Mardonius

But at the beginning of spring the other generals were deposed by the king from their offices, and Mardonius son of Gobryas, a man young in years and recently married to Darius ' daughter Artozostre, came down to the coast at the head of a very great army and fleet.

When Mardonius reached Cilicia at the head of this army, he himself embarked on shipboard and sailed with the rest of his ships, while other captains led the land army to the Hellespont.

Mardonius deposed all the Ionian tyrants and set up democracies in their cities.

Was it not he who, being appointed treasurer at the Acropolis, stole from that place those prizes of victory which our ancestors carried off from the barbarians, the throne with silver feet, and Mardonius’s scimitar, which weighed three hundred darics?

And they fought together with you and the others who were seeking to save the freedom of Greece in the final battle at Plataea against Mardonius, the King’s general, and deposited the liberty thus secured as a common prize for all the Greeks.

For they possess as a far more august and excellent offering the scimitar of Mardonius and the shields of the Laconians once captured at Pylos, than the propylaea of the Acropolis and the Olympieum, built at a cost of more than ten thousand talents.

” Mardonius, in the Polyhymnia of Herodotus, blames the Grecians, who, being united in one language, might settle their quarrels by messengers of peace, by heralds, and negotiations, rather than by war.