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Title: Xerxes

Author: Jacob Abbott

Release date: May 6, 2008 [eBook #25351]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK XERXES ***

Makers of History

Xerxes
BY JACOB ABBOTT

WITH ENGRAVINGS

NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1902

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Clerk's Office for the Southern District of New York.
Copyright, 1878, by Jacob Abbott

Artabanus and the Ghost

PREFACE.
One special object which the author of this series has had in view, in the
plan and method which he has followed in the preparation of the successive
volumes, has been to adapt them to the purposes of text-books in schools.
The study of a general compend of history, such as is frequently used as a
text-book, is highly useful, if it comes in at the right stage of education,
when the mind is sufficiently matured, and has acquired sufficient
preliminary knowledge to understand and appreciate so condensed a
generalization as a summary of the whole history of a nation contained in
an ordinary volume must necessarily be. Without this degree of maturity of
mind, and this preparation, the study of such a work will be, as it too
frequently is, a mere mechanical committing to memory of names, and
dates, and phrases, which awaken no interest, communicate no ideas, and
impart no useful knowledge to the mind.
A class of ordinary pupils, who have not yet become much acquainted with
history, would, accordingly, be more benefited by having their attention
concentrated, at first, on detached and separate topics, such as those which
form the subjects, respectively, of these volumes. By studying thus fully the
history of individual monarchs, or the narratives of single events, they can
go more fully into detail; they conceive of the transactions described as
realities; their reflecting and reasoning powers are occupied on what they
read; they take notice of the motives of conduct, of the gradual development
of character, the good or ill desert of actions, and of the connection of
causes and consequences, both in respect to the influence of wisdom and
virtue on the one hand, and, on the other, of folly and crime. In a word, their
minds and hearts are occupied instead of merely their memories. They
reason, they sympathize, they pity, they approve, and they condemn. They
enjoy the real and true pleasure which constitutes the charm of historical
study for minds that are mature; and they acquire a taste for truth instead of
fiction, which will tend to direct their reading into proper channels in all
future years.

The use of these works, therefore, as text-books in classes, has been kept
continually in mind in the preparation of them. The running index on the
tops of the pages is intended to serve instead of questions. These captions
can be used in their present form as topics, in respect to which, when
announced in the class, the pupils are to repeat substantially what is said on
the page; or, on the other hand, questions in form, if that mode is preferred,
can be readily framed from them by the teacher. In all the volumes, a very
regular system of division is observed, which will greatly facilitate the
assignment of lessons.

CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
I. THE MOTHER OF XERXES 13
II. EGYPT AND GREECE 33
DEBATE ON THE PROPOSED
III. 56
INVASION OF GREECE
PREPARATIONS FOR THE
IV. 78
INVASION OF GREECE
THE CROSSING OF THE
V. 100
HELLESPONT
THE REVIEW OF THE ARMY AT
VI. 125
DORISCUS
PREPARATIONS OF THE GREEKS
VII. 151
FOR DEFENSE
THE ADVANCE OF XERXES INTO
VIII. 178
GREECE
IX. THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLÆ 201
X. THE BURNING OF ATHENS 224
XI. THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS 245
XII. THE RETURN TO PERSIA 284

ENGRAVINGS.
PAGE
ARTABANUS AND THE GHOST Frontispiece.
MAP OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE xii
PHERON DEFYING THE NILE 48
MAP OF GREECE 101
XERXES CROSSING THE
121
HELLESPONT
FATE OF THE PERSIAN
158
EMBASSADORS AT SPARTA
CITADEL AT ATHENS 241
RETURN OF XERXES TO PERSIA 297

Map of the Persian Empire

XERXES.

Chapter I.

The Mother of Xerxes.
B.C. 522–484

T he name of Xerxes is associated in the minds of men
with the idea of the highest attainable elevation of Persian
magnificence.
human magnificence and grandeur. This monarch was
the sovereign of the ancient Persian empire when it was at the height of its
prosperity and power. It is probable, however, that his greatness and fame
lose nothing by the manner in which his story comes down to us through
the Greek historians. The Greeks conquered Xerxes, and, in relating his
history, they magnify the wealth, the power, and the resources of his
empire, by way of exalting the greatness and renown of their own exploits
in subduing him.
The mother of Xerxes was Atossa, a daughter of Cyrus
the Great, who was the founder of the Persian empire. The mother of
Xerxes.
Cyrus was killed in Scythia, a wild and barbarous region Cambyses.
lying north of the Black and Caspian Seas. His son
Cambyses succeeded him.
A kingdom, or an empire, was regarded, in ancient days,
much in the light of an estate, which the sovereign held Ambition and
selfishness of kings.
as a species of property, and which he was to manage
mainly with a view to the promotion of his own personal aggrandizement
and pleasure. A king or an emperor could have more palaces, more money,
and more wives than other men; and if he was of an overbearing or
ambitious spirit, he could march into his neighbors' territories, and after
gratifying his love of adventure with various romantic exploits, and gaining
great renown by his ferocious impetuosity in battle, he could end his
expedition, perhaps, by adding his neighbors' palaces, and treasures, and
wives to his own.
Divine Providence, however, the mysterious power that
overrules all the passions and impulses of men, and General influence
exerted by great

brings extended and general good out of local and sovereigns upon the
community.
particular evil, has made the ambition and the
selfishness of princes the great means of preserving order and government
among men. These great ancient despots, for example, would not have been
able to collect their revenues, or enlist their armies, or procure supplies for
their campaigns, unless their dominions were under a regular and complete
system of social organization, such as should allow all the industrial
pursuits of commerce and of agriculture, throughout the mass of the
community, to go regularly on. Thus absolute monarchs, however
ambitious, and selfish, and domineering in their characters, have a strong
personal interest in the establishment of order and of justice between man
and man throughout all the regions which are under their sway. In fact, the
greater their ambition, their selfishness, and their pride, the stronger will
this interest be; for, just in proportion as order, industry, and internal
tranquillity prevail in a country, just in that proportion can revenues be
collected from it, and armies raised and maintained.
It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose of the great heroes,
and sovereigns, and conquerors that have appeared from Labors of great
conquerors.
time to time among mankind, that the usual and ordinary Cæsar.
result of their influence and action has been that of Darius.
disturbance and disorganization. It is true that a vast William the
Conqueror.
amount of disturbance and disorganization has often Napoleon.
followed from the march of their armies, their sieges,
their invasions, and the other local and temporary acts of violence which
they commit; but these are the exceptions, not the rule. It must be that such
things are exceptions, since, in any extended and general view of the
subject, a much greater amount of social organization, industry, and peace is
necessary to raise and maintain an army, than that army can itself destroy.
The deeds of destruction which great conquerors perform attract more
attention and make a greater impression upon mankind than the quiet,
patient, and long-continued labors by which they perfect and extend the
general organization of the social state. But these labors, though less
noticed by men, have really employed the energies of great sovereigns in a
far greater degree than mankind have generally imagined. Thus we should
describe the work of Cæsar's life in a single word more truly by saying that
he organized Europe, than that he conquered it. His bridges, his roads, his

systems of jurisprudence, his coinage, his calendar, and other similar means
and instruments of social arrangement, and facilities for promoting the
pursuits of industry and peace, mark, far more properly, the real work which
that great conqueror performed among mankind, than his battles and his
victories. Darius was, in the same way, the organizer of Asia. William the
Conqueror completed, or, rather, advanced very far toward completing, the
social organization of England; and even in respect to Napoleon, the true
and proper memorial of his career is the successful working of the
institutions, the systems, and the codes which he perfected and introduced
into the social state, and not the brazen column, formed from captured
cannon, which stands in the Place Vendôme.
These considerations, obviously true, though not always
borne in mind, are, however, to be considered as making Heroes and
conquerors.
the characters of the great sovereigns, in a moral point of The main spring of
view, neither the worse nor the better. In all that they their actions.
did, whether in arranging and systematizing the
functions of social life, or in ruthless deeds of conquest and destruction,
they were actuated, in a great measure, by selfish ambition. They arranged
and organized the social state in order to form a more compact and solid
pedestal for the foundation of their power. They maintained peace and order
among their people, just as a master would suppress quarrels among his
slaves, because peace among laborers is essential to productive results.
They fixed and defined legal rights, and established courts to determine and
enforce them; they protected property; they counted and classified men;
they opened roads; they built bridges; they encouraged commerce; they
hung robbers, and exterminated pirates—all, that the collection of their
revenues and the enlistment of their armies might go on without hinderance
or restriction. Many of them, indeed, may have been animated, in some
degree, by a higher and nobler sentiment than this. Some may have felt a
sort of pride in the contemplation of a great, and prosperous, and wealthy
empire, analogous to that which a proprietor feels in surveying a well-
conditioned, successful, and productive estate. Others, like Alfred, may
have felt a sincere and honest interest in the welfare of their fellow-men,
and the promotion of human happiness may have been, in a greater or less
degree, the direct object of their aim. Still, it can not be denied that a selfish
and reckless ambition has been, in general, the main spring of action with

