Plataeans

“ but the Plataeans in the town at once displayed a number of others, prepared beforehand for this very purpose, in order to render the enemy’s signals unintelligible, and to prevent his friends getting a true idea of what was passing and coming to his aid before their comrades who had gone out should have made good their escape and be in safety. ”

“ This generous daring of their weak but true-hearted ally was never forgotten at Athens. The Platæans were made the civil fellow-countrymen of the Athenians, except the right of exercising certain political functions; and from that time forth in the solemn sacrifices at Athens, the public prayers were offered up for a joint blessing from Heaven upon the Athenians, and the Platæans also. ”

“ While the Athenians were stationed near Marathon, the Platæans marched to their aid with the whole force of their state. The connexion of Platæa with Athens lasted so long, and was maintained with such consistency and good faith, no very common distinction in the politics of Greece, that it is worth while to trace its origin and progress. Platæa, a small state of Bœotia, was originally a member of a federal union formed by the independent cities of that province, over which Thebes, the largest and most powerful of them, presided. ”

“ The Athenians were arrayed in the precinct of Heracles, and now the whole power of the Plataeans came to their aid; for the Plataeans had put themselves under the protection of Athens, and the Athenians had taken upon them many labours for their sake. The manner of the Plataeans’ so doing was this:—Being hard pressed by the Thebans, they had offered themselves to the first comers, Cleomenes son of Anaxandrides and the Lacedaemonians; but these would not accept them, and said: “We dwell afar off, and such aid as ours would be found but cold comfort to you ”

“ The proposition now made was so fair and tempting, that the general body of the Platæans were at first inclined to accept it, provided the Athenians would acquiesce; and they obtained from Archidamus a truce long enough to enable them to send envoys to Athens. After communication with the Athenian assembly, the envoys returned to Platæa, bearing the following answer: “Men of Platæa, the Athenians say they have never yet permitted you to be wronged since the alliance first began,—nor will they now betray you, but will help you to the best of their [p. 187] power. ”

“ We counsel you rather to give yourselves up to the Athenians, who are your next neighbours, and well able to shelter you."
This they said, not so much out of good will towards the Plataeans as because they wished to involve the Athenians in trouble by engaging them in wars with the Boeotians. The Plataeans, however, when the Lacedaemonians gave them this counsel, complied at once; and when the sacrifice to the Twelve Gods was being offered at Athens, they came and sat as suppliants about the altar, and gave themselves up to the Athenians. ”

“ The Platæans were upon the point of acceding to all the demands made upon them, when, discovering the small number of the enemy, they attacked and overpowered them in the darkness, and took a hundred and eighty of them prisoners. ”

“ All being finished by about the rising of Arcturus, they left men enough to man half the wall, the rest being manned by the Boeotians, and drawing off their army dispersed to their several cities. The Plataeans had before sent off their wives and children and oldest men and the mass of the non-combatants to Athens; so that the number of the besieged left in the place comprised four hundred of their own citizens, eighty Athenians, and a hundred and ten women to bake their bread. ”

“ In 490 the Plataeans sent their full levy to the assistance of the Athenians at Marathon, and during the invasion of Xerxes they joined eagerly in the national defence. At Artemisium they volunteered to man several Athenian ships, and subsequently abandoned their town to be burnt by Xerxes. ”

“ And at the same time we adjure you not to give us up—your suppliants, Lacedaemonians, out of your hands and faith, Plataeans foremost of the Hellenic patriots, to Thebans, our most hated enemies—but to be our saviours, and not, while you free the rest of the Hellenes, to bring us to destruction. ”

“ The Athenians with the help of the Platæans repelled forever the reëstablishing of a despot in Attica, and Athens herself unconsciously entered upon what was to be the intellectual and moral trusteeship of Occidental civilization. Demosthenes, more than a century later, amidst the ruins of political liberty, could foreshadow a destiny greater than material success. ”

“ And the attack made by the Boeotians and Arcadians under Epaminondas upon the city of Sparta, even this terrified both the Lacedaemonians themselves and those who participated with them in the transactions at that time, [5] rather by the novelty of the sight than by the reality of the danger. The capture of the city of the Plataeans was not a great calamity, by reason of the small number of those who were taken in it; most of the citizens having long before escaped to Athens. ”

“ After going for rather more than half a mile upon the road to Thebes, the Plataeans turned off and took that leading to the mountain, to Erythrae and Hysiae, and reaching the hills, made good their escape to Athens, two hundred and twelve men in all ”

“ Grecian manners abounded with rites of this kind, but none seem more worthy of commemoration than those observed annually by the Platæans, in honour of the warriors who fell around their city. It is well-known that the Greeks regarded the spirits of good men of former ages as guardian genii, to whom belonged religious veneration amounting perhaps to worship. ”

“ Themistocles and Aristides had seconded the advice of Miltiades, to whom the other generals surrendered their days of command—a rare example of patriotic disinterestedness. The Athenians marched at once to Marathon to meet their foes, and were joined by the Platæans, one thousand warriors, from a little city—the whole armed population, which had a great moral effect. ”

“ Stationed by the Tirynthians came, in successive order, a thousand Phliasians, three hundred Hermionians, six hundred Eretrians and Styreans, four hundred Chalcidians, five hundred Ambracians, eight hundred Leucadians and Anactorians, two hundred Paleans of Cephallenia, and five hundred only of the islanders of Aegina. Three thousand Megarians and six hundred Plataeans were ranged contiguous to the Athenians, whose force of eight thousand men, under the command of Aristides, closed the left wing. ”

