Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/351

THE PERSIAN ARMY LANDS AT MARATHON. 338 Persians, 1 and we see plainly that either some of the inhabitants must have been left or new settlers introduced, when we find the Eretrians reckoned ten years afterwards among the opponents oi Xerxes. Datis had thus accomplished with little or no resistance one of the two express objects commanded by Darius, and his army was elated with the confident hope of soon completing the other. After halting a few days at Eretria, and depositing in the neigh- boring islet of -ZEgilia the prisoners recently captured, he reem- barked his army to cross over to Attica, and landed in the memorable bay of Marathon on the eastern coast, the spot indicated by the despot Hippias, who now landed along with the Persians, twenty years after his expulsion from the government. Forty-seven years had elapsed since he had made as a young man this same passage, from Eretria to Marathon, in conjunction with his father Peisistratus, on the occasion of the second restora- tion of the latter. On that previous occasion, the force accom- panying the father had been immeasurably inferior to that which now seconded the son ; yet it had been ibund amply sufficient to carry him in triumph to Athens, with feeble opposition from citizens alike irresolute and disunited. And the march of Hip- pias from Marathon to Athens would now have been equally easy, as it was doubtless conceived to be by himself, both in his waking hopes and in the dream which Herodotus mentions, had not the Athenians whom he found been men radically different from those whom he had left. To that great renewal of the Athenian character, under the democratical institutions which had subsisted since the disposses- sion of Hippias, I have already pointed attention in a former chapter. The modifications introduced by Kleisthenes in the constitution had now existed eighteen or nineteen years, without any attempt to overthrow them by violence. The Ten Tribes, 1 Plutarch, De Garrulitate, c. 15, p. 510. The descendants of Gongylus the Eretrian, who passed over to the Persians on this occasion, are found nearly a century afterwards in possession of a town and district in Mysia, which the Persian king had bestowed upon their ancestor. Herodotus does not mention Gongylus (Xenoph. Hellen. iii, 1,6). This surrender to the Persians drew upon the Eretrians hitter remarks it the time of the battle of Salamis (Plutarch, Themistokles, c. 11).