[Footnote 45:  It is remarkable that there is no other instance of a Greek general deviating from the ordinary mode of bringing a phalanx of spearmen into action until the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea, more than a century after Marathon, when Epaminondas introduced the tactics which Alexander the Great in ancient times, and Frederick the Great in modern times, made so famous, of concentrating an overpowering force to bear on some decisive point of the enemy’s line, while he kept back, or, in military phrase, refused the weaker part of his own.]

In this order, and availing himself probably of the inequalities of the ground, so as to conceal his preparations from the enemy till the last possible moment, Miltiades drew up the eleven thousand infantry whose spears were to decide this crisis in the struggle between the European and the Asiatic worlds.  The sacrifices by which the favor of heaven was sought, and its will consulted, were announced to show propitious omens.  The trumpet sounded for action, and, chanting the hymn of battle, the little army bore down upon the host of the foe.  Then, too, along the mountain slopes of Marathon must have resounded the mutual exhortation which AEschylus, who fought in both battles, tells us was afterward heard over the waves of Salamis:  “On, sons of the Greeks!  Strike for the freedom of your country! strike for the freedom of your children and of your wives—­for the shrines of your fathers’ gods, and for the sepulchres of your sires.  All—­all are now staked upon the strife.”

Instead of advancing at the usual slow pace of the phalanx, Miltiades brought his men on at a run.  They were all trained in the exercise of the palaestra, so that there was no fear of their ending the charge in breathless exhaustion; and it was of the deepest importance for him to traverse as rapidly as possible the mile or so of level ground that lay between the mountain foot and the Persian outposts, and so to get his troops into close action before the Asiatic cavalry could mount, form, and manoeuvre against him, or their archers keep him long under fire, and before the enemy’s generals could fairly deploy their masses.

“When the Persians,” says Herodotus, “saw the Athenians running down on them, without horse or bowmen, and scanty in numbers, they thought them a set of madmen rushing upon certain destruction.”  They began, however, to prepare to receive them, and the Eastern chiefs arrayed, as quickly as time and place allowed, the varied races who served in their motley ranks.  Mountaineers from Hyrcania and Afghanistan, wild horsemen from the steppes of Khorassan, the black archers of Ethiopia, swordsmen from the banks of the Indus, the Oxus, the Euphrates and the Nile, made ready against the enemies of the Great King.