Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/154

126 the first to storm the camp. As at Plataea, the battle—fought like the latter near a temple of Demeter—and the fight at the camp resulted in the practical annihilation of the Persian army. Even a division stationed on the high ground of Mykale as a reserve were betrayed and misled by Milesian guides, and perished with the rest. A curious story is told by Herodotus in regard to this battle. On the morning of the day a herald's staff was washed on shore, and a report spread of the victory gained at Plataea. Whether historians are mistaken in placing the battles on the same day, or whether (as later writers assume) the Greek generals deliberately spread the report to encourage their men, we cannot tell. In times of excitement such rumours will spread among men. Whatever their origin, their effect is often decisive, and the Greeks naturally attributed them to divine influence.

This victory freed many Ionian states from Persia, and made all the other Hellenic states in Asia ready to strike for freedom. In order to secure this a beginning of what was afterwards a much larger league was made by Samos, Chios, and Lesbos, whose citizens bound themselves by an oath—confirmed by dropping leaden tablets into the sea—to furnish ships and men to resist the Persians. In fact, measures were at once begun. The Greek fleet sailed to the Chersonese, and freed the cities there, expelling the royal garrisons, the last to hold out being Sestos, which fell in the course of the winter.

In the spring of the next year (B.C. 478), the Greek fleet again returned to the Aegean, and in the