heroes and conquerors, which, while it aimed only at personal
aggrandizement, has been made to operate, through the peculiar mechanism
of the social state which the Divine wisdom has contrived, as a means, in
the main of preserving and extending peace and order among mankind, and
not of destroying them.
But to return to Atossa. Her father Cyrus, who laid the
foundation of the great Persian empire, was, for a hero Cyrus.
and conqueror, tolerably considerate and just, and he Character and
career of Cambyses.
desired, probably, to promote the welfare and happiness
of his millions of subjects; but his son Cambyses, Atossa's brother, having
been brought up in expectation of succeeding to vast wealth and power, and
having been, as the sons of the wealthy and the powerful often are in all
ages of the world, wholly neglected by his father during the early part of his
life, and entirely unaccustomed to control, became a wild, reckless, proud,
selfish, and ungovernable young man. His father was killed suddenly in
battle, as has already been stated, and Cambyses succeeded him.
Cambyses's career was short, desperate, and most tragical in its end.[A] In
fact, he was one of the most savage, reckless, and abominable monsters that
have ever lived.
It was the custom in those days for the Persian monarchs
to have many wives, and, what is still more remarkable, Wives of
Cambyses.
whenever any monarch died, his successor inherited his
predecessor's family as well as his throne. Cyrus had several children by his
various wives. Cambyses and Smerdis were the only sons, but there were
daughters, among whom Atossa was the most distinguished. The ladies of
the court were accustomed to reside in different palaces, or in different
suites of apartments in the same palace, so that they lived in a great measure
isolated from each other. When Cambyses came to the throne, and thus
entered into possession of his father's palaces, he saw and fell in love with
one of his father's daughters. He wished to make her one of his wives. He
was accustomed to the unrestricted indulgence of every appetite and
passion, but he seems to have had some slight misgivings in regard to such
a step as this. He consulted the Persian judges. They conferred upon the
subject, and then replied that they had searched among the laws of the
realm, and though they found no law allowing a man to marry his sister,

they found many which authorized a Persian king to do whatever he
pleased.
Cambyses therefore added the princess to the number of
his wives, and not long afterward he married another of He marries his
sister.
his father's daughters in the same way. One of these
princesses was Atossa.
Cambyses invaded Egypt, and in the course of his mad
career in that country he killed his brother Smerdis and Death of Cambyses.
one of his sisters, and at length was killed himself.
Atossa escaped the dangers of this stormy and terrible reign, and returned
safely to Susa after Cambyses's death.
Smerdis, the brother of Cambyses, would have been
Cambyses's successor if he had survived him; but he had Smerdis the
been privately assassinated by Cambyses's orders, magian. Cunning of
though his death had been kept profoundly secret by Smerdis.
those who had perpetrated the deed. There was another
Smerdis in Susa, the Persian capital, who was a magian—that is, a sort of
priest—in whose hands, as regent, Cambyses had left the government while
he was absent on his campaigns. This magian Smerdis accordingly
conceived the plan of usurping the throne, as if he were Smerdis the prince,
resorting to a great many ingenious and cunning schemes to conceal his
deception. Among his other plans, one was to keep himself wholly
sequestered from public view, with a few favorites, such, especially, as had
not personally known Smerdis the prince. In the same manner he secluded
from each other and from himself all who had known Smerdis, in order to
prevent their conferring with one another, or communicating to each other
any suspicions which they might chance to entertain. Such seclusion, so far
as related to the ladies of the royal family, was not unusual after the death
of a king, and Smerdis did not deviate from the ordinary custom, except to
make the isolation and confinement of the princesses and queens more
rigorous and strict than common. By means of this policy he was enabled to
go on for some months without detection, living all the while in the greatest
luxury and splendor, but at the same time in absolute seclusion, and in
unceasing anxiety and fear.

One chief source of his solicitude was lest he should be
detected by means of his ears! Some years before, when His feeling of
he was in a comparatively obscure position, he had in insecurity.
some way or other offended his sovereign, and was punished by having his
ears cut off. It was necessary, therefore, to keep the marks of this mutilation
carefully concealed by means of his hair and his head-dress, and even with
these precautions he could never feel perfectly secure.
At last one of the nobles of the court, a sagacious and
observing man, suspected the imposture. He had no Smerdis suspected.
access to Smerdis himself, but his daughter, whose name His imposture
discovered.
was Phædyma, was one of Smerdis's wives. The
nobleman was excluded from all direct intercourse with Smerdis, and even
with his daughter; but he contrived to send word to his daughter, inquiring
whether her husband was the true Smerdis or not. She replied that she did
not know, inasmuch as she had never seen any other Smerdis, if, indeed,
there had been another. The nobleman then attempted to communicate with
Atossa, but he found it impossible to do so. Atossa had, of course, known
her brother well, and was on that very account very closely secluded by the
magian. As a last resort, the nobleman sent to his daughter a request that she
would watch for an opportunity to feel for her husband's ears while he was
asleep. He admitted that this would be a dangerous attempt, but his
daughter, he said, ought to be willing to make it, since, if her pretended
husband were really an impostor, she ought to take even a stronger interest
than others in his detection. Phædyma was at first afraid to undertake so
dangerous a commission; but she at length ventured to do so, and, by
passing her hand under his turban one night, while he was sleeping on his
couch, she found that the ears were gone.[B]
The consequence of this discovery was, that a
conspiracy was formed to dethrone and destroy the Death of Smerdis.
Succession of
usurper. The plot was successful. Smerdis was killed; his Darius.
imprisoned queens were set free, and Darius was raised
to the throne in his stead.
Atossa now, by that strange principle of succession which has been already
alluded to, became the wife of Darius, and she figures frequently and
conspicuously in history during his long and splendid reign.

Her name is brought into notice in one case in a
remarkable manner, in connection with an expedition Atossa's sickness.
which Darius sent on an exploring tour into Greece and The Greek
physician.
Italy. She was herself the means, in fact, of sending the
expedition. She was sick; and after suffering secretly and in silence as long
as possible—the nature of her complaint being such as to make her
unwilling to speak of it to others—she at length determined to consult a
Greek physician who had been brought to Persia as a captive, and had
acquired great celebrity at Susa by his medical science and skill. The
physician said that he would undertake her case on condition that she would
promise to grant him a certain request that he would make. She wished to
know what it was beforehand, but the physician would not tell her. He said,
however, that it was nothing that it would be in any way derogatory to her
honor to grant him.
On these conditions Atossa concluded to agree to the
physician's proposals. He made her take a solemn oath Atossa's promise.
that, if he cured her of her malady, she would do
whatever he required of her, provided that it was consistent with honor and
propriety. He then took her case under his charge, prescribed for her and
attended her, and in due time she was cured. The physician then told her
that what he wished her to do for him was to find some means to persuade
Darius to send him home to his native land.
Atossa was faithful in fulfilling her promise. She took a
private opportunity, when she was alone with Darius, to Atossa's
propose that he should engage in some plans of foreign conversation
Darius.
with

conquest. She reminded him of the vastness of the
military power which was at his disposal, and of the facility with which, by
means of it, he might extend his dominions. She extolled, too, his genius
and energy, and endeavored to inspire in his mind some ambitious desires to
distinguish himself in the estimation of mankind by bringing his capacities
for the performance of great deeds into action.
Darius listened to these suggestions of Atossa with interest and with evident
pleasure. He said that he had been forming some such plans himself. He
was going to build a bridge across the Hellespont or the Bosporus, to unite
Europe and Asia; and he was also going to make an incursion into the

country of the Scythians, the people by whom Cyrus, his great predecessor,
had been defeated and slain. It would be a great glory for him, he said, to
succeed in a conquest in which Cyrus had so totally failed.
But these plans would not answer the purpose which
Atossa had in view. She urged her husband, therefore, to Success of her
postpone his invasion of the Scythians till some future plans.
time, and first conquer the Greeks, and annex their territory to his
dominions. The Scythians, she said, were savages, and their country not
worth the cost of conquering it, while Greece would constitute a noble
prize. She urged the invasion of Greece, too, rather than Scythia, as a
personal favor to herself, for she had been wanting, she said, some slaves
from Greece for a long time—some of the women of Sparta, of Corinth, and
of Athens, of whose graces and accomplishments she had heard so much.
There was something gratifying to the military vanity of Darius in being
thus requested to make an incursion to another continent, and undertake the
conquest of the mightiest nation of the earth, for the purpose of procuring
accomplished waiting-maids to offer as a present to his queen. He became
restless and excited while listening to Atossa's proposals, and to the
arguments with which she enforced them, and it was obvious that he was
very strongly inclined to accede to her views. He finally concluded to send
a commission into Greece to explore the country, and to bring back a report
on their return; and as he decided to make the Greek physician the guide of
the expedition, Atossa gained her end.
A full account of this expedition, and of the various
adventures which the party met with on their voyage, is The expedition to
given in our history of Darius. It may be proper to say Greece.Escape of the
here, however, that the physician fully succeeded in his physician.
plans of making his escape. He pretended, at first, to be
unwilling to go, and he made only the most temporary arrangements in
respect to the conduct of his affairs while he should be gone, in order to
deceive the king in regard to his intentions of not returning. The king, on his
part, resorted to some stratagems to ascertain whether the physician was
sincere in his professions, but he did not succeed in detecting the artifice,
and so the party went away. The physician never returned.

