The great battles of all nations
from Marathon to the surrender of Cronje in South Africa, 490 B.C. to the present day
Excerpt:
The battle of the Marathon is one of the most resonant in history With it history properly begins. Before then there was history indeed, and much history; there were battles, too, and many of them. Yet, like history, they were fitful flashes, short or long, that subsided into darkness. With Marathon historic consciousness arose.
For a while before there had been history there had been no historian. With Marathon came Herodotus, and from him the first truly historical book, in which, together with the rest of the Persian war, he tells of this great deed. Marathon is memorable for another reason. It stands for a thousand battles. Subsequent struggles for freedom are but echoes and repetitions of it. For the first time, it told a race what a race could do. It was therefore not a battle merely.
It was a promise. It was the gestation of the future. Two thousand three hundred and eighty-eight years ago a council of Athenian officers stood on a hill that overlooked the plain of Marathon, on the eastern coast of Attica. The immediate object of their meeting, says Sir E. S. Creasy, was to consider whether they should give battle to an enemy that lay encamped on the shore beneath them; but on the result of their deliberations.
There were eleven members of that council of war. Ten were the generals who were then annually elected at Athens, one for each of the local tribes into which the Athenians were divided. Each general led the men of his own tribe, and each was invested with equal military authority. But one of the archons was also associated with them in the general command of the army.
This magistrate was termed the polemarch or War-ruler; he had the privilege of leading the right wing of the army in battle, and his vote in a council of war was equal to that of any of the generals. A noble Athenian named CaUimachus was the Warruler of this year; and as such, stood hastening to the earnest discussion of the ten generals.
They had, indeed, deep matter for anxiety, though little aware how momentous to mankind were the votes they were about to give, or how the generations to come would read with interest the record of their discussions. They saw before them the invading forces of a mighty empire, which had in the last fifty years shattered and enslaved nearly all the kingdoms and principalities of the then-known world. They knew that all the resources of their own country were comprised in the battle army entrusted to their guidance. They saw before them a chosen host of the Great King, sent to wreak his special wrath on that country, and on the other insolent little Greek community, which had dared to aid his rebels and burn the capital of one of his provinces.
That victorious host had already fulfilled half its mission of vengeance. Eretria, the confederate of Athens in the bold march against Sardis nine years before, had fallen in the last few days; and the Athenian generals could discern from the heights the island of JEgilia, in which the Persians had deposited their Eretrian prisoners, whom they had reserved to be led away captives into Upper Asia, there to hear their doom from the lips of King Darius himself. Moreover, the men of Athens knew that in the camp before them was their own banished tyrant, who was seeking to be reinstated by foreign scimiters in despotic sway over any remnant of his countrymen that might survive the sack of their town, and might be left behind as loo worthless for leading away into Median bondage.
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History