“ On the other hand, the Lacedaemonian governor in the citadel, as soon as that night's proclamation reached his ears, was not slow to send to Plataeae (7) and Thespiae for reinforcements. The approach of the Plataeans was perceived by the Theban cavalry, who met them and killed a score of them and more, and after that achievement returned to the city, to find the Athenians from the frontier already arrived. Then they assaulted the acropolis. ”

“ But the plain of Ceres Eleusinia, and the offer of victory to the Athenians, if they fought in their own territories, recalled them again, and transferred the war into the country of Attica. In this juncture, Arimnestus, who commanded the Plataeans, dreamed that Jupiter, the Saviour, asked him what the Greeks had resolved upon; and that he answered, "Tomorrow, my Lord, we march our army to Eleusis, and there give the barbarians battle according to the directions of the oracle of Apollo." ”

“ While raising the mound the Peloponnesians also brought up engines against the city, one of which was brought up upon the mound against the great building and shook down a good piece of it, to the no small alarm of the Plataeans. ”

“ When Plataea was destroyed by Sparta in 431, the refugees were granted rights of Athenian citizenship and eventually given land (421) in the territory of Skiône in Chalcidice. The slaves who were enfranchised after Arginusae were apparently sent to join the Plataeans.
P. 56, ll. 718–720, Is the same towards men and money. ”

“ The Platæans were naturally attached to the interest of the Athenians, and they furnished them with 1000 soldiers when Greece was attacked by Datis the general of Darius. Platæa was taken by the Thebans, after a famous siege, in the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, and destroyed by the Spartans, B.C. 427. Alexander rebuilt it, and paid great encomiums to the inhabitants, on account of their ancestors, who had so bravely fought against the Persians at the battle of Marathon, and under Pausanias. Herodotus, bk. ”

“ In the incident now before us, the Theban hoplites enter Platæa, a strange town, with the population decidedly hostile, and likely to be provoked more than ever by this surprise, add to which, that it is pitch dark, and a rainy night. Is it likely, that the first thing which they do will be to pile their arms? The darkness alone would render it a slow and uncertain operation to resume the arms: so that when the Platæans attacked them, as they did, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and while it was yet dark, the Thebans would have been—upon Dr. ”

“ Furthermore, that there be not a single citizen in Athens who is deprived of his rights; otherwise would it not be shameful to see slaves become masters and treated as honourably as Platæans, because they helped in a single naval fight? [75] Not that I censure this step, for, on the contrary I approve it; 'tis the sole thing you have done that is sensible. But those citizens, both they and their fathers, have so often fought with you and are allied to you by ties of blood, so ought you not to listen to their prayers and pardon them their single fault? ”

“ But the Peloponnesians, when they found it out, rammed clay into cases made of reeds, which they cast into the cavity, with intention that the mound should not moulder, and be carried away like loose earth. The Platæans, excluded here, gave over that plot, and digging a secret mine, which they carried under the mound from within the city by conjecture, fetched away the earth again, and were a long time undiscovered; so that the earth being continually carried out below, it was no use to cast fresh stuff on the mound, which still settled down into the excavation. ”

“ Then indeed the Thebans, no longer defending themselves, were slain, not so much by the Macedonians as by the Phocians, Plataeans and other Boeotians, [4] who by indiscriminate slaughter vented their rage against them. Some were even attacked in the houses, having there turned to defend themselves from the enemy, and others were slain as they were supplicating the protection of the gods in the temples; not even the women and children being spared. [5]
↑ Arrian says that the attack of the Macedonians upon Thebes was made by Perdiccas, without orders from Alexander ”

“ Even in a great empire there might be a degree of virtue and justice, such as the Greeks believed to have existed under the sway of the first Persian kings. But all such empires were liable to degenerate, and soon incurred the anger of the gods. Their Oriental wealth, and splendour of gold and silver, and variety of colours, seemed also to be at variance with the simplicity of Greek notions. In the island of Atlantis, Plato is describing a sort of Babylonian or Egyptian city, to which he opposes the frugal life of the true Hellenic citizen. ”

“ And so the soldiers of Marathon and the sailors of Salamis became the schoolmasters of Hellas; the one teaching and habituating the Hellenes not to fear the barbarians at sea, and the others not to fear them by land. Third in order, for the number and valour of the combatants, and third in the salvation of Hellas, I place the battle of Plataea. And now the Lacedaemonians as well as the Athenians took part in the struggle; they were all united in this greatest and most terrible conflict of all; wherefore their virtues will be celebrated in times to come, as they are now celebrated by us. ”

“ Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe, the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia is in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of Europe; he substricts the religion of Asia as the base. ”

“ The Greek love of the beautiful and reverence for the state, the Greek union of intellectual freedom with conventional bondaoe to the forms of politics and of religion, the whole Greek attitude towards the universe, in so far as the Athens of that age could embody it, are made articulate in enduring form in the speculations of these representative men. They consciously interpret this Hellenic life, — they do also more: they criticise it. Plato especially is in some of his work a fairly destructive analyst of his nation’s faith. ”

“ Here Plato goes back to the original partition of the earth among the gods, and (what is of some importance as to the interpretation of the legend) , he particularly marks the fact that, of the two parties in this great primeval conflict, the Athenians were the people of Athena and Hephaestus, but the Atlantines the people of Poseidon. The royal race was the offspring of Poseidon and of Cleito, a mortal woman, the daughter of Evenor, one of the original earthborn inhabitants of the island, of whose residence in the centre of the island Plato gives a particular description. ”