Atossa had four sons. Xerxes was the eldest of them. He
was not, however, the eldest of the sons of Darius, as Atossa's four sons.
there were other sons, the children of another wife, Artobazanes.
whom Darius had married before he ascended the throne. The oldest of
these children was named Artobazanes. Artobazanes seems to have been a
prince of an amiable and virtuous character, and not particularly ambitious
and aspiring in his disposition, although, as he was the eldest son of his
father, he claimed to be his heir. Atossa did not admit the validity of this
claim, but maintained that the oldest of her children was entitled to the
inheritance.
It became necessary to decide this question before Darius's death; for
Darius, in the prosecution of a war in which he was engaged, formed the
design of accompanying his army on an expedition into Greece, and, before
doing this, he was bound, according to the laws and usages of the Persian
realm, to regulate the succession.
There immediately arose an earnest dispute between the
friends and partisans of Artobazanes and Xerxes, each Dispute about the
succession.
side urging very eagerly the claims of its own candidate. Xerxes and
The mother and the friends of Artobazanes maintained Artobazanes.
that he was the oldest son, and, consequently, the heir.
Atossa, on the other hand, contended that Xerxes was the grandson of
Cyrus, and that he derived from that circumstance the highest possible
hereditary rights to the Persian throne.
This was in some respects true, for Cyrus had been the
founder of the empire and the legitimate monarch, while The arguments.
Darius had no hereditary claims. He was originally a
noble, of high rank, indeed, but not of the royal line; and he had been
designated as Cyrus's successor in a time of revolution, because there was,
at that time, no prince of the royal family who could take the inheritance.
Those, therefore, who were disposed to insist on the claims of a legitimate
hereditary succession, might very plausibly claim that Darius's government
had been a regency rather than a reign; that Xerxes, being the oldest son of
Atossa, Cyrus's daughter, was the true representative of the royal line; and
that, although it might not be expedient to disturb the possession of Darius

during his lifetime, yet that, at his death, Xerxes was unquestionably
entitled to the throne.
There was obviously a great deal of truth and justice in
this reasoning, and yet it was a view of the subject not Influence of Atossa.
likely to be very agreeable to Darius, since it seemed to
deny the existence of any real and valid title to the sovereignty in him. It
assigned the crown, at his death, not to his son as such, but to his
predecessor's grandson; for though Xerxes was both the son of Darius and
the grandson of Cyrus, it was in the latter capacity that he was regarded as
entitled to the crown in the argument referred to above. The doctrine was
very gratifying to the pride of Atossa, for it made Xerxes the successor to
the crown as her son and heir, and not as the son and heir of her husband.
For this very reason it was likely to be not very gratifying to Darius. He
hesitated very much in respect to adopting it. Atossa's ascendency over his
mind, and her influence generally in the Persian court, was almost
overwhelming, and yet Darius was very unwilling to seem, by giving to the
oldest grandson of Cyrus the precedence over his own eldest son, to admit
that he himself had no legitimate and proper title to the throne.
While things were in this state, a Greek, named
Demaratus, arrived at Susa. He was a dethroned prince The Spartan
fugitive.
from Sparta, and had fled from the political storms of his His views of the
own country to seek refuge in Darius's capital. succession.
Demaratus found a way to reconcile Darius's pride as a
sovereign with his personal preferences as a husband and a father. He told
the king that, according to the principles of hereditary succession which
were adopted in Greece, Xerxes was his heir as well as Cyrus's, for he was
the oldest son who was born after his accession. A son, he said, according
to the Greek ideas on the subject, was entitled to inherit only such rank as
his father held when the son was born; and that, consequently, none of his
children who had been born before his accession could have any claims to
the Persian throne. Artobazanes, in a word, was to be regarded, he said,
only as the son of Darius the noble, while Xerxes was the son of Darius the
king.
In the end Darius adopted this view, and designated
Xerxes as his successor in case he should not return The decision.

from his distant expedition. He did not return. He did Death of Darius.
not even live to set out upon it. Perhaps the question of
the succession had not been absolutely and finally settled, for it arose again
and was discussed anew when the death of Darius occurred. The manner in
which it was finally disposed of will be described in the next chapter.

Chapter II.

Egypt and Greece.
B.C. 484

T he arrangements which Darius had made to fix and
determine the succession, before his death, did not Xerxes assumes the
crown.
entirely prevent the question from arising again when his His message to
death occurred. Xerxes was on the spot at the time, and Artobazanes.
at once assumed the royal functions. His brother was
absent. Xerxes sent a messenger to Artobazanes[C] informing him of their
father's death, and of his intention of assuming the crown. He said,
however, that if he did so, he should give his brother the second rank,
making him, in all respects, next to himself in office and honor. He sent,
moreover, a great many splendid presents to Artobazanes, to evince the
friendly regard which he felt for him, and to propitiate his favor.
Artobazanes sent back word to Xerxes that he thanked him for his presents,
and that he accepted them with pleasure. He said that he considered
himself, nevertheless, as justly entitled to the crown, though he should, in
the event of his accession, treat all his brothers, and especially Xerxes, with
the utmost consideration and respect.
Soon after these occurrences, Artobazanes came to
Media, where Xerxes was, and the question which of Question of the
succession again
them should be the king was agitated anew among the debated.
nobles of the court. In the end, a public hearing of the
cause was had before Artabanus, a brother of Darius, and, of course, an
uncle of the contending princes. The question seems to have been referred
to him, either because he held some public office which made it his duty to
consider and decide such a question, or else because he had been specially
commissioned to act as judge in this particular case. Xerxes was at first
quite unwilling to submit his claims to the decision of such a tribunal. The
crown was, as he maintained, rightfully his. He thought that the public
voice was generally in his favor. Then, besides, he was already in
possession of the throne, and by consenting to plead his cause before his

uncle, he seemed to be virtually abandoning all this vantage ground, and
trusting instead to the mere chance of Artabanus's decision.
Atossa, however, recommended to him to accede to the
plan of referring the question to Artabanus. He would Advice of Atossa.
consider the subject, she said, with fairness and
impartiality, and decide it right. She had no doubt that he would decide it in
Xerxes's favor; "and if he does not," she added, "and you lose your cause,
you only become the second man in the kingdom instead of the first, and
the difference is not so very great, after all."
Atossa may have had some secret intimation how Artabanus would decide.
However this may be, Xerxes at length concluded to
submit the question. A solemn court was held, and the Decision of
case was argued in the presence of all the nobles and Artabanus.
great officers of state. A throne was at hand to which the successful
competitor was to be conducted as soon as the decision should be made.
Artabanus heard the arguments, and decided in favor of Xerxes.
Artobazanes, his brother, acquiesced in the decision with the utmost
readiness and good humor. He was the first to bow before the king in token
of homage, and conducted him, himself, to the throne.
Xerxes kept his promise faithfully of making his brother the second in his
kingdom. He appointed him to a very high command in the army, and
Artobazanes, on his part, served the king with great zeal and fidelity, until
he was at last killed in battle, in the manner hereafter to be described.
As soon as Xerxes found himself established on his
throne, he was called upon to decide immediately a great Unfinished wars of
question, namely, which of two important wars in which Darius.
his father had been engaged he should first undertake to prosecute, the war
in Egypt or the war in Greece.
By referring to the map, the reader will see that, as the
Persian empire extended westward to Asia Minor and to Egypt and Greece.
Character of the
the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, the great countries Egyptians.
which bordered upon it in this direction were, on the Character of the
north Greece, and on the south, Egypt; the one in Greeks.

