rta, having decided on resistance, endeavored to form a
league of the Greeks against the Persians. Few cities had the courage
to enter it, and these placed themselves under the command of the
Spartans. Four battles in one year settled the war. At Thermopylae,
Leonidas, king of Sparta, who tried to bar the entrance to a defile
was outflanked and overwhelmed. At Salamis, the Persian fleet, crowded
into a narrow space where the ships embarrassed one another, was
defeated by the Greek navy (480). At Plataea the rest of the Persian
army left in Greece was annihilated by the Greek hoplites; of 300,000
men but 40,000 escaped. The same day at Mycale, on the coast of Asia,
an army of the Greeks landed and routed the Persians (479). The Greeks
had conquered the Great King.

=Reasons for the Greek Victory.=--The Median war was not a national
war between Greeks and barbarians. All the Greeks of Asia and half the
Greeks of Europe fought on the Persian side. Many of the other Greeks
gave no assistance. In reality it was a fight of the Great King and
his subjects against Sparta, Athens, and their allies.

The conquest of this great horde by two small peoples appeared at that
time as a prodigy. The gods, said the Greeks, had fought for them. But
there is less wonder when we examine the two antagonists more closely:
the Persian army was innumerable, and Xerxes had thought that victory
was a matter of numbers. But this multitude was an embarrassment to
itself. It did not know where to secure food for itself, it advanced
but slowly, and it choked itself on the day of combat. Likewise the
ships arranged in too close order drove their prows into neighboring
ships and shattered their oars. Then in this immense crowd there were,
according to Herodotus, many men but few soldiers. Only the Persians
and Medes, the flower of the army, fought with energy; the rest
advanced only under the lash, they had come under pressure to a war
which had no interest for them, ill-armed and without discipline,
ready to desert as soon as no one was watching them. At Plataea the
Medes and Persians were the only ones to do any fighting; the subjects
kept aloof.

The Persian soldiers were ill-equipped; they were embarrassed by their
long robes, the head was poorly protected by a felt hat, the body
ill-defended by a shield of wicker-work. For arms they had a bow, a
dagger, and a very short pike; they could fight only at a great
distance or hand-to-hand. The Sparta