Athenian hoplites slew their thousands also. So at length the Persian peril rolled away and Greece was able to breathe again.

This whole episode was the great achievement of the Greeks in the field of action. It passed into the realm of heroic history. It is almost the only historical episode which the drama, usually devoted to heroic and epic subjects, was permitted to use. No public oration was complete without a reference to it. Vase-painters also depicted the story of Darius and Xerxes as they did that of Hector and Priam. It remained on the border-line of the permissible, however, for when temple sculptors wished to allude to it they generally did so under cover of Homeric contests between Greeks and Trojans or mythological battles between gods and giants or Lapithæ and Centaurs. The memory of this united action had some influence in counteracting the local separatism of the Greeks.