Europe, and the other in Africa. The Greeks and the Egyptians were both
wealthy and powerful, and the countries which they respectively inhabited
were fertile and beautiful beyond expression, and yet in all their essential
features and characteristics they were extremely dissimilar. Egypt was a
long and narrow inland valley. Greece reposed, as it were, in the bosom of
the sea, consisting, as it did, of an endless number of islands, promontories,
peninsulas, and winding coasts, laved on every side by the blue waters of
the Mediterranean. Egypt was a plain, diversified only by the varieties of
vegetation, and by the towns and villages, and the enormous monumental
structures which had been erected by man. Greece was a picturesque and
ever-changing scene of mountains and valleys; of precipitous cliffs,
winding beaches, rocky capes, and lofty headlands. The character and
genius of the inhabitants of these two countries took their cast, in each case,
from the physical conformations of the soil. The Egyptians were a quiet,
gentle, and harmless race of tillers of the ground. They spent their lives in
pumping water from the river, in the patient, persevering toil of sowing
smooth and mellow fields, or in reaping the waving grain. The Greeks
drove flocks and herds up and down the declivities of the mountains, or
hunted wild beasts in forests and fastnesses. They constructed galleys for
navigating the seas; they worked the mines and manufactured metals. They
built bridges, citadels, temples, and towns, and sculptured statuary from
marble blocks which they chiseled from the strata of the mountains. It is
surprising what a difference is made in the genius and character of man by
elevations, here and there, of a few thousand feet in the country where his
genius and character are formed.
The architectural wonders of Egypt and of Greece were
as diverse from each other as the natural features of the Architecture.
soil, and in each case the structures were in keeping and Monuments
Greece.
of

in harmony with the character of the landscape which Egyptian
they respectively adorned. The harmony was, however, architecture.
that of contrast, and not of correspondence. In Greece,
where the landscape itself was grand and sublime, the architect aimed only
at beauty. To have aimed at magnitude and grandeur in human structures
among the mountains, the cliffs, the cataracts, and the resounding ocean
shores of Greece, would have been absurd. The Grecian artists were
deterred by their unerring instincts from the attempt. They accordingly built

beautiful temples, whose white and symmetrical colonnades adorned the
declivities, or crowned the summits of the hills. They sculptured statues, to
be placed on pedestals in groves and gardens; they constructed fountains;
they raised bridges and aqueducts on long ranges of arches and piers; and
the summits of ragged rocks crystallized, as it were, under their hands into
towers, battlements, and walls. In Egypt, on the other hand, where the
country itself was a level and unvarying plain, the architecture took forms
of prodigious magnitude, of lofty elevation, and of vast extent. There were
ranges of enormous columns, colossal statues, towering obelisks, and
pyramids rising like mountains from the verdure of the plain. Thus, while
nature gave to the country its elements of beauty, man completed the
landscape by adding to it the grand and the sublime.
The shape and proportions of Egypt would be
represented by a green ribbon an inch wide and a yard Form of Egypt.
long, lying upon the ground in a serpentine form; and to
complete the model, we might imagine a silver filament passing along the
center of the green to denote the Nile. The real valley of verdure, however,
is not of uniform breadth, like the ribbon so representing it, but widens as it
approaches the sea, as if there had been originally a gulf or estuary there,
which the sediment from the river had filled.
In fact, the rich and fertile plain which the alluvial
deposits of the Nile have formed, has been protruded for Delta of the Nile.
some distance into the sea, and the stream divides itself Fertility of Egypt.
into three great branches about a hundred miles from its mouth, two
outermost of which, with the sea-coast in front, inclose a vast triangle,
which was called the Delta, from the Greek letter delta, Δ, which is of a
triangular form. In ascending the river beyond the Delta, the fertile plain, at
first twenty-five or thirty miles wide, grows gradually narrower, as the
ranges of barren hills and tracts of sandy deserts on either hand draw nearer
and nearer to the river. Thus the country consists of two long lines of rich
and fertile intervals, one on each side of the stream. In the time of Xerxes
the whole extent was densely populated, every little elevation of the land
being covered with a village or a town. The inhabitants tilled the land,
raising upon it vast stores of corn, much of which was floated down the
river to its mouth, and taken thence to various countries of Europe and Asia,
in merchant ships, over the Mediterranean Sea. Caravans, too, sometimes

came across the neighboring deserts to obtain supplies of Egyptian corn.
This was done by the sons of Jacob when the crops failed them in the land
of Canaan, as related in the sacred Scriptures.
There were two great natural wonders in Egypt in
ancient times as now: first, it never rained there, or, at No rain in Egypt.
least, so seldom, that rain was regarded as a marvelous
phenomenon, interrupting the ordinary course of nature, like an earthquake
in England or America. The falling of drops of water out of clouds in the
sky was an occurrence so strange, so unaccountable, that the whole
population regarded it with astonishment and awe. With the exception of
these rare and wonder-exciting instances, there was no rain, no snow, no
hail, no clouds in the sky. The sun was always shining, and the heavens
were always serene. These meteorological characteristics of the country,
resulting, as they do, from permanent natural causes, continue, of course,
unchanged to the present day; and the Arabs who live now along the banks
of the river, keep their crops, when harvested, in heaps in the open air, and
require no roofs to their huts except a light covering of sheaves to protect
the inmates from the sun.
The other natural wonder of Egypt was the annual rising
of the Nile. About midsummer, the peasantry who lived Rising of the Nile.
along the banks would find the river gradually beginning
to rise. The stream became more turbid, too, as the bosom of the waters
swelled. No cause for this mysterious increase appeared, as the sky
remained as blue and serene as before, and the sun, then nearly vertical,
continued to shine with even more than its wonted splendor. The inhabitants
however, felt no surprise, and asked for no explanation of the phenomenon.
It was the common course of nature at that season. They had all witnessed
it, year after year, from childhood. They, of course, looked for it when the
proper month came round, and, though they would have been amazed if the
annual flood had failed, they thought nothing extraordinary of its coming.
When the swelling of the waters and the gradual filling
of the channels and low grounds in the neighborhood of Preparations for the
inundation.
the river warned the people that the flood was at hand, Gradual rise of the
they all engaged busily in the work of completing their water.
preparations. The harvests were all gathered from the

fields, and the vast stores of fruit and corn which they yielded were piled in
roofless granaries, built on every elevated spot of ground, where they would
be safe from the approaching inundation. The rise of the water was very
gradual and slow. Streams began to flow in all directions over the land.
Ponds and lakes, growing every day more and more extended, spread
mysteriously over the surface of the meadows; and all the time while this
deluge of water was rising to submerge the land, the air continued dry, the
sun was sultry, and the sky was without a cloud.
As the flood continued to rise, the proportion of land and
water, and the conformation of the irregular and Appearance of the
temporary shores which separated them, were changed country during an
inundation.
continually, from day to day. The inhabitants assembled
in their villages, which were built on rising grounds, some natural, others
artificially formed. The waters rose more and more, until only these
crowded islands appeared above its surface—when, at length, the valley
presented to the view the spectacle of a vast expanse of water, calm as a
summer's sea, brilliant with the reflected rays of a tropical sun, and
canopied by a sky, which, displaying its spotless blue by day and its
countless stars at night, was always cloudless and serene.
The inundation was at its height in October. After that
period the waters gradually subsided, leaving a slimy The three theories.
and very fertilizing deposit all over the lands which they
had covered. Though the inhabitants themselves, who had been accustomed
to this overflow from infancy, felt no wonder or curiosity about its cause,
the philosophers of the day, and travelers from other countries who visited
Egypt, made many attempts to seek an explanation of the phenomenon.
They had three theories on the subject, which Herodotus mentions and
discusses.
The first explanation was, that the rising of the river was
occasioned by the prevalence of northerly winds on the Objections to the
Mediterranean at that time of the year, which drove back first.
the waters at the mouth of the river, and so caused the accumulation of the
water in the upper parts of the valley. Herodotus thought that this was not a
satisfactory explanation; for sometimes, as he said, these northerly winds
did not blow, and yet the rising of the river took place none the less when

the appointed season came. Besides, there were other rivers similarly
situated in respect to the influence of prevailing winds at sea in driving in
the waters at their mouths, which were, nevertheless, not subject to
inundations like the Nile.
The second theory was, that the Nile took its rise, not,
like other rivers, in inland lakes, or among inland Second and third
theories.
mountains, but in some remote and unknown ocean on Reasons against
the other side of the continent, which ocean the them.
advocates of this theory supposed might be subject to
some great annual ebb and flow; and from this it might result that at stated
periods an unusual tide of waters might be poured into the channel of the
river. This, however, could not be true, for the waters of the inundation were
fresh, not salt, which proved that they were not furnished by any ocean.
A third hypothesis was, that the rising of the water was occasioned by the
melting of the snows in summer on the mountains from which the sources
of the river came. Against this supposition Herodotus found more numerous
and more satisfactory reasons even than he had advanced against the others.
In the first place the river came from the south—a direction in which the
heat increased in intensity with every league, as far as travelers had
explored it; and beyond those limits, they supposed that the burning sun
made the country uninhabitable. It was preposterous to suppose that there
could be snow and ice there. Then, besides, the Nile had been ascended to a
great distance, and reports from the natives had been brought down from
regions still more remote, and no tidings had ever been brought of ice and
snow. It was unreasonable, therefore, to suppose that the inundations could
arise from such a cause.
These scientific theories, however, were discussed only
among philosophers and learned men. The common Ideas of the
common people in
people had a much more simple and satisfactory mode regard to the
of disposing of the subject. They, in their imaginations, inundation.
invested the beneficent river with a sort of life and
personality, and when they saw its waters rising so gently but yet surely, to
overflow their whole land, leaving it, as they withdrew again, endued with a
new and exuberant fertility, they imagined it a living and acting
intelligence, that in the exercise of some mysterious and inscrutable powers,

the nature of which was to them unknown, and impelled by a kind and
friendly regard for the country and its inhabitants, came annually, of its own
accord, to spread over the land the blessings of fertility and abundance. The
mysterious stream being viewed in this light, its wonderful powers
awakened their veneration and awe, and its boundless beneficence their
gratitude.

