ominion into Europe.

Athens and Sparta were, as usual, engaged in a small war; but at the news
of a threatened Persian invasion, the Greek States sprang solidly
together.

The armies met on the field of Marathon (490 B.C.), and the
Asiatic host, after a desperate conflict, turned and fled. So confident
had the Persians been of victory, that they had brought a mass of white
marble with which to erect a monument on the plain of Marathon. This
Phidias, the great Greek sculptor, carved into a gigantic figure of
Nemesis, to represent Divine vengeance.

The proud and arrogant Persians were not used to defeat. For ten years
they brooded over it and prepared to wipe it out by an overwhelming
victory. Darius was dead; but his son Xerxes, in the year 480
B.C., appeared on the coast of Greece with a vast army, which he
himself led.

The first incident in the war was the most renowned in the history of the
world. If you do not know of it already, you will often hear how Leonidas,
with his little Spartan band of three hundred, defended the narrow rocky
pass at Thermopylae against the whole Persian army, and how they stood
their ground until every man was killed.

The Persians pressed on into the heart of Greece. Athens was abandoned,
and then burnt by the conquerors. What made the cause of Greece still more
desperate was the dissensions between the Athenians and the Spartans, who
insisted upon concentrating their forces to guard their own Peloponnesus.
But finally all united in a great battle at Salamis.

The fate of Greece was now to be decided. Xerxes, seated on a jewelled
throne that he might witness the victory of his arms, to his bitter dismay
saw the terrible and overwhelming rout of his entire army, and returned to
Persia with only a ragged remnant of his great host.

Now shall I tell you something more about this great King, and who it was
who became his wife after he went back to Persia?

You all know the story. It is one of the most thrilling and dramatic that
was ever written. You know about the lovely Jewish maiden who was chosen
by the great King to be his wife in the place of Vashti, and how a wicked
minister or adviser to the King plotted the downfall of Mordecai, and was
then after all compelled to lead him in triumph through the streets,
crying, "Thus shall it be done to the man whom the King delighteth to
honor!" And how the brave Queen, at the risk of her own life, saved her
people from extermination. We