for when the Persians landed in Attica the
 Athenians did not wait for their allies, but, making the common war their private cause,
 they marched out with their own forces alone to meet an enemy who looked with contempt
 upon the whole of Hellas—a mere handful against thousands upon thousands The Athenians at Marathon were reckoned at ten thousand, the
 Persians at about two hundred thousand. —as if they were about to risk the lives
 of others, not their own; Echoed from Thuc. 1.70 . the Lacedaemonians, on the other hand, no sooner heard of
 the war in Attica than they put all else aside
 and came to our rescue, having made as great haste as if it had been their own country
 that was being laid waste. A proof of the swiftness and of the rivalry of both is that, according to the account,
 our ancestors on one and the same day Isocrates makes
 greater “haste” than Hdt. 6.110 . learned of the
 landing of the barbarians, rushed to the defense of the borders of their land, won the
 battle, and set up a trophy of victory over the enemy; while the Lacedaemonians in three
 days and as many nights This agrees with Hdt. 6.120 . covered twelve hundred stadia in marching
 order: so strenuously did they both hasten, the Lacedaemonians to share in the dangers,
 the Athenians to engage the enemy before their helpers should arrive. Then came the later expedition, The second campaign is
 described by Hdt. 7-9 . which was led by Xerxes in person;
 he had left his royal residence, boldly taken command as general in the field, and
 collected about him all the hosts of Asia . What
 orator, however eager to overshoot the mark, has not fallen short of the truth in speaking
 of this king, who rose to such a pitch of arrogance that, thinking it a small task to subjugate
 Hellas , and proposing to leave a memorial such
 as would mark a more than human power, did not stop until he had devised and compelled the
 execution of a plan whose fame is on the lips of all mankind—a plan by which, having
 bridged the Hellespont and channelled Athos , he sailed his ships across the mainland, and
 marched his troops across the main? A like artificiality of
 rhetoric to describe the presumption of Xerxes in building a bridge across the
 Hellespont for his troops and a canal through
 the promontory of Athos for his ships ( Hdt. 7.22-24 ) seems to have been conventional. Cf. Lys. 2.29 and Aesch. Pers. 745
 ff. 
 It was against a king who had grown so proud, who had carried through such mighty tasks,
 and who had made himself master of so many men, that our ancestors and the Lacedaemonians
 marched forth, first dividing the danger: the latter going to Thermopylae to oppose the land forces with a
 thousand There were originally in all about four
 thousand, according to Hdt. 7.202 . picked soldiers of
 their own, supported by a few of their allies, with the purpose of checking the Persians
 in the narrow pass from advancing farther; while our ancestors sailed to Artemisium with sixty triremes An understatement of the number. Cf. Hdt.
 8.1 . which they had manned to oppose the whole armada of the enemy.