Pheron defying the Nile.
Among the ancient Egyptian legends, there is one Story of King
relating to a certain King Pheron which strikingly Pheron.
illustrates this feeling. It seems that during one of the His punishment.
inundations, while he was standing with his courtiers and watching the flow
of the water, the commotion in the stream was much greater than usual on
account of a strong wind which was blowing at that time, and which greatly
increased the violence of the whirlpools, and the force and swell of the
boiling eddies. There was given, in fact, to the appearance of the river an
expression of anger, and Pheron, who was of a proud and haughty character,
like most of the Egyptian kings, threw his javelin into one of the wildest of
the whirlpools, as a token of his defiance of its rage. He was instantly struck
blind!

The sequel of the story is curious, though it has no
connection with the personality of the Nile. Pheron Sequel of the story
of King Pheron.
remained blind for ten years. At the end of that time it
was announced to him, by some supernatural communication, that the
period of his punishment had expired, and that his sight might be brought
back to him by the employment of a certain designated means of
restoration, which was the bathing of his eyes by a strictly virtuous woman.
Pheron undertook compliance with the requisition, without any idea that the
finding of a virtuous woman would be a difficult task. He first tried his own
wife, but her bathing produced no effect. He then tried, one after another,
various ladies of his court, and afterward others of different rank and
station, selecting those who were most distinguished for the excellence of
their characters. He was disappointed, however, in them all. The blindness
continued unchanged. At last, however, he found the wife of a peasant,
whose bathing produced the effect. The monarch's sight was suddenly
restored. The king rewarded the peasant woman, whose virtuous character
was established by this indisputable test, with the highest honors. The
others he collected together, and then shut them up in one of his towns.
When they were all thus safely imprisoned, he set the town on fire, and
burned them all up together.
To return to the Nile. Certain columns were erected in
different parts of the valley, on which cubits and the Nilometers.
subdivisions of cubits were marked and numbered, for
the purpose of ascertaining precisely the rise of the water. Such a column
was called a Nilometer. There was one near Memphis, which was at the
upper point of the Delta, and others further up the river. Such pillars
continue to be used to mark the height of the inundations to the present day.
The object of thus accurately ascertaining the rise of the
water was not mere curiosity, for there were certain Use of Nilometers.
important business operations which depended upon the
results. The fertility and productiveness of the soil each year were
determined almost wholly by the extent of the inundation; and as the ability
of the people to pay tribute depended upon their crops, the Nilometer
furnished the government with a criterion by which they regulated the
annual assessments of the taxes. There were certain canals, too, made to
convey the water to distant tracts of land, which were opened or kept closed

according as the water rose to a higher or lower point. All these things were
regulated by the indications of the Nilometer.
Egypt was famed in the days of Xerxes for those
enormous structures and ruins of structures whose origin Enormous
was then, as now, lost in a remote antiquity. Herodotus structures of Egypt.
Comparative
found the Pyramids standing in his day, and presenting antiquity of various
the same spectacle of mysterious and solitary grandeur objects.
Great age of the
which they exhibited to Napoleon. He speculated on Pyramids.
their origin and their history, just as the philosophers and
travelers of our day do. In fact, he knew less and could learn less about
them than is known now. It helps to impress our minds with an idea of the
extreme antiquity of these and the other architectural wonders of Egypt, to
compare them with things which are considered old in the Western world.
The ancient and venerable colleges and halls of Oxford and Cambridge are,
many of them, two or three hundred years old. There are remains of the old
wall of the city of London which has been standing seven hundred years.
This is considered a great antiquity. There are, however, Roman ruins in
Britain, and in various parts of Europe, more ancient still. They have been
standing eighteen hundred years! People look upon these with a species of
wonder and awe that they have withstood the destructive influences of time
so long. But as to the Pyramids, if we go back twenty-five hundred years,
we find travelers visiting and describing them then—monuments as ancient,
as venerable, as mysterious and unknown in their eyes, as they appear now
in ours. We judge that a mountain is very distant when, after traveling many
miles toward it, it seems still as distant as ever. Now, in tracing the history
of the pyramids, the obelisks, the gigantic statues, and the vast columnar
ruins of the Nile, we may go back twenty-five hundred years, without,
apparently, making any progress whatever toward reaching their origin.
Such was Egypt. Isolated as it was from the rest of the
world, and full of fertility and riches, it offered a marked Egypt a mark for
the conqueror.
and definite object to the ambition of a conqueror. In Its relation to
fact, on account of the peculiar interest which this long Persia.
and narrow valley of verdure, with its wonderful
structures, the strange and anomalous course of nature which prevails in it,
and the extraordinary phases which human life, in consequence, exhibits
there, has always excited among mankind, heroes and conquerors have

generally considered it a peculiarly glorious field for their exploits. Cyrus,
the founder of the Persian monarchy, contemplated the subjugation of it. He
did not carry his designs into effect, but left them for Cambyses his son.
Darius held the country as a dependency during his reign, though, near the
close of his life, it revolted. This revolt took place while he was preparing
for his grand expedition against Greece, and he was perplexed with the
question which of the two undertakings, the subjugation of the Egyptians or
the invasion of Greece, he should first engage in. In the midst of this
uncertainty he suddenly died, leaving both the wars themselves and the
perplexity of deciding between them as a part of the royal inheritance
falling to his son.
Xerxes decided to prosecute the Egyptian campaign
first, intending to postpone the conquest of Greece till he Xerxes resolves to
subdue Egypt first.
had brought the valley of the Nile once more under The Jews.
Persian sway. He deemed it dangerous to leave a The Egyptians
province of his father's empire in a state of successful subdued.
Return to Susa.
rebellion, while leading his armies off to new
undertakings. Mardonius, who was the commander-in-chief of the army,
and the great general on whom Xerxes mainly relied for the execution of his
schemes, was very reluctant to consent to this plan. He was impatient for
the conquest of Greece. There was little glory for him to acquire in merely
suppressing a revolt, and reconquering what had been already once
subdued. He was eager to enter upon a new field. Xerxes, however,
overruled his wishes, and the armies commenced their march for Egypt.
They passed the land of Judea on their way, where the captives who had
returned from Babylon, and their successors, were rebuilding the cities and
reoccupying the country. Xerxes confirmed them in the privileges which
Cyrus and Darius had granted them, and aided them in their work. He then
went on toward the Nile. The rebellion was easily put down. In less than a
year from the time of leaving Susa, he had reconquered the whole land of
Egypt, punished the leaders of the revolt, established his brother as viceroy
of the country, and returned in safety to Susa.
All this took place in the second year of his reign.

Chapter III.

Debate on the Proposed Invasion Of Greece.
B.C. 481

T he two great counselors on whose judgment Xerxes
mainly relied, so far as he looked to any other Counselors of
Xerxes.
judgment than his own in the formation of his plans, Age and character
were Artabanus, the uncle by whose decision the throne of Mardonius.
had been awarded to him, and Mardonius, the The avenues to
renown.
commander-in-chief of his armies. Xerxes himself was Blood inherited and
quite a young man, of a proud and lofty, yet generous blood shed.
character, and full of self-confidence and hope.
Mardonius was much older, but he was a soldier by profession, and was
eager to distinguish himself in some great military campaign. It has always
been unfortunate for the peace and happiness of mankind, under all
monarchical and despotic governments, in every age of the world, that,
through some depraved and unaccountable perversion of public sentiment,
those who are not born to greatness have had no means of attaining to it
except as heroes in war. Many men have, indeed, by their mental powers or
their moral excellences, acquired an extended and lasting posthumous fame;
but in respect to all immediate and exalted distinction and honor, it will be
found, on reviewing the history of the human race, that there have generally
been but two possible avenues to them: on the one hand, high birth, and on
the other, the performance of great deeds of carnage and destruction. There
must be, it seems, as the only valid claim to renown, either blood inherited
or blood shed. The glory of the latter is second, indeed, to that of the
former, but it is only second. He who has sacked a city stands very high in
the estimation of his fellows. He yields precedence only to him whose
grandfather sacked one.
This state of things is now, it is true, rapidly undergoing a change. The age
of chivalry, of military murder and robbery, and of the glory of great deeds
of carnage and blood, is passing away, and that of peace, of industry, and of
achievements for promoting the comfort and happiness of mankind is
coming. The men who are now advancing to the notice of the world are

