Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/61

 ATHENS AND SPARTA 49 the bay of the Salamis. The city of Athens was seized by the Persians, but the Athenian people were on board the fleet. The Peloponnesians now wished for nothing but to keep the Persians out of the Peloponnesus ; but Themistocles saw that if a great victory could be won over the Persian navy their army would become much less dangerous, and might be driven out of Greece altogether. He succeeded in keeping the Greek fleets together, and forcing on the great sea fight of Salamis, which, mainly through the seamanship and the valour of the Athenians, ended in the utter destruction of the Persian fleet ; a destruction which King Xerxes himself witnessed from the shore. Never had the forces of the great king met with a disaster so overwhelming. The countless myriads of his army were in Greece, cut off from all their resources. There was nothing for it but to retreat before the Greek fleet could sail for the Helles- pont and cut off his return. Xerxes and most of his army fled, though a sufficiently huge army — three hundred thousand of the best troops — remained behind in hopes that they might complete the conquest after all. But Marathon and Ther- piataea, mopylae and Salamis had taught the Greeks what 479 B.C. they could do, and in the next year that Persian army was shattered at the battle of Piataea. From that time the Persian kings never again dreamed of conquering the Greeks. A hundred and fifty years later the Greeks had shattered the Persian Empire itself, and the sway of Greek conquerors began over all Western Asia. Now it must be remembered that the race whom we call Greeks because the Romans gave them that name were not merely the inhabitants of the Grecian peninsula, or Greece, or even of the islands and coasts of the Aegean Sea. Their colonies had spread far to the west ; Sicily was almost as Greek as Greece itself, and they had many flourishing and prosperous cities or states in Southern Italy. The Greeks who were fight- ing the Persians called upon the Greeks of Sicily to The Western come to their aid ; but at this very time the Sicilian Greeks. Greeks had another enemy to fight, or rather two enemies— the Carthaginians and the Etruscans, neither of them Aryan peoples. D