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 86 fflSTORY OF GREECE. Herakleid leader, had taken post there, but he treated the new*« with scorn : and when a horseman, — whom he sent to recon- noitre them, and who approached near enough to survey their position, without exciting any attention among them by his pres- ence, — brought back to him a description of the pass, the wall of defence, and the apparent number of the division, he was yet more astonished and puzzled. It happened too, that at the mo- ment when this horseman rode up, the Spartans were in the advanced guard, outside of the wall : some were engaged in gymnastic exercises, others in combing their long hair, and none of them heeded the approach of the hostile spy. Xerxes next sent for the Spartan king, Demaratus, to ask what he was to think of such madness ; upon which the latter reminded him of their former conversation at Doriskus, again assuring him that the Spartans in the pass would resist to the death, in spite of the smallness of their number ; and adding, that it was their cus- tom, in moments of special danger, to comb their hair with pecu- liar care. In spite of this assurance from Demaratus, and of the pass not only occupied, but in itself so narrow and impracti- cable, before his eyes, Xerxes still persisted in believing that the Greeks did not intend to resist, and that they would disperse of their own accord. He delayed the attack for four days : on the fifth he became wroth at the impudence and recklessness of the petty garrison before him, and sent against them the Median and Kissian divisions, with orders to seize them and bring them as prisoners into his presence.^ Though we read thus in Herodotus, it is hardly possible to believe that we are reading historical reality : we rather find laid out before us a picture of human self-conceit in its most exag- gerated form, ripe for the stroke of the jealous gods, and des- tined, like the interview between Crcesus and Solon, to point and enforce that moral which was ever present to the mind of the historian ; whose religious and poetical imagination, even uncon- sciously to himself, surrounds the naked facts of history with accompaniments of speech and motive which neither Homer nor ^schylus would have deemed unsuitable. The whole pro- ' Herod, vii, 208, 210. iri/j.izei ec avroiic Mt/Sovc Kal KiGaiovg ^vuu^ei( ivreiXufievog aeag ^uyprjaavTa^ ayeiv tc o^iv t^v euvrov.