Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/119

BATTLES OF THERMOPYLAE AND ARTEMISIUM. 95 After a year of such bitter disgrace, he was at length enabled to retrieve his honor at the battle of Plataea, where he was slain, after surpassing all his comrades in heroic and even reckless valor. Amidst the last moments of this gallant band, we turn with repugnance to the desertion and surrender of the Thebans. They are said to have taken part in the final battle, though only to save appearances and under the pressure of necessity : but when the Spartans and Thespians, exhausted and disarmed, retreated to die upon the little hillock within the pass, the Thebans then separated themselves, approached the enemy with outstretched hands, and entreated quarter. They now loudly proclaimed that they were friends and subjects of the Great King, and had come to Thermopylos against their owti consent ; all which was con- firmed by the Thessalians in the Persian army. Though some few were slain before this proceeding was understood by the Persians, the rest were admitted to quarter; not without the signal disgrace, however, of being branded with the regal mark as untrustworthy slaves, — an indignity to which their com- mander, Leontiades was compelled to submit along with the rest. Such is the narrative which Herodotus recounts, without any ex- pression of mistrust or even of doubt : Plutarch emphatically contradicts it, and even cites a Boeotian author,' who affirms that Anaxarchus, not Leontiades, was commander of the Thebans at Thermopylai. Without calling in question the equivocal conduct and surrender of this Theban detachment, we may reasonably dismiss the story of this ignominious branding, as an invention of that strong anti-Theban feeling which prevailed in Greece after the repulse of Xerxes. The wrath of that monarch, as he went over the field after the close of the action, vented itself upon the corpse of the gallant Leonidas, whose head he directed to be cut off and fixed on a cross. But it was not wrath alone which fiUed his mind : he was intolerable scorn and hardly escaped execution (Vogelin, Geschichte det Schweizer Eidgenossenschaft, vol. i, ch. 5, p. 393). ' Herodot. vii, 233 ; PluUirch, Herodot. Malign, p. 867. The Boeotian history of Aristophanes, cited by the latter, professed to be founded in part upon memoi-ials arranged according to the sequence of magistrates and generals — iK ruv Kara upxavrqc virofivrifiuTUV iaropTjae.