n saving the rest. They pushed off
from the fatal shore; but even here the skill of Datis did not desert
him, and he sailed round to the western coast of Attica, in hopes to
find the city unprotected, and to gain possession of it from some of the
partisans of Hippias.

[Footnote 46:

The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow;
The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear;
Mountains above, Earth's, Ocean's plain below,
Death in the front, Destruction in the rear!
Such was the scene.--Byron.]

Miltiades, however, saw and counteracted his manoeuvre. Leaving
Aristides, and the troops of his tribe, to guard the spoil and the
slain, the Athenian commander led his conquering army by a rapid
night-march back across the country to Athens. And when the Persian
fleet had doubled the Cape of Sunium and sailed up to the Athenian
harbor in the morning, Datis saw arrayed on the heights above the city
the troops before whom his men had fled on the preceding evening. All
hope of further conquest in Europe for the time was abandoned, and the
baffled armada returned to the Asiatic coasts.

After the battle had been fought, but while the dead bodies were yet on
the ground, the promised reenforcement from Sparta arrived. Two thousand
Lacedaemonian spearmen, starting immediately after the full moon, had
marched the hundred and fifty miles between Athens and Sparta in the
wonderfully short time of three days. Though too late to share in the
glory of the action, they requested to be allowed to march to the
battle-field to behold the Medes. They proceeded thither, gazed on the
dead bodies of the invaders, and then praising the Athenians and what
they had done, they returned to Lacedaemon.

The number of the Persian dead was sixty-four hundred; of the Athenians,
one hundred and ninety-two. The number of the Plataeans who fell is not
mentioned; but, as they fought in the part of the army which was not
broken, it cannot have been large.

The apparent disproportion between the losses of the two armies is not
surprising when we remember the armor of the Greek spearmen, and the
impossibility of heavy slaughter being inflicted by sword or lance on
troops so armed, as long as they kept firm in their ranks.[47]

[Footnote 47: Mitford well refers to Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt as
instances of similar disparity of loss between the conquerors and the
conquered.]

The Athenian slain were buried on the field of battle. This was c