Note 392 — Chapter XLII · BATTLES OF PLATÆA AND MYKALE. — FINAL REPULSE OF THE PERSIANS.

It is to this general and solemn meeting, held at Platæa after the victory, that we might probably refer another vow noticed by the historians and orators of the subsequent century, if that vow were not of suspicious authenticity. The Greeks, while promising faithful attachment, and continued peaceful dealing among themselves, and engaging at the same time to amerce in a tithe of their property all who had medized,—are said to have vowed that they would not repair or rebuild the temples which the Persian invader had burnt; but would leave them in their half-ruined condition as a monument of his sacrilege. Some of the injured temples near Athens were seen in their half-burnt state even by the traveller Pausanias (x, 35, 2), in his time. Periklês, forty years after the battle, tried to convoke a Pan-Hellenic assembly at Athens, for the purpose of deliberating what should be done with these temples (Plutarch, Periklês, c. 17). Yet Theopompus pronounced this alleged oath to be a fabrication, though both the orator Lykurgus and Diodorus profess to report it verbatim. We may safely assert that the oath, as they give it, is not genuine; but perhaps the vow of tithing those who had voluntarily joined Xerxes, which Herodotus refers to an earlier period, when success was doubtful, may now have been renewed in the moment of victory: see Diodor. ix, 29; Lykurgus cont. Leokrat. c. 19, p. 193; Polybius, ix, 33; Isokrates, Or. iv; Panegyr. c. 41, p. 74; Theopompus, Fragm. 167, ed. Didot; Suidas, v. Δεκατεύειν, Cicero de Republicâ, iii, 9, and the beginning of the chapter last but one preceding, of this history.