Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/130

102 nine thousand men the generals and the Polemarch Callimachus, after sending a swift runner to Sparta for help, marched out to Marathon and occupied the precinct of Hercules on the slope of a mountain near which the road to Athens passed, whence they could see the enemy encamped on the plain below.

There was again a division of opinion as to whether they should attack at once. The votes of the ten generals were equally divided, and the casting vote therefore being with Callimachus, he was persuaded by Miltiades to give it in favour of attacking. The four generals who were on the same side gave up their days of command to Miltiades, whose object seems to have been not so much to make an immediate attack as to have the power of attacking whenever he thought the moment had come. The famous battle was, in fact, fought on his own day of command, and seems to have been decided upon owing to information signalled to Miltiades by some Ionians in the Persian army to the effect that the Persian cavalry had been re-embarked. For a treasonable party in Athens had communicated to the enemy—perhaps by the signal of a flashing shield—that the fighting force had left Athens; and the Persian generals seem thereupon to have taken measures at once to sail round Sunium, hoping to find the city defenceless. With Eretria in their hands, commanding the Attic coast, this would probably have been their wisest course in any case. Their large fleet would easily have closed the harbour of Phalerum or Piraeus. Athens was an open town; there were as yet no long walls joining it to its