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 The name of MILTIADES records the first great victory of the West over the East; and represents the vanguard of the military civilization which first checked and finally absorbed the theocracies of Central Asia.
Miltiades, a noble Athenian, of the race of the Homeric heroes, had joined, as ruler of a Greek colony in Thrace, in the Scythian expedition of Darius; and his conspiracy to induce the Greek feudatories to destroy the bridge over the Danube showed how dangerous to the Great King Greece had become. When Darius resolved to crush the rising power of Athens, it was her fortune to find amongst her citizens a chief who, with long experience as a ruler, had seen war on a great scale, and knew the weakness and strength of Asia. Miltiades, retreating to Athens before the storm, was named general in the first great struggle, and became, next to Themistocles himself, the soul of the audacious defiance with which Athens braved the mighty Empire of Persia. To his personal ascendancy and consummate strategy were due the plan of the campaign, the victory of Marathon, and the repulse of the invaders from Attica (B.C. 490). Failing next year in the new expedition which he had promoted, he was impeached and condemned; and, dying of his wound in prison, he points the moral of the instability of popular favour, a difficulty which weighted all the great men of republican Greece.
The battle of Marathon, though second in importance to Salamis, profoundly impressed the imagination of Greece and of all antiquity. It is probable that about 10,000 fully armed Athenians took part in it, and about 50,000 Persians. But the battle tested the highest qualities both of commander and soldiers. There, as Demosthenes and Thucydides say, the Athenians "bore the first brunt of the danger," and were "the first to face the look of the terrible Mede." This victory first inspired them with a sense of their own destiny. Aristides, Themistocles, and the poet Aeschylus had important parts in it. The 192 citizens who fell were by special decree buried on the field, and the monumental mound raised over them may still be seen. Seven centuries afterwards they were worshipped as heroes on the spot; the day was still kept as a festival in Attica; and men heard at night the battle-field resound with the din of arms.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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