the Theban cavalry. (See
the account of the battle of Plataea, Herodotus, ix, 59-70.) For the
Thebans, after the barbarians were overthrown, going before with their
horse, affectionately assisted them in their flight; to return them
thanks (forsooth) for the marks they had stigmatized them with at
Thermopylae! Now what rank the Corinthians had in the fight at Plataea
against the barbarians, and how they performed their duty, you may hear
from Simonides in these verses:

I' th' midst were men, in warlike feats excelling,
Who Ephyre full of springs, inhabited,
And who in Corinth, Glaucus' city, dwelling,
Great praise by their great valor merited;
Of which they to perpetuate the fame,
To th' gods of well-wrought gold did offerings frame.

For he wrote not these things, as one that taught at Corinth or that
made verses in honor of the city, but only as recording these actions
in elegiac verses. But Herodotus, whilst he desires to prevent that
objection by which those might convince him of lying who should ask,
Whence then are so many mounts, tombs, and monuments of the dead, at
which the Plataeans, even to this day, celebrate funeral solemnities in
the presence of the Greeks?--has charged, unless I am mistaken, a fouler
crime than that of treason on their posterity. For these are his words:
"As for the other sepulchres that are seen in Plataea, I have heard that
their successors, being ashamed of their progenitors' absence from this
battle, erected every man a monument for posterity's sake." (Herodotus,
ix. 85.) Of this treacherous deserting the battle Herodotus was the
only man that ever heard. For if any Greeks withdrew themselves from
the battle, they must have deceived Pausanias, Aristides, the
Lacedaemonians, and the Athenians. Neither yet did the Athenians exclude
the Aeginetans who were their adversaries from the inscription, nor
convince the Corinthians of having fled from Salamis before the victory,
Greece bearing witness to the contrary. Indeed Cleadas, a Plataean,
ten years after the Persian war, to gratify, as Herodotus says, the
Aeginetans, erected a mount bearing their name. Now came it then to pass
that the Athenians and Lacedaemonians, who were so jealous of each other
that they were presently after the war ready to go together by the ears
about the setting up a trophy, did not yet repel those Greeks who fled
in a fear from the battle from having a share in the honor of those