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 The Repulse of Persia and the Athenian Empire 177 and slow when the crisis demanded quick and vigorous action, Spartan was finally induced to put her army into the field. When Mar- adkances^^ donius in Attica saw the Spartan king Pausanias advancing through the Corinthian Isthmus and threatening his rear, he withdrew northward, having for the second time laid waste Attica far and wide. With the united armies of Sparta, Athens, and other allies behind him, Pausanias was able to lead some thirty thousand heavy-armed Greeks of the phalanx, as he fol- lowed Mardonius into Boeotia. In several days of preliminary movements which brought the Battle of two armies into contact at Platsea, the clever Persian showed finai^^e'feat his superiority, out-maneuvering Pausanias and even gaining ^}^^^^^^ possession of the southern passes behind the Greeks and cap- turing a train of their supply wagons. But when Mardonius led his archers forward at double-quick, and the Persians kneeling behind their line of shields rained deadly volleys of arrows into the compact Greek lines, the Hellenes never flinched, although their comrades were falling on every hand. With the gaps closed up, the massive Greek phalanxes pushed through the line of Persian shields, and, as at Marathon, the spear proved invincible against the bow. In a heroic but hopeless effort to rally his Death of broken lines, Mardonius himself fell. The Persian cavalry covered the rear of the flying Asiatic army and saved it from destruction. Not only European Greece, but Ionia too, was saved from Athenian . . . -, . r 1 ^ 1 • 1 • ^- fl^^t victori- Asiatic despotism ; for the Greek triremes, having meantime ous in i crossed to the peninsula of Mycale on the north of Miletus, drove out or destroyed the remnants of the Persian fleet. The Athenians now also captured and occupied Sestus on the Euro- pean side of the Hellespont and thus held the crossing from Asia into Europe closed against further Persian invasion. Thus the grandsons of the men who had seen Persia advance to the ^gean had blocked her further progress in the west and thrust her back from Europe. Indeed, no Persian army ever set foot in European Greece again. onia and the north