those who, through their commerce or their manufactures, feed and clothe
their fellow-men by millions, or, by opening new channels or new means
for international intercourse, civilize savages, and people deserts; while the
glory of killing and destroying is less and less regarded, and more and more
readily forgotten.
In the days of Xerxes, however, there was no road to honor but by war, and
Mardonius found that his only hope of rising to distinction was by
conducting a vast torrent of military devastation over some portion of the
globe; and the fairer, the richer, the happier the scene which he was thus to
inundate and overwhelm, the greater would be the glory. He was very much
disposed, therefore, to urge on the invasion of Greece by every means in his
power.
Artabanus, on the other hand, the uncle of Xerxes, was a
man advanced in years, and of a calm and cautious Character of
disposition. He was better aware than younger men of Artabanus.
His advice to
the vicissitudes and hazards of war, and was much more Xerxes.
inclined to restrain than to urge on the youthful ambition The Ionian
rebellion.
of his nephew. Xerxes had been able to present some First invasion of
show of reason for his campaign in Egypt, by calling the Greece.
resistance which that country offered to his power a
rebellion. There was, however, no such reason in the case of Greece. There
had been two wars between Persia and the Athenians already, it is true. In
the first, the Athenians had aided their countrymen in Asia Minor in a
fruitless attempt to recover their independence. This the Persian government
considered as aiding and abetting a rebellion. In the second, the Persians
under Datis, one of Darius's generals, had undertaken a grand invasion of
Greece, and, after landing in the neighborhood of Athens, were beaten, with
immense slaughter, at the great battle of Marathon, near that city. The
former of these wars is known in history as the Ionian rebellion; the latter as
the first Persian invasion of Greece. They had both occurred during the
reign of Darius, and the invasion under Datis had taken place not many
years before the accession of Xerxes, so that a great number of the officers
who had served in that campaign were still remaining in the court and army
of Xerxes at Susa. These wars had, however, both been terminated, and
Artabanus was very little inclined to have the contests renewed.

Xerxes, however, was bent upon making one more
attempt to conquer Greece, and when the time arrived Xerxes convenes a
public council.
for commencing his preparations, he called a grand
council of the generals, the nobles, and the potentates of the realm, to lay
his plans before them. The historian who narrated these proceedings
recorded the debate that ensued in the following manner.
Xerxes himself first addressed the assembly, to announce and explain his
designs.
"The enterprise, my friends," said he, "in which I
propose now to engage, and in which I am about to ask His speech.
your co-operation, is no new scheme of my own
devising. What I design to do is, on the other hand, only the carrying
forward of the grand course of measures marked out by my predecessors,
and pursued by them with steadiness and energy, so long as the power
remained in their hands. That power has now descended to me, and with it
has devolved the responsibility of finishing the work which they so
successfully began.
"It is the manifest destiny of Persia to rule the world. From the time that
Cyrus first commenced the work of conquest by subduing Media, to the
present day, the extent of our empire has been continually widening, until
now it covers all of Asia and Africa, with the exception of the remote and
barbarous tribes, that, like the wild beasts which share their forests with
them, are not worth the trouble of subduing. These vast conquests have
been made by the courage, the energy, and the military power of Cyrus,
Darius, and Cambyses, my renowned predecessors. They, on their part,
have subdued Asia and Africa; Europe remains. It devolves on me to finish
what they have begun. Had my father lived, he would, himself, have
completed the work. He had already made great preparations for the
undertaking; but he died, leaving the task to me, and it is plain that I can not
hesitate to undertake it without a manifest dereliction of duty.
"You all remember the unprovoked and wanton
aggressions which the Athenians committed against us Xerxes recounts the
aggressions of the
in the time of the Ionian rebellion, taking part against us Athenians.
with rebels and enemies. They crossed the Ægean Sea

on that occasion, invaded our territories, and at last captured and burned the
city of Sardis, the principal capital of our Western empire. I will never rest
until I have had my revenge by burning Athens. Many of you, too, who are
here present, remember the fate of the expedition under Datis. Those of you
who were attached to that expedition will have no need that I should urge
you to seek revenge for your own wrongs. I am sure that you will all second
my undertaking with the utmost fidelity and zeal.
"My plan for gaining access to the Grecian territories is
not, as before, to convey the troops by a fleet of galleys Xerxes proposes to
build a bridge over
over the Ægean Sea, but to build a bridge across the the Hellespont.
Hellespont, and march the army to Greece by land. This
course, which I am well convinced is practicable, will be more safe than the
other, and the bridging of the Hellespont will be of itself a glorious deed.
The Greeks will be utterly unable to resist the enormous force which we
shall be able to pour upon them. We can not but conquer; and inasmuch as
beyond the Greek territories there is, as I am informed, no other power at all
able to cope with us, we shall easily extend our empire on every side to the
sea, and thus the Persian dominion will cover the whole habitable world.
"I am sure that I can rely on your cordial and faithful co-operation in these
plans, and that each one of you will bring me, from his own province or
territories, as large a quota of men, and of supplies for the war, as is in his
power. They who contribute thus most liberally I shall consider as entitled
to the highest honors and rewards."
Such was, in substance, the address of Xerxes to his council. He concluded
by saying that it was not his wish to act in the affair in an arbitrary or
absolute manner, and he invited all present to express, with perfect freedom,
any opinions or views which they entertained in respect to the enterprise.
While Xerxes had been speaking, the soul of Mardonius
had been on fire with excitement and enthusiasm, and Excitement of
Mardonius.
every word which the king had uttered only fanned the
flame. He rose immediately when the king gave permission to the
counselors to speak, and earnestly seconded the monarch's proposals in the
following words:

"For my part, sire, I can not refrain from expressing my
high admiration of the lofty spirit and purpose on your His speech.
part, which leads you to propose to us an enterprise so
worthy of your illustrious station and exalted personal renown. Your
position and power at the present time are higher than those ever attained by
any human sovereign that has ever lived; and it is easy to foresee that there
is a career of glory before you which no future monarch can ever surpass.
You are about to complete the conquest of the world! That exploit can, of
course, never be exceeded. We all admire the proud spirit on your part
which will not submit tamely to the aggressions and insults which we have
received from the Greeks. We have conquered the people of India, of Egypt,
of Ethiopia, and of Assyria, and that, too, without having previously
suffered any injury from them, but solely from a noble love of dominion;
and shall we tamely stop in our career when we see nations opposed to us
from whom we have received so many insults, and endured so many
wrongs? Every consideration of honor and manliness forbids it.
"We have nothing to fear in respect to the success of the
enterprise in which you invite us to engage. I know the Mardonius
expresses his
Greeks, and I know that they can not stand against our contempt of the
arms. I have encountered them many times and in Greeks.
various ways. I met them in the provinces of Asia Minor,
and you all know the result. I met them during the reign of Darius your
father, in Macedon and Thrace—or, rather, sought to meet them; for, though
I marched through the country, the enemy always avoided me. They could
not be found. They have a great name, it is true; but, in fact, all their plans
and arrangements are governed by imbecility and folly. They are not ever
united among themselves. As they speak one common language, any
ordinary prudence and sagacity would lead them to combine together, and
make common cause against the nations that surround them. Instead of this,
they are divided into a multitude of petty states and kingdoms, and all their
resources and power are exhausted in fruitless contentions with each other. I
am convinced that, once across the Hellespont, we can march to Athens
without finding any enemy to oppose our progress; or, if we should
encounter any resisting force, it will be so small and insignificant as to be
instantly overwhelmed."

In one point Mardonius was nearly right in his
predictions, since it proved subsequently, as will Predictions of
hereafter be seen, that when the Persian army reached Mardonius.
the pass of Thermopylæ, which was the great avenue of entrance, on the
north, into the territories of the Greeks, they found only three hundred men
ready there to oppose their passage!
When Mardonius had concluded his speech, he sat
down, and quite a solemn pause ensued. The nobles and Pause in the
assembly.
chieftains generally were less ready than he to encounter
the hazards and uncertainties of so distant a campaign. Xerxes would
acquire, by the success of the enterprise, a great accession to his wealth and
to his dominion, and Mardonius, too, might expect to reap very rich
rewards; but what were they themselves to gain? They did not dare,
however, to seem to oppose the wishes of the king, and, notwithstanding the
invitation which he had given them to speak, they remained silent, not
knowing, in fact, exactly what to say.
All this time Artabanus, the venerable uncle of Xerxes, sat silent like the
rest, hesitating whether his years, his rank, and the relation which he
sustained to the young monarch would justify his interposing, and make it
prudent and safe for him to attempt to warn his nephew of the consequences
which he would hazard by indulging his dangerous ambition. At length he
determined to speak.
"I hope," said he, addressing the king, "that it will not
displease you to have other views presented in addition Speech of
Artabanus.
to those which have already been expressed. It is better His apologies.
that all opinions should be heard; the just and the true Artabanus opposes
will then appear the more just and true by comparison the war.
with others. It seems to me that the enterprise which you
contemplate is full of danger, and should be well considered before it is
undertaken. When Darius, your father, conceived of the plan of his invasion
of the country of the Scythians beyond the Danube, I counseled him against
the attempt. The benefits to be secured by such an undertaking seemed to
me wholly insufficient to compensate for the expense, the difficulties, and
the dangers of it. My counsels were, however, overruled. Your father
proceeded on the enterprise. He crossed the Bosporus, traversed Thrace,

