was not merely by the generation whom the battle
liberated from Hippias and the Medes that the transcendent importance of
their victory was gratefully recognized. Through the whole epoch of her
prosperity, through the long Olympiads of her decay, through centuries
after her fall, Athens looked back on the day of Marathon as the
brightest of her national existence.

By a natural blending of patriotic pride with grateful piety, the very
spirits of the Athenians who fell at Marathon were deified by their
countrymen. The inhabitants of the district of Marathon paid religious
rites to them, and orators solemnly invoked them in their most
impassioned adjurations before the assembled men of Athens. "Nothing was
omitted that could keep alive the remembrance of a deed which had first
taught the Athenian people to know its own strength, by measuring it
with the power which had subdued the greater part of the known world.
The consciousness thus awakened fixed its character, its station, and
its destiny; it was the spring of its later great actions and ambitious
enterprises."

It was not indeed by one defeat, however signal, that the pride of
Persia could be broken, and her dreams of universal empire dispelled.
Ten years afterward she renewed her attempts upon Europe on a grander
scale of enterprise, and was repulsed by Greece with greater and
reiterated loss. Larger forces and heavier slaughter than had been seen
at Marathon signalized the conflicts of Greeks and Persians at
Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and the Eurymedon. But, mighty and
momentous as these battles were, they rank not with Marathon in
importance. They originated no new impulse. They turned back no current
of fate. They were merely confirmatory of the already existing bias
which Marathon had created. The day of Marathon is the critical epoch in
the history of the two nations. It broke forever the spell of Persian
invincibility, which had previously paralyzed men's minds. It generated
among the Greeks the spirit which beat back Xerxes, and afterward led on
Xenophon, Agesilaus, and Alexander, in terrible retaliation through
their Asiatic campaigns. It secured for mankind the intellectual
treasures of Athens, the growth of free institutions, the liberal
enlightenment of the Western world, and the gradual ascendency for many
ages of the great principles of European civilization.

EXPLANATORY REMARKS ON SOME OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BATTLE OF
MARATHON

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