in Asia Minor were accused by the great King Darius of inciting his own
people in Asia Minor to revolt. And he sent an army, which punished and
subdued the offending Greeks. King Darius then decided that he would
invade Greece itself. He thought he could easily master that little scrap
of territory, and capture its straggling colonies along the Mediterranean
coast, and thus extend his own dominion into Europe.

Athens and Sparta were, as usual, engaged in a small war; but at the news
of a threatened Persian invasion, the Greek States sprang solidly
together.

The armies met on the field of Marathon (490 B.C.), and the
Asiatic host, after a desperate conflict, turned and fled. So confident
had the Persians been of victory, that they had brought a mass of white
marble with which to erect a monument on the plain of Marathon. This
Phidias, the great Greek sculptor, carved into a gigantic figure of
Nemesis, to represent Divine vengeance.

The proud and arrogant Persians were not used to defeat. For ten years
they brooded over it and prepared to wipe it out by an overwhelming
victory. Darius was dead; but his son Xerxes, in the year 480
B.C., appeared on the coast of Greece with a vast army, which he
himself led.

The first incident in the war was the most renowned in the history of the
world. If you do not know of it already, you will often hear how Leonidas,
with his little Spartan band of three hundred, defended the narrow rocky
pass at Thermopylæ against the whole Persian army, and how they stood
their ground until every man was killed.