ians helping them with their testimonies? Some of them, says he,
were slain by the barbarians; many of them were by command of Xerxes
marked with the royal mark, beginning with their leader Leontiades.
Now the captain of the Thebans at Thermopylae was not Leontiades,
but Anaxander, as both Aristophanes, out of the Commentaries of the
Magistrates, and Nicander the Colophonian have taught us. Nor did any
man before Herodotus know that the Thebans were stigmatized by Xerxes;
for otherwise this would have been an excellent plea for them against
his calumny, and this city might well have gloried in these marks, that
Xerxes had punished Leonidas and Leontiades as his greatest enemies,
having outraged the body of the one when he was dead, and caused the
other to be tormented whilst living. But as to a writer who makes the
barbarian's cruelty against Leonidas when dead a sign that he hated him
most of all men when living, (Herodotus, vii. 238.) and yet says that
the Thebans, though favoring the Persians, were stigmatized by them at
Thermopylae, and having been thus stigmatized, again cheerfully took
their parts at Plataea, it seems to me that such a man--like that
Hippoclides (See Herodotus, vi. 126-130.) who gesticulating with his
limbs by standing on his head on a table--would dance away the truth and
say, It makes no difference to Herodotus.

In the Eighth Book our author says, that the Greeks being frighted
designed to fly from Artemisium into Greece, and that, being requested
by the Euboeans to stay a little till they could dispose of their wives
and families, they regarded them not, till such time as Themistocles,
having taken money of them, divided it between Eurybiades and Adimantus,
the captain of the Corinthians, and that then they stayed and had a
sea-fight with the barbarians (Ibid. viii. 4.) Yet Pindar, who was not a
citizen of any of the confederate cities, but of one that was suspected
to take part with the Medians, having made mention of Artemisium, brake
forth into this exclamation: "This is the place where the sons of the
Athenians laid the glorious foundation of liberty." But Herodotus, by
whom, as some will have it, Greece is honored, makes that victory a
work of bribery and theft, saying that the Greeks, deceived by their
captains, who had to that end taken money, fought against their wills.
Nor does he here put an end to his malice. All men in a manner confess
that, although the Greeks got the better at sea