Aristides

On hearing this, the Ephors, as long as it was day, publicly disported themselves in easygoing festival fashion; for it was their festival of the Hyacinthia. But in the night they selected five thousand Spartans, each of whom had seven Helots to attend upon him, and sent them forth without the knowledge of the Athenians. So when Aristides came before them with renewed invectives, they laughed and said he was but a sleepy babbler, for that their army was already in Arcadia on its march against the strangers (they called the Persians strangers).

But Aristides declared they were jesting out of all season, forasmuch as they were deceiving their friends instead of their enemies. This is the way Idomeneus tell the story. But in the decree which Aristides caused to be passed, he himself is not named as envoy, but Cimon, Xanthippus, and Myronides.

Having been elected general with sole powers in view of the expected battle, he came to Plataea[*]( Spring of 479 B.C.) at the head of eight thousand Athenian hoplites. There Pausanias also, the commander in chief of the whole Hellenic army, joined him with his Spartans, and the forces of the rest of the Hellenes kept streaming up.

Now, generally speaking, there was no limit to the encampment of the Barbarians as it lay stretched out along the river Asopus, so vast was it; but round their baggage trains and chief headquarters they built a quadrangular wall, whereof each side was ten stadia in length. To Pausanias and all the Hellenes under him Tisamenus the Eleian made prophecy, and foretold victory for them if they acted on the defensive and did not advance to the attack.

But Aristides sent to Delphi and received from the god response that the Athenians would be superior to their foes if they made vows to Zeus, Cithaeronian Hera, Pan, and the Sphragitic nymphs; paid sacrifices to the heroes Androcrates, Leucon, Pisandrus, Damocrates, Hypsion, Actaeon, and Polyidus; and if they sustained the peril of battle on their own soil, in the plain of Eleusinian Demeter and Cora.

When this oracle was reported to Aristides, it perplexed him greatly. The heroes to whom he was to sacrifice were, it was true, ancient dignitaries of the Plataeans; and the cave of the Sphragitic nymphs was on one of the peaks of Cithaeron, facing the summer sunsets; and in it there was also an oracle in former days, as they say, and many of the natives were possessed of the oracular power, and these were called nympholepti, or nymph-possessed.