body-armour, and never taught by training to keep the even front
and act with the regular movement of the Greek infantry, fought
at grievous disadvantage with their shorter and feebler weapons
against the compact array of well-armed Athenian and Plataean
spearmen, all perfectly drilled to perform each necessary
evolution in concert, and to preserve an uniform and unwavering
line in battle. In personal courage and in bodily activity the
Persians were not inferior to their adversaries. Their spirits
were not yet cowed by the recollection of former defeats; and
they lavished their lives freely, rather than forfeit the fame
which they had won by so many victories. While their rear ranks
poured an incessant shower of arrows over the heads of their
comrades, the foremost Persians kept rushing forward, sometimes
singly, sometimes in desperate groups of twelve or ten upon the
projecting spears of the Greeks, striving to force a lane into
the phalanx, and to bring their scimetars and daggers into play.
But the Greeks felt their superiority, and though the fatigue of
the long-continued action told heavily on their inferior numbers,
the sight of the carnage that they dealt amongst their assailants
nerved them to fight still more fiercely on.

[See the description, in the 62nd section of the ninth book of
Herodotus, of the gallantry shown by the Persian infantry against
the Lacedaemonians at Plataea. We have no similar detail of the
fight at Marathon, but we know that it was long and obstinately
contested (see the 113th section of the sixth book of Herodotus,
and the lines from the "Vespae" already quoted), and the spirit
of the Persians must have been even higher at Marathon than at
Plataea. In both battles it was only the true Persians and the
Sacae who showed this valour; the other Asiatics fled like