the plains of Marathon, distant only ten miles from Athens. The danger, which threatened his country, called forth the martial spirit of our poet ; and very honourable mention is made of him, and his two brothers, Cynægirus and Amynias, for their eminent valour in that battle: to have wanted courage on such an occasion would have been a mark of the most abject baseness ; but to be distinguished in an action, where every soldier was an hero, is a proof of superior merit: in a picture representing the battle of Marathon the portrait of Æschylus was drawn : this was all the honour that Miltiades himself received from the state for his glorious conduct on that day; he was placed at the head of the ten commanders, and drawn in the act of encouraging the soldiers and beginning the battle.
Sometime after, Cynægirus was one of the four naval commanders, who, with an armament of one thousand Grecians, defeated thirty thousand Persians; but he lost his life in the action.
Ten years after the battle of Marathon, when Xerxes made that immense preparation to revenge the defeat of his father, we find the two surviving brothers exerting their courage in the sea-fight off Salamis: here Amynias, too boldly laying hold of a Persian ship, had his hand lopped off with a sabre ; but Æschylus defended him, and saved his life; and the Athenians decreed him the first ho-
