eks fall back to Thermopylae.--Xerxes visits Thessaly.--Beautiful
rural scene.--Conversation of Xerxes at the Olympic Pass.

We must now leave, for a time, the operations of Xerxes and his army,
and turn our attention to the Greeks, and to the preparations which they
were making to meet the emergency.

The two states of Greece which were most prominent in the transactions
connected with the invasion of Xerxes were Athens and Sparta. By
referring to the map, Athens will be found to have been situated upon a
promontory just without the Peloponnesus, while Sparta, on the other
hand, was in the center of a valley which lay in the southern part of
the peninsula. Each of these cities was the center and strong-hold of a
small but very energetic and powerful commonwealth. The two states were
entirely independent of each other, and each had its own peculiar system
of government, of usages, and of laws. These systems, and, in fact, the
characters of the two communities, in all respects, were extremely
dissimilar.

Both these states, though in name republics, had certain magistrates,
called commonly, in history, kings. These kings were, however, in fact,
only military chieftains, commanders of the armies rather than sovereign
rulers of the state. The name by which such a chieftain was actually
called by the people themselves, in those days, was _tyrannus_, the name
from which our word _tyrant_ is derived. As, however, the word
_tyrannus_ had none of that opprobrious import which is associated with
its English derivative, the latter is not now a suitable substitute for
the former. Historians, therefore, commonly use the word king instead,
though that word does not properly express the idea. They were
commanders, chieftains, hereditary generals, but not strictly kings. We
shall, however, often call them kings, in these narratives, in
conformity with the general usage. Demaratus, who had fled from Sparta
to seek refuge with Darius, and who was now accompanying Xerxes on his
march to Greece, was one of these kings.

It was a peculiarity in the constitution of Sparta that, from a very
early period of its history, there had been always two kings, who had
held the supreme command in conjunction with each other, like the Roman
consuls in later times. This custom was sustained partly by the idea
that by this division of the executive power of the state, the exercise
of the power was less likely to become despotic or tyrannical. It had