The Greeks, terrified, submitted for the most part to the Great King and joined their armies to the Persian force.  The Athenians sent to consult the oracle of Delphi, but received only the reply; “Athens will be destroyed from base to summit.”  The god being asked to give a more favorable response, replied, “Zeus accords to Pallas [protectress of Athens] a wall of wood which alone shall not be taken; in that shall you and your children find safety.”  The priests of whom they asked the interpretation of this oracle bade the Athenians quit Attica and go to establish themselves elsewhere.  But Themistocles explained the “wall of wood” as meaning the ships; they should retire to the fleet and fight the Persians on sea.

Athens and Sparta, having decided on resistance, endeavored to form a league of the Greeks against the Persians.  Few cities had the courage to enter it, and these placed themselves under the command of the Spartans.  Four battles in one year settled the war.  At Thermopylae, Leonidas, king of Sparta, who tried to bar the entrance to a defile was outflanked and overwhelmed.  At Salamis, the Persian fleet, crowded into a narrow space where the ships embarrassed one another, was defeated by the Greek navy (480).  At Plataea the rest of the Persian army left in Greece was annihilated by the Greek hoplites; of 300,000 men but 40,000 escaped.  The same day at Mycale, on the coast of Asia, an army of the Greeks landed and routed the Persians (479).  The Greeks had conquered the Great King.

=Reasons for the Greek Victory.=—­The Median war was not a national war between Greeks and barbarians.  All the Greeks of Asia and half the Greeks of Europe fought on the Persian side.  Many of the other Greeks gave no assistance.  In reality it was a fight of the Great King and his subjects against Sparta, Athens, and their allies.

The conquest of this great horde by two small peoples appeared at that time as a prodigy.  The gods, said the Greeks, had fought for them.  But there is less wonder when we examine the two antagonists more closely:  the Persian army was innumerable, and Xerxes had thought that victory was a matter of numbers.  But this multitude was an embarrassment to itself.  It did not know where to secure food for itself, it advanced but slowly, and it choked itself on the day of combat.  Likewise the ships arranged in too close order drove their prows into neighboring ships and shattered their oars.  Then in this immense crowd there were, according to Herodotus, many men but few soldiers.  Only the Persians and Medes, the flower of the army, fought with energy; the rest advanced only under the lash, they had come under pressure to a war which had no interest for them, ill-armed and without discipline, ready to desert as soon as no one was watching them.  At Plataea the Medes and Persians were the only ones to do any fighting; the subjects kept aloof.