and then crossed the Danube; but, after a long and weary contest with the
hordes of savages which he found in those trackless wilds, he was forced to
abandon the undertaking, and return, with the loss of half his army. The
plan which you propose seems to me to be liable to the same dangers, and I
fear very much that it will lead to the same results.
"The Greeks have the name of being a valiant and
formidable foe. It may prove in the end that they are so. Repulse of Datis.
Artabanus warns
They certainly repulsed Datis and all his forces, vast as Xerxes of the
they were, and compelled them to retire with an danger of the
enormous loss. Your invasion, I grant, will be more expedition.
formidable than his. You will throw a bridge across the
Hellespont, so as to take your troops round through the northern parts of
Europe into Greece, and you will also, at the same time, have a powerful
fleet in the Ægean Sea. But it must be remembered that the naval
armaments of the Greeks in all those waters are very formidable. They may
attack and destroy your fleet. Suppose that they should do so, and that then,
proceeding to the northward in triumph, they should enter the Hellespont
and destroy your bridge? Your retreat would be cut off, and, in case of a
reverse of fortune, your army would be exposed to total ruin.
"Your father, in fact, very narrowly escaped precisely this fate. The
Scythians came to destroy his bridge across the Danube while his forces
were still beyond the river, and, had it not been for the very extraordinary
fidelity and zeal of Histiæus, who had been left to guard the post, they
would have succeeded in doing it. It is frightful to think that the whole
Persian army, with the sovereign of the empire at their head, were placed in
a position where their being saved from overwhelming and total destruction
depended solely on the fidelity and firmness of a single man! Should you
place your forces and your own person in the same danger, can you safely
calculate upon the same fortunate escape?
"Even the very vastness of your force may be the means of insuring and
accelerating its destruction, since whatever rises to extraordinary elevation
and greatness is always exposed to dangers correspondingly extraordinary
and great. Thus tall trees and lofty towers seem always specially to invite
the thunderbolts of Heaven.

"Mardonius charges the Greeks with a want of sagacity,
efficiency, and valor, and speaks contemptuously of Artabanus
vindicates the
them, as soldiers, in every respect. I do not think that character of the
such imputations are just to the people against whom Greeks.
they are directed, or honorable to him who makes them.
To disparage the absent, especially an absent enemy, is not magnanimous or
wise; and I very much fear that it will be found in the end that the conduct
of the Greeks will evince very different military qualities from those which
Mardonius has assigned them. They are represented by common fame as
sagacious, hardy, efficient, and brave, and it may prove that these
representations are true.
"My counsel therefore is, that you dismiss this assembly, and take further
time to consider this subject before coming to a final decision. Perhaps, on
more mature reflection, you will conclude to abandon the project altogether.
If you should not conclude to abandon it, but should decide, on the other
hand, that it must be prosecuted, let me entreat you not to go yourself in
company with the expedition. Let Mardonius take the charge and the
responsibility. If he does so, I predict that he will leave the dead bodies of
the soldiers that you intrust to him, to be devoured by dogs on the plains of
Athens or Lacedæmon."
Xerxes was exceedingly displeased at hearing such a
speech as this from his uncle, and he made a very angry Xerxes's
displeasure.
reply. He accused Artabanus of meanness of spirit, and His angry reply to
of a cowardice disgraceful to his rank and station, in Artabanus.
thus advocating a tame submission to the arrogant
pretensions of the Greeks. Were it not, he said, for the respect which he felt
for Artabanus, as his father's brother, he would punish him severely for his
presumption in thus basely opposing his sovereign's plans. "As it is,"
continued he, "I will carry my plans into effect, but you shall not have the
honor of accompanying me. You shall remain at Susa with the women and
children of the palace, and spend your time in the effeminate and ignoble
pleasures suited to a spirit so mean. As for myself, I must and will carry my
designs into execution. I could not, in fact, long avoid a contest with the
Greeks, even if I were to adopt the cowardly and degrading policy which
you recommend; for I am confident that they will very soon invade my
dominions, if I do not anticipate them by invading theirs."

So saying, Xerxes dismissed the assembly.
His mind, however, was not at ease. Though he had so
indignantly rejected the counsel which Artabanus had Xerxes's anxiety.
He determines to
offered him, yet the impressive words in which it had abandon his project.
been uttered, and the arguments with which it had been
enforced, weighed upon his spirit, and oppressed and dejected him. The
longer he considered the subject, the more serious his doubts and fears
became, until at length, as the night approached, he became convinced that
Artabanus was right, and that he himself was wrong. His mind found no rest
until he came to the determination to abandon the project after all. He
resolved to make this change in his resolution known to Artabanus and his
nobles in the morning, and to countermand the orders which he had given
for the assembling of the troops. Having by this decision restored
something like repose to his agitated mind, he laid himself down upon his
couch and went to sleep.
In the night he saw a vision. It seemed to him that a
resplendent and beautiful form appeared before him, and Xerxes sees a vision
in the night.
after regarding him a moment with an earnest look,
addressed him as follows:
"And do you really intend to abandon your deliberate design of leading an
array into Greece, after having formally announced it to the realm and
issued your orders? Such fickleness is absurd, and will greatly dishonor
you. Resume your plan, and go on boldly and perseveringly to the
execution of it."
So saying, the vision disappeared.
When Xerxes awoke in the morning, and the remembrance of the events of
the preceding day returned, mingling itself with the new impressions which
had been made by the dream, he was again agitated and perplexed. As,
however, the various influences which pressed upon him settled to their
final equilibrium, the fears produced by Artabanus's substantial arguments
and warnings on the preceding day proved to be of greater weight than the
empty appeal to his pride which had been made by the phantom of the
night. He resolved to persist in the abandonment of his scheme. He called
his council, accordingly, together again, and told them that, on more mature

reflection, he had become convinced that his uncle was right and that he
himself had been wrong. The project, therefore, was for the present
suspended, and the orders for the assembling of the forces were revoked.
The announcement was received by the members of the council with the
most tumultuous joy.
That night Xerxes had another dream. The same spirit
appeared to him again, his countenance, however, The spirit appears a
bearing now, instead of the friendly look of the second Xerxes.
time to

preceding night, a new and stern expression of
displeasure. Pointing menacingly at the frightened monarch with his finger,
he exclaimed, "You have rejected my advice; you have abandoned your
plan; and now I declare to you that, unless you immediately resume your
enterprise and carry it forward to the end, short as has been the time since
you were raised to your present elevation, a still shorter period shall elapse
before your downfall and destruction."
The spirit then disappeared as suddenly as it came, leaving Xerxes to awake
in an agony of terror.
As soon as it was day, Xerxes sent for Artabanus, and
related to him his dreams. "I was willing," said he, "after Xerxes relates his
hearing what you said, and maturely considering the dreams to
Artabanus.
subject, to give up my plan; but these dreams, I can not
but think, are intimations from Heaven that I ought to proceed."
Artabanus attempted to combat this idea by representing
to Xerxes that dreams were not to be regarded as Opinion of the
latter.
indications of the will of Heaven, but only as a vague
and disordered reproduction of the waking thoughts, while the regular
action of the reason and the judgment by which they were ordinarily
controlled was suspended or disturbed by the influence of slumber. Xerxes
maintained, on the other hand, that, though this view of the case might
explain his first vision, the solemn repetition of the warning proved that it
was supernatural and divine. He proposed that, to put the reality of the
apparition still further to the test, Artabanus should take his place on the
royal couch the next night, to see if the specter would not appear to him.
"You shall clothe yourself," said he, "in my robes, put the crown upon your

head, and take your seat upon the throne. After that, you shall retire to my
apartment, lie down upon the couch, and go to sleep. If the vision is
supernatural, it will undoubtedly appear to you. If it does not so appear, I
will admit that it was nothing but a dream."
Artabanus made some objection, at first, to the details of
the arrangement which Xerxes proposed, as he did not Artabanus takes
see, he said, of what advantage it could be for him to Xerxes's place.
assume the guise and habiliments of the king. If the vision was divine, it
could not be deceived by such artifices as those. Xerxes, however, insisted
on his proposition, and Artabanus yielded. He assumed for an hour the dress
and the station of the king, and then retired to the king's apartment, and laid
himself down upon the couch under the royal pavilion. As he had no faith in
the reality of the vision, his mind was quiet and composed, and he soon fell
asleep.
At midnight, Xerxes, who was lying in an adjoining
apartment, was suddenly aroused by a loud and piercing The spirit appears a
cry from the room where Artabanus was sleeping, and in third time.
a moment afterward Artabanus himself rushed in, perfectly wild with terror.
He had seen the vision. It had appeared before him with a countenance and
gestures expressive of great displeasure, and after loading him with
reproaches for having attempted to keep Xerxes back from his proposed
expedition into Greece, it attempted to bore out his eyes with a red-hot iron
with which it was armed. Artabanus had barely succeeded in escaping by
leaping from his couch and rushing precipitately out of the room.[D]
Artabanus said that he was now convinced and satisfied.
It was plainly the divine will that Xerxes should Artabanus is
convinced.
undertake his projected invasion, and he would himself, The invasion
thenceforth, aid the enterprise by every means in his decided upon.
power. The council was, accordingly, once more
convened. The story of the three apparitions was related to them, and the
final decision announced that the armies were to be assembled for the
march without any further delay.

