ccasion from the commonplace
tactics of his countrymen. It was essential for him to extend his line
so as to cover all the practicable ground, and to secure himself from
being outflanked and charged in the rear by the Persian horse. This
extension involved the weakening of his line. Instead of a uniform
reduction of its strength, he determined on detaching principally from
his centre, which, from the nature of the ground, would have the best
opportunities for rallying, if broken; and on strengthening his wings so
as to insure advantage at those points; and he trusted to his own skill
and to his soldiers' discipline for the improvement of that advantage
into decisive victory.[45]

[Footnote 45: It is remarkable that there is no other instance of a
Greek general deviating from the ordinary mode of bringing a phalanx of
spearmen into action until the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea, more
than a century after Marathon, when Epaminondas introduced the tactics
which Alexander the Great in ancient times, and Frederick the Great in
modern times, made so famous, of concentrating an overpowering force to
bear on some decisive point of the enemy's line, while he kept back, or,
in military phrase, refused the weaker part of his own.]

In this order, and availing himself probably of the inequalities of the
ground, so as to conceal his preparations from the enemy till the last
possible moment, Miltiades drew up the eleven thousand infantry whose
spears were to decide this crisis in the struggle between the European
and the Asiatic worlds. The sacrifices by which the favor of heaven was
sought, and its will consulted, were announced to show propitious omens.
The trumpet sounded for action, and, chanting the hymn of battle, the
little army bore down upon the host of the foe. Then, too, along the
mountain slopes of Marathon must have resounded the mutual exhortation
which AEschylus, who fought in both battles, tells us was afterward heard
over the waves of Salamis: "On, sons of the Greeks! Strike for the
freedom of your country! strike for the freedom of your children and of
your wives--for the shrines of your fathers' gods, and for the
sepulchres of your sires. All--all are now staked upon the strife."

Instead of advancing at the usual slow pace of the phalanx, Miltiades
brought his men on at a run. They were all trained in the exercise of
the _palaestra_, so that there was no fear of their ending the charge in
breathless exhaustion