Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/213

 BATTLES OF PLAT^A AND 51 Y KALE. 189 proprietors of that ground on which the liberation of Greece had been achieved. The market-place and centre of their town was selected as the scene for the solemn sacrifice of thanksgivintr, offered up by Pausanias, after the battle, to Zeus Eleutherius, in the name and presence of all the assembled allies. The local gods and heroes of the Plataean territory, who had been invoked in prayer before the battle, and who had granted their soil as a propitious field for the Greek arms, were made partakers of this ceremony, and witnesses as well as guarantees of the engage- ments with which it was accompanied. i The Platagans, now re- entering their city, which the Persian invasion had compelled them to desert, were invested with the honorable duty of cele- brating the periodical sacrifice in commemoration of this great victory, as well as of rendering care and religious service at the tombs of the fallen warriors. As an aid to enable them to dis- charge this obligation, which probably might have pressed hard upon them at a time when their city was half-ruined and their fields unsown, they received out of the prize-money the large allotment of eighty talents, which was partly employed in build- ing and adorning a handsome temple of Athene, — the symbol probably of renewed connection with Athens. They undertook to render religious honors every year to the tombs of the warriors, and to celebrate in every fifth year the grand public solemnity of the Eleutheria with gymnastic matches analogous to the other great festival games of Greece.2 In consideration of the dis- charge of these duties, together with the sanctity of the ground, Pausanias, and the whole body of allies, bound themselves by oath to guarantee the autonomy of Plataea, and the inviolability ' Thuryd. ii, 71, 72. So the Roman emperor Vitellius, on visiting the field of Bebriacum, where his troops had recently been victorious, " instau- rabat sacnim Diis loci." (Tacitus, Histor. ii, 70.) - Thucyd. ii, 71; Plutarch, Aristeides, c. 19-21; Strabo, ix, p. 412; Pausanias, ix, 2, 4. The Eleutheria were celebrated on the fourth of the Attic month Boedromion, which was the day on which the battle itself was fought ; while the annual decoration of the tombs, and ceremonies in honor of the deceased, took place on the sixteenth of the Attic month Moemakterion. K. F. Hermann (Gottesdienstliche Alterthiimer der Griechen, ch. 63, note 9) has treated these two celebrations as if they were one.