the best opportunities for rallying if broken; and on
strengthening his wings, so as to insure advantage at those
points; and he trusted to his own skill, and to his soldiers'
discipline, for the improvement of that advantage into decisive
victory.

[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 Mantineia,
more than a century after Marathon, when Epaminondas introduced
the tactics (which Alexander the Great in ancient times, and
Frederic the Great in modern times, made so famous) of
concentrating an overpowering force 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 favour 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 afterwards 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