Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/102

 78 ' HISTORY OF GREECE. their festivals while an invader of superhuman might was at their gates, remind us of the Jews in the latter days of their independence, who suffered the operations of the besieging Ro- man army round their city to be carried on without interruption during the Sabbath.i The Spartans and their confederates reckoned that Leonidas with his detachment would be strong enough to hold the pass of Thermopylje until the Olympic and E[arneian festivals should be past, after which period they were prepared to march to his aid with their whole military force : 2 and they engaged to assemble in Boeotia for the purpose of de- fending Attica against attack on the land-side, while the great mass of the Athenian force was serving on shipboard. At the time when this plan was laid, they believed that the narrow pass of Thermopylae was the only means of possible access for an invading army. But Leonidas, on reaching the spot, dis- covered for the first time that there was also a mountain-path starting from the neighborhood of Trachis, ascending the gorge of the river Asopus and the hill called Anopaea, then crossing the crest of (Eta and descending in the rear of Thermopylae near the Lokrian town of Alpeni. This path — then hardly used, though its ascending half now serves as the regular track from Zeitun, the ancient Lamia, to Salona on the Corinthian gulf, the ancient Amphissa — was revealed to him by its first discoverers, the inhabitants of Trachis, who in former days had conducted the Thessalians over it to attack Phocis, after the Phocians had blocked up the pass of Thermopylae. It was therefore not unknown to the Phocians : it conducted from Tra- chis into their country, and they volunteered to Leonidas that they ATOuld occupy and defend it.3 But the Greeks thus found themselves at Thermopylae under the same necessity of provid- ing a double line of defence, for the mountain-path as well as for the defile, as that which had induced their former army to aban- don Tempe : and so insufficient did their numbers seem, when ' Josephus, Bell. Judaic, i, 7, 3; ii, 16, 4; ibid. Antiqq. Judaic, xiv, 4, 2. K their bodies were attacked on the Sabbath, the Jews defended themselves ; but they would not break through the religious obligations of the day in order to impede any military operations of the besiegers. See Reimar. ad JDiou. Cass. Ixvi, 7.
 * Herodot. -vii, 206 ; viii, 40. ^ Herodot. vii, 212, 216, 218.