But Themistocles explained
the "wall of wood" as meaning the ships; they should retire to the
fleet and fight the Persians on sea.
Athens and Sparta, having decided on resistance, endeavored to form a
league of the Greeks against the Persians. Few cities had the courage
to enter it, and these placed themselves under the command of the
Spartans. Four battles in one year settled the war. At Thermopylae,
Leonidas, king of Sparta, who tried to bar the entrance to a defile
was outflanked and overwhelmed. At Salamis, the Persian fleet, crowded
into a narrow space where the ships embarrassed one another, was
defeated by the Greek navy (480). At Plataea the rest of the Persian
army left in Greece was annihilated by the Greek hoplites; of 300,000
men but 40,000 escaped. The same day at Mycale, on the coast of Asia,
an army of the Greeks landed and routed the Persians (479). The Greeks
had conquered the Great King.
=Reasons for the Greek Victory.=--The Median war was not a national
war between Greeks and barbarians. All the Greeks of Asia and half the
Greeks of Europe fought on the Persian side.
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