anded them
on the island of Psyttalia, conquered the post, and killed every man
that the Persians had stationed there.

When the day was spent, and the evening came on, it was found that the
result of the battle was a Greek victory, and yet it was not a victory
so decisive as to compel the Persians wholly to retire. Vast numbers of
the Persian ships were destroyed, but still so many remained, that when
at night they drew back from the scene of the conflict, toward their
anchorage ground at Phalerum, the Greeks were very willing to leave them
unmolested there. The Greeks, in fact, had full employment on the
following day in reassembling the scattered remnants of their own fleet,
repairing the damages that they had sustained, taking care of their
wounded men, and, in a word, attending to the thousand urgent and
pressing exigencies always arising in the service of a fleet after a
battle, even when it has been victorious in the contest. They did not
know in exactly what condition the Persian fleet had been left, nor how
far there might be danger of a renewal of the conflict on the following
day. They devoted all their time and attention, therefore, to
strengthening their defenses and reorganizing the fleet, so as to be
ready in case a new assault should be made upon them.

But Xerxes had no intention of any new attack. The loss of this battle
gave a final blow to his expectations of being able to carry his
conquests in Greece any further. He too, like the Greeks, employed his
men in industrious and vigorous efforts to repair the damages which had
been done, and to reassemble and reorganize that portion of the fleet
which had not been destroyed. While, however, his men were doing this,
he was himself revolving in his mind, moodily and despairingly, plans,
not for new conflicts, but for the safest and speediest way of making
his own personal escape from the dangers around him, back to his home in
Susa.

In the mean time, the surface of the sea, far and wide in every
direction, was covered with the wrecks, and remnants, and fragments
strewed over it by the battle. Dismantled hulks, masses of entangled
spars and rigging, broken oars, weapons of every description, and the
swollen and ghastly bodies of the dead, floated on the rolling swell of
the sea wherever the winds or the currents carried them. At length many
of these mournful memorials of the strife found their way across the
whole breadth of the Mediterranean, and were