GREECE.]

LEONIDAS.

noble resolution which has placed him at the head of the greatest heroes in every age. He ordered the allied troops to abandon a post which would have become their grave, to reserve themselves for more fortunate times, and singly with the Spartans, the Thespians, and 400 Thebans, determined upon the most daring enterprize: "In the camp of Xerxes," said he to his companions, we must seek victory or death!" They replied by an acclamation of joy. He then ordered a frugal repast, adding, "We shall soon take another with Pluto;" and on the decline of day, he threw himself in the enemies' entrenchments. Every thing that opposed his passage was overthrown. Night added to the horror of his march, and he spread terror into every soul. Xerxes, terrified, abandoned his tent; and the Persian army, conceiving that all the forces of Greece had at length collected to avenge their wrongs, hastened to escape from death, which they received in their eagerness to avoid it.

The break of day, however, discovering to the Persians the small numbers of their conquerors, they immediately formed, and renewed the combat. Leonidas fell beneath a shower of arrows. The honour of bearing away his body, occasioned a terrible conflict between his soldiers and the most daring of the Persian army. Three times the Greeks, in their retreat, repulsed their pursuers; but attacked incessantly by fresh troops, they all perished except one man, who was considered a coward in Lacedæmon, and who only recovered his honour by performing prodigies of valour at the battle of Platæa.

The Greeks erected at Thermopyla a monument to these brave defenders of their country: forty years after

wards Pausanias caused the reliques of Leonidas to be conveyed to Sparta. Upon the tomb, raised to his memory, they pronounced every year a funeral oration in praise of his valour, and that of his companions in arms; and celebrated festivals, called Leonidea, at which only the Lacedæmonians were permitted to contend. died about 480 years before the Christian era.

He

Ir required a great painter to trace the origin, the progress, and the prodigious success of a people who, in the end, governed the rest of the world. What a phenomenon, that a city, at first composed of certain refugées, where guilt found an asylum, whose alliance was despised by their neighbours, who were only able to obtain wives by fraud and violence, and who, by the happy influence of a constitution applicable to the developement of talents, should produce, in six centuries, more illustrious men, and more distinguished characters, than all the nations combined in the circuit of their existence!

Rome could not subsist without violent commotions: the laws of Numa had been framed for monarchy, they became almost useless when she became a republic; an aristocracy more imperious and insupportable than royalty had usurped its place. The people, oppressed, made choice of defenders, while the tribuneship protected liberty in the midst of dissentions; and sometimes by the ascendancy of words, sometimes by menaces and seditions, prevented Rome from becoming the slave of a nobility, who sought in peace, in war, in all intestine or foreign dissentions, nothing but the means of maintaining or encreasing their prerogatives.

Livy found no other succours than indigested annals, and insipid chronicles: he thence extracted facts, which he embellished by the charms of his eloquence. His