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 thousandsThe 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 dayIsocrates 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 nightsThis 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 thousandThere 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 triremesAn understatement of the number. Cf. Hdt. 8.1. which they had manned to oppose the whole armada of the enemy.