one and the same; that we are but fighting in these latter days the very battles that were fought ages before the Christian era, and winning them by the self-same manoeuvres that won them for the nations, to whom, if we were known at all, we were known but as the most remote and barbarous of barbarians-that strategy, in a word, is a direct and simple science, and therefore like truth must be the same for ever, and all its principles immortal.

II.

MILTIADES,

THE SON OF CIMON.

HIS BATTLE OF MARATHON, CAMPAIGNS, CHARACTER, AND

CONDUCT.

A tyrant! But our tyrants then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.

The tyrant of the Chersonese

Was freedom's best and dearest friend;

That tyrant was Miltiades.-THE ISLES OF GREECE.

THUS sang, in his resonant and harmonious verse, and in the fulness of his enthusiasm for that fair land of Hellas, in whose behalf it was his lot to die, as those whom the gods love die," young, Lord Byron, first martyr for her new-born freedom. But so assuredly, had not his eyes, dazzled by the splendor of his great fame whom he celebrates, refused to look into the obscurer portions of his career, would he not have sung. Nor does he so sing truly. For whatsoever else of greatness or of grandeur may be ascribed to the life of Miltiades, it certainly is not as to a fast and consistent friend of freedom, that his altar will be erected in the shrine of national honor; and, though he did fight once the good fight in her cause, it was as a Hellene earnest to die for Hellas, an Athenian careless to survive Athens, not as a free

HIS LOVE OF FREEDOM.

53

man sincere in his love of liberty, not as a man devoted to the emancipation of mankind. Indeed, it would be scarcely less absurd to heap praises on the Emperor of Russia, and the Austrian Cæsar, as sure friends of freedom, because they broke the chains of Europe under the walls of Leipsic and on the heights of Montmartre, than to do the like of Miltiades, because he preserved the liberty of Greece upon the plain of Marathon. Not to desire to be a slave himself, and to be a friend of freedom, are in a man, as it were, moral antipodes. And so it was with Miltiades. But of this anon; inasmuch as my first concern is with his mili tary genius, not with his moral character; and it comes as much within my plan to commemorate the strategetic skill of “a Borgia or a Catiline," as of a Tell or an Epaminondas.

It will be necessary, however, before coming direct to the campaigns and career of my hero, with his one almost inimitable battle, to take a brief glance at the position of affairs, and the state of nations in Europe at the period of the Persian wars, as well as at the parentage and condition of Miltiades himself, in order to avoid interruptions of the narrative when once begun, and those retrospective episodes, which are so annoying to the reader.

At the commencement of these celebrated wars, which was in fact the commencement of the long struggle for existence and supremacy between the religion and polity of the Eastern and Western races, scarcely terminated until within two centuries of the present day, the kingdom of Persia was the most extensive, the most wealthy, the most powerful, and, probably as a whole, the most civilized empire in the world. It comprehended all the countries between the Indus and the Mediterranean, between the Euxine and Caspian Seas and the Indian Ocean; and of all these countries the population were the subjects, he hereditary or appointed princes the slaves, of the great king. From the Punjaub and the banks of the Scinde to the Levantine Sea and

the broad rush of the fertilizing Nile; from the pearl-freighted waters of the Persian Gulf to the wild and inhospitable waves of the Black Sea, every tribe and nation, every nomad horde and civilized kingdom, poured lavish tribute of its wealth into his central treasuries, sent myriads and tens of myriads to perish under the banners, and at the slightest nod of that most sovereign monarch.

Tyre and Sidon were his marts and naval depots, Egypt his granary, and the wild steppes of Northern Asia his horse pastures, and nurseries for innumerable cavalries, indomitable hordes of archery. And, at that moment, the throne of this gigantic. kingdom was occupied by a prince, the greatest of his race, capable of developing and employing his vast resources to their fullest extent, eager in ambition, fierce lover of glory, covetous to enlarge dominions, which already embraced seven-tenths of the known world. This was the first Darius, son of Hystaspes; who, having already added the Punjaub to the dominions of the Persian, which Hardinge and Gough have the other day attached to those of the British crown-and having previously met with his first reverse in his remarkable Scythian campaign, wherein, after crossing the Danube and penetrating so far, according to some geographers, as the Volga, without bringing his nomadic and active enemy to action, he lost nearly all his host by thirst, fatigue and famine, and felt himself thrice happy to find the bridge of boats, whereby he might recross the Hellespont, unbroken— now determined on reducing all Greece, but Attica especially, into a Persian province. At this period, then-with the exception of Persia-Greece, Sicily, Italy, and Carthage were the only free and civilized states of Europe; for the Greek cities of Asia Minor and of Eastern Europe, along the borders of the Hellespont, and most of the Eastern isles of the Archipelago, though highly refined, flourishing, and wealthy, were, like Tyre and Sidon, Egypt, and even Ethiopia, dependents on the Persian

empire, and as such bound to pay their tributes in peace, and to furnish their contingents in time of war. Greece, in the prime of her literary splendor, and wanting but a few years of the era of her greatest artistic glory, consisted of a few antagonistic and jealous republics, rich in arts, in valor, and in glory, but poor in the numbers of her men, poorer yet in moneys; and relied only on the patriotism, the heroism, the inimitable discipline, and unlimited resources of the Hellenic mind. She extended no farther north than Mount Olympus and the mouth of the river Peneus, had no states of any great importance, with the exception of Thebes and Athens-for Thessaly and Macedonia were still but barbarous regions-beyond the Peloponnesus, or as we should say north of the isthmus of Corinth, and could not compare in magnitude with the smallest Asiatic province, or in united opulence with several of the tributary cities of the Persian empire.

Sicily, which was rich and powerful, was too much occupied in contesting the commercial enterprise and wealth of the Italian cities of Magna Græcia, as the south-eastern extremity of Italy was then called, and with the territorial and maritime encroachments of Carthage, to intermeddle at all in the affairs of the East, or of Eastern Europe. The eyes of Carthage, selfish and undeviating worshipper of Mammon and of Moloch, capable of no generous sentiment, no intellectual impulse, were turned already westward; westward, beyond Abyla and Calpe, pillars of Hercules, far into the great unknown ocean, southward to the fortunate isles, the soft Canaries and the Cape di Verds, and northward to the stormy Cassiterides, the wave-lashed crags of Cornwall. No thought had she, at the farthest, to carry her arms eastward of the Adriatic, and little cared she what fell out, so long as her galleys might sweep the Mediterranean unmolested, rich with the gold and silver of the Spanish Tarshish, rich with the tin and copper of the barbarous Britons. Rome, to complete the tale, can scarcely as yet be said to have fallen within