lives of Themistocles and

189 A. C. 490. Herodotus's description of the battle is as fresh as on the day it was written. VI. 103 et seq. 190 Thermopyla and Salamis in Aristides.

war was ended, Aristides, a hero in many conflicts, achieved another triumph, greater, it might have been, than any on a battle-field. At his proposal, a solemn league was formed between the people, who had learned, at last, the benefits of union, to maintain a common army against the Persians "and barbarians," and to celebrate, every year, but especially every fifth year in a feast of liberty at Platæa, the memory of their concord and their glory.191

The history of ancient liberty has no names of greater note than those over which we have passed almost as though they were idle sounds. But of them all, of others not here even breathed, there is one so much the purest and the loftiest, that it may be taken for the rest to complete these rapid outlines. Aristides, noble by blood as well as by spirit, first appears at Marathon. Elected Archon for the following year, he became, if he was not already, so distinguished for his probity and justice, as not only to be called, by common consent, the Just, but to be employed amongst all classes as the umpire in their various controversies. As a public man, while admiring the aristocratical principles which, in his day, bore the name of Lycurgus, he yet appears to have constantly followed the liberal policy which Clisthenes, without either generous or sincere intentions, had begun near twenty years before; but though he thus belonged exclusively to neither of the Athenian factions, it was through political intrigues, through those, more particularly, of Themistocles 192 against him, that he 192 Plut., Them., 5

191 Plut., Arist., 21.

was ostracized, a few years after his Archonship. The injustice of others had no effect upon his own excellence of soul. While yet an exile, he went from city to city, to persuade the Greeks to defend themselves against the invasion of the Persians; and when he was recalled to Athens, though he found his antagonists in authority, he made no opposition to them, but rather lent them all the aid he could give in action or in deliberation against their common enemies. He even obeyed Themistocles. His watchfulness was equal to his serenity of mind; it was he who encouraged the stand Themistocles proposed at Salamis, 193 —he who upheld the resolution of his countrymen in their universal exile, - he, also, who, at Platea, confounded the conspiracy of certain Athenian nobles, to overthrow their national institutions, or else desert to the strangers. Nor were his principles affected by the misfortunes he had met in upholding them. He continued the stanch supporter of the moderate democracy, and after the Persian war was concluded, he proposed and carried the law by which the highest offices, the Archonship, and therefore the tribunal of the Areopagus, were brought within the reach of every class of citizens; 194 in this wise acknowledging to whose arms the victory was due, and in what spirit the danger had been repelled. At the formation of the confederacy between Athens and most of the maritime states of Greece, he was again

193 Plut., Arist., 8. Herod., of the Athen., p. 296 and note, Eng. transl.

VIII. 79.

194 See Schömann, Assemblies

the energetic and the just statesman, procuring the first place in the league for Athens, as the fittest to possess it, and composing the rules by which its authority should be exercised and obeyed, with such consummate equity, that none complained they were inferior, and even Athens scarcely boasted of being superior.195 He lived, however, to behold the growth of covetousness amongst his people, which made them oppressive where he had taught them to be moderate; and the poverty in which he died, though it gave them an opportunity to be generous towards his children, did not inspire them to be frugal or just themselves, 196

The war with the Persians was not fairly over before the freedom thus gallantly defended was endangered by a recurrence of the intestine strifes to which the Greeks appear to have been born and doomed. They who had won the glory of the conflict were hasty to turn their arms against the neighbours from whom the disgrace of faithlessness or cowardice might be thought to spread itself over the entire nation.197 Yet the impulse to union survived its original cause

195 Diod. Sic., XI. 46, 47. Corn. Nep., Arist., 3. Plut., Arist., 24. See, generally, for the account here given of Aristides, Plutarch's Life, Sect. 2, 5-8, 13, 22, 27.

196There have been, in this city and elsewhere, and there undoubtedly will be hereafter, men distinguished in that kind of virtue which consists in managing their trusts with justice." These are words that Plato wrote for Socrates, and to

a little longer; the more naturally, that the hostilities with the Persians did not immediately cease, but were even directed against them in the islands and provinces of their own dominion. The greater part, therefore, of the Grecian states were still united in the league that had been made in resistance and was now continued in aggression. But from this confederacy, common though it were, there arose an untried danger, more threatening, indeed, to the liberties of Greece than the previous separation between her children. Almost immediately after the triumph at Platæa and the naval victory of the same day at Mycale, the quarrel for precedence amongst the conquerors began. Sparta was accustomed to rule; but Athens, scarcely wont to obey at any time, was now learning to govern through the ambition which Miltiades, Themistocles, and Aristides had, each in his different way, aroused. The claims of the two great cities to ascendency over adjoining states or islands were soon succeeded by pretensions to superiority over one another; of which the example was set by Sparta, in endeavouring to prevent the fortification of Athens by its famous walls.198 Spartans could not but foresee that the preeminence of their country would be disputed by the nation whose sacrifices and victories had lately eclipsed their own; while Athenians were urgent to catch the breeze that drove them on to rivalry and empire. Both and all bore ample testi

198 Thucyd., I. 89 et seq. Diod. Sic., XI. 41 et seq. Plut., Them., 19. All these narratives are full of

instruction concerning the evil spirit which followed upon the day of glory.