and easily defeated the Persian hosts by creating a panic.  There was no resisting a phalanx sixteen files deep, with their projecting pikes, aided by the heavily armed cavalry, all under the strictest military discipline and animated by patriotic ardor.  This terrible Macedonian phalanx was a great advance over the early armies of the Greeks, who fought without discipline in a hand to hand encounter, with swords and spears, after exhausting their arrows.  They had learned two things of great importance,—­a rigid discipline, and a concentration of forces which made an army a machine.  Under Alexander, the grand phalanx consisted of 16,384 men, made up of four divisions and smaller phalanxes.

In Roman armies we see a still further advance in the military art, as it existed in the time of Augustus, which required centuries to perfect.  The hardy physique and stern nature of the Romans, exercised and controlled by their organizing genius, evolved the Roman legion, which learned to resist the impetuous assaults of the elephants of the East, the phalanx of the Greeks, and the Teutonic barbarians.  The indomitable courage of the Romans, trained under severest discipline and directed by means of an organization divided and subdivided and officered almost as perfectly as our modern corps and divisions and brigades and regiments and companies and squads, marched over and subdued the world.

The Roman soldier was trained to march twenty miles a day, under a burden of eighty pounds; to swim rivers, to climb mountains, to penetrate forests, and to encounter every kind of danger.  He was taught that his destiny was to die in battle:  death was at once his duty and his glory.  He enlisted in the army with little hope of revisiting his home; he crossed seas and deserts and forests with the idea of spending his life in the service of his country.  His pay was only a denarius daily, equal to about sixteen cents of our money.  Marriage for him was discouraged or forbidden.  However insignificant the legionary was as a man, he gained importance from the great body with which he was identified:  he was both the servant and the master of the State.  He had an intense esprit de corps; he was bound up in the glory of his legion.  Both religion and honor bound him to his standards; the golden eagle which glittered in his front was the object of his fondest devotion.  Nor was it possible to escape the penalty of cowardice or treachery or disobedience; he could be chastised with blows by his centurion, and his general could doom him to death.  Never was the severity of military discipline relaxed; military exercises were incessant, in winter as in summer.  In the midst of peace the Roman troops were familiarized with the practice of war.