Personal activity now prevalent among the Athenian citizens—empire of Athens again exclusively maritime, after the thirty years' truce

The judicial alterations effected at Athens by Periklês and Ephialtês, described in the preceding chapter, gave to a large proportion of the citizens direct jury functions and an active interest in the constitution, such as they had never before enjoyed; the change being at once a mark of previous growth of democratical sentiment during the past, and a cause of its farther development during the future. The Athenian people were at this time ready for personal exertion in all directions: military service on land or sea was not less conformable to their dispositions than attendance in the ekklesia or in the dikastery at home. The naval service especially was prosecuted with a degree of assiduity which brought about continual improvement in skill and efficiency, and the poorer citizens, of whom it chiefly consisted, were more exact in obedience and discipline than any of the more opulent persons from whom the infantry or the cavalry were drawn. The maritime multitude, in addition to self-confidence and courage, acquired by this laborious training an increased skill, which placed the Athenian navy every year more and more above the rest of Greece: and the perfection of this force became the more indispensable as the Athenian empire was now again confined to the sea and seaport towns; the reverses immediately preceding the thirty years' truce having broken up all Athenian land ascendency over Megara, Bœotia, and the other continental territories adjoining to Attica.

After having in the last chapter followed the repulse of the Carthaginians by the Sicilian Greeks, we now return to the central Greeks and the Persians a case in which the triumph was yet more interesting to the cause of human improvement generally. The disproportion between the immense host assembled by Xerxes, and the little which he accomplished, naturally provokes both a contempt for Persian force and an admiration for the comparative handful of men by whom they were so ignominiously beaten. Both these sentiments are just, but both are often exaggerated beyond the point which attentive contemplation of the facts rewill justify. The Persian mode of making war (which we may liken to that of the modern Turks, now that the period of their energetic fanaticism has passed away) was in a high degree disorderly and inefficient : the men indeed, individually taken, especially the native Persians, were not deficient in the qualities of soldiers, but their arms and their organisation were wretched and their leaders yet worse. On t he other hand, the Greeks, equal, if not superior, in individual bravery, were incomparably superior in soldier-like order as well as in arms : but here too the leadership was defective, and the disunion a constant source of peril.

The sentiment, alike durable and unanimous, with which the Greeks of after-times looked back on the battle of Thermopylæ, and which they have communicated to all subsequent readers, was that of just admiration for the courage and patriotism of Leonidas and his band. But among the contemporary Greeks that sentiment, though doubtless sincerely felt, was by no means predominant: it was overpowered by the more pressing emotions of disappointment and terror. So confident were the Spartans and Peloponnesians in the defensibility of Thermopylæ and Artemisium, that when the news of the disaster reached them, not a single soldier had yet been put in motion : the season of the festival-games had passed, but no active step had yet been taken. Meanwhile the invading force, army and fleet, was in its progress towards Attica and Peloponnesus, without the least preparations– and what was still worse, without any combined and concerted plan–for defending the heart of Greece. The loss sustained by Xerxes at Thermopylæ, insignificant in proportion to his vast total, was more than compensated by the fresh Grecian auxiliaries which he now acquired. Not merely the Malians, Lokrians and Dorians, but also the great mass of the Bœotians, with their chief town Thebes, all except Thespiæ and Platæa, now joined him.