nice and
particular about their dress and military appearance, though every thing
pertaining to both was coarse and simple, and they had slaves to wait
upon them even in their campaigns.

The Athenians were a totally different people. The leading classes in
their commonwealth were cultivated, intellectual, and refined. The city
of Athens was renowned for the splendor of its architecture, its
temples, its citadels, its statues, and its various public institutions,
which in subsequent times made it the great intellectual center of
Europe. It was populous and wealthy. It had a great commerce and a
powerful fleet. The Spartan character, in a word, was stern, gloomy,
indomitable, and wholly unadorned. The Athenians were rich,
intellectual, and refined. The two nations were nearly equal in power,
and were engaged in a perpetual and incessant rivalry.

[Illustration: FATE OF THE PERSIAN EMBASSADORS AT SPARTA.]

There were various other states and cities in Greece, but Athens and
Sparta were at this time the most considerable, and they were altogether
the most resolute and determined in their refusal to submit to the
Persian sway. In fact, so well known and understood was the spirit of
defiance with which these two powers were disposed to regard the Persian
invasion, that when Xerxes sent his summons demanding submission, to the
other states of Greece, he did not send any to these. When Darius
invaded Greece some years before, he had summoned Athens and Sparta as
well as the others, but his demands were indignantly rejected. It seems
that the custom was for a government or a prince, when acknowledging the
dominion of a superior power, to send, as a token of territorial
submission, a little earth and water, which was a sort of legal form of
giving up possession of their country to the sovereign who claimed it.
Accordingly, when Darius sent his embassadors into Greece to summon the
country to surrender, the embassadors, according to the usual form,
called upon the governments of the several states to send earth and
water to the king. The Athenians, as has been already said, indignantly
refused to comply with this demand. The Spartans, not content with a
simple refusal, seized the embassadors and threw them into a well,
telling them, as they went down, that if they wanted earth and water for
the King of Persia, they might get it there.

The Greeks had obtained some information of Xerxes's designs against
them before they recei