It is proper here to repeat, once for all in this volume, a
remark which has elsewhere often been made in the Mardonius probably
the ghost.
various works of this series, that in studying ancient
history at the present day, it is less important now to know, in regard to
transactions so remote, what the facts actually were which really occurred,
than it is to know the story respecting them, which, for the last two
thousand years, has been in circulation among mankind. It is now, for
example, of very little consequence whether there ever was or never was
such a personage as Hercules, but it is essential that every educated man
should know the story which ancient writers tell in relating his doings. In
this view of the case, our object, in this volume, is simply to give the
history of Xerxes just as it stands, without stopping to separate the false
from the true. In relating the occurrences, therefore, which have been
described in this chapter, we simply give the alleged facts to our readers
precisely as the ancient historians give them to us, leaving each reader to
decide for himself how far he will believe the narrative. In respect to this
particular story, we will add, that some people think that Mardonius was
really the ghost by whose appearance Artabanus and Xerxes were so
dreadfully frightened.

Chapter IV.

Preparations for the Invasion Of Greece.
B.C. 481

A s soon as the invasion of Greece was finally decided
upon, the orders were transmitted to all the Orders to the
provinces.
provinces of the empire, requiring the various authorities Mode of raising
and powers to make the necessary preparations. There money.
were men to be levied, arms to be manufactured, ships to
be built, and stores of food to be provided. The expenditures, too, of so vast
an armament as Xerxes was intending to organize, would require a large
supply of money. For all these things Xerxes relied on the revenues and the
contributions of the provinces, and orders, very full and very imperative,
were transmitted, accordingly, to all the governors and satraps of Asia, and
especially to those who ruled over the countries which lay near the western
confines of the empire, and consequently near the Greek frontiers.
In modern times it is the practice of powerful nations to
accumulate arms and munitions of war on storage in Modern mode of
securing supplies of
arsenals and naval depôts, so that the necessary supplies arms and money.
for very extended operations, whether of attack or
defense, can be procured in a very short period of time. In respect to funds,
too, modern nations have a great advantage over those of former days, in
case of any sudden emergency arising to call for great and unusual
expenditures. In consequence of the vast accumulation of capital in the
hands of private individuals, and the confidence which is felt in the
mercantile honor and good faith of most established governments at the
present day, these governments can procure indefinite supplies of gold and
silver at any time, by promising to pay an annual interest in lieu of the
principal borrowed. It is true that, in these cases, a stipulation is made, by
which the government may, at a certain specified period, pay back the
principal, and so extinguish the annuity; but in respect to a vast portion of
the amount so borrowed, it is not expected that this repayment will ever be
made. The creditors, in fact, do not desire that it should be, as owners of
property always prefer a safe annual income from it to the custody of the

principal; and thus governments in good credit have sometimes induced
their creditors to abate the rate of interest which they were receiving, by
threatening otherwise to pay the debt in full.
These inventions, however, by which a government in
one generation may enjoy the pleasure and reap the Xerxes's
preparations.
glory of waging war, and throw the burden of the Four years allotted
expense on another, were not known in ancient times. to them.
Xerxes did not understand the art of funding a national
debt, and there would, besides, have probably been very little confidence in
Persian stocks, if any had been issued. He had to raise all his funds by
actual taxation, and to have his arms, and his ships and chariots of war,
manufactured express. The food, too, to sustain the immense army which he
was to raise, was all to be produced, and store-houses were to be built for
the accumulation and custody of it. All this, as might naturally be expected,
would require time; and the vastness of the scale on which these immense
preparations were made is evinced by the fact that four years were the time
allotted for completing them. This period includes, however, a considerable
time before the great debate on the subject described in the last chapter.
The chief scene of activity, during all this time, was the
tract of country in the western part of Asia Minor, and Arms.
Provisions.
along the shores of the Ægean Sea. Taxes and Building of ships.
contributions were raised from all parts of the empire,
but the actual material of war was furnished mainly from those provinces
which were nearest to the future scene of it. Each district provided such
things as it naturally and most easily produced. One contributed horses,
another arms and ammunition, another ships, and another provisions. The
ships which were built were of various forms and modes of construction,
according to the purposes which they were respectively intended to serve.
Some were strictly ships of war, intended for actual combat; others were
transports, their destination being simply the conveyance of troops or of
military stores. There were also a large number of vessels, which were built
on a peculiar model, prescribed by the engineers, being very long and
straight-sided, and smooth and flat upon their decks. These were intended
for the bridge across the Hellespont. They were made long, so that, when
placed side by side across the stream, a greater breadth might be given to

the platform of the bridge. All these things were very deliberately and
carefully planned.
Although it was generally on the Asiatic side of the
Ægean Sea that these vast works of preparation were Persian possessions
on the north of the
going on, and the crossing of the Hellespont was to be Ægean Sea.
the first great movement of the Persian army, the reader
must not suppose that, even at this time, the European shores were wholly
in the hands of the Greeks. The Persians had, long before, conquered
Thrace and a part of Macedon; and thus the northern shores of the Ægean
Sea, and many of the islands, were already in Xerxes's hands. The Greek
dominions lay further south, and Xerxes did not anticipate any opposition
from the enemy, until his army, after crossing the strait, should have
advanced to the neighborhood of Athens. In fact, all the northern country
through which his route would lie was already in his hands, and in passing
through it he anticipated no difficulties except such as should arise from the
elements themselves, and the physical obstacles of the way. The Hellespont
itself was, of course, one principal point of danger. The difficulty here was
to be surmounted by the bridge of boats. There was, however, another point,
which was, in some respects, still more formidable: it was the promontory
of Mount Athos.
By looking at the map of Greece, placed at the
commencement of the next chapter, the reader will see Promontory of
that there are two or three singular promontories jutting Mount Athos.
out from the main land in the northwestern part of the Ægean Sea. The most
northerly and the largest of these was formed by an immense mountainous
mass rising out of the water, and connected by a narrow isthmus with the
main land. The highest summit of this rocky pile was called Mount Athos in
ancient times, and is so marked upon the map. In modern days it is called
Monte Santo, or Holy Mountain, being covered with monasteries, and
convents, and other ecclesiastical establishments built in the Middle Ages.
Mount Athos is very celebrated in ancient history. It
extended along the promontory for many miles, and Dangerous
terminated abruptly in lofty cliffs and precipices toward navigation.
the sea, where it was so high that its shadow, as was said, was thrown, at
sunset, across the water to the island of Lemnos, a distance of twenty

leagues. It was a frightful specter in the eyes of the ancient navigators,
when, as they came coasting along from the north in their frail galleys, on
their voyages to Greece and Italy, they saw it frowning defiance to them as
they came, with threatening clouds hanging upon its summit, and the surges
and surf of the Ægean perpetually thundering upon its base below. To make
this stormy promontory the more terrible, it was believed to be the haunt of
innumerable uncouth and misshapen monsters of the sea, that lived by
devouring the hapless seamen who were thrown upon the rocks from their
wrecked vessels by the merciless tumult of the waves.
The plan which Xerxes had formed for the advance of
his expedition was, that the army which was to cross the Plan of Xerxes for
the march of his
Hellespont by the bridge should advance thence through expedition.
Macedonia and Thessaly, by land, attended by a
squadron of ships, transports, and galleys, which was to accompany the
expedition along the coast by sea. The men could be marched more
conveniently to their place of destination by land. The stores, on the other
hand, the arms, the supplies, and the baggage of every description, could be
transported more easily by sea. Mardonius was somewhat solicitous in
respect to the safety of the great squadron which would be required for this
latter service, in doubling the promontory of Mount Athos.
In fact, he had special and personal reason for his
solicitude, for he had himself, some years before, met Former shipwreck
with a terrible disaster at this very spot. It was during the of Mardonius.
reign of Darius that this disaster occurred. On one of the expeditions which
Darius had intrusted to his charge, he was conducting a very large fleet
along the coast, when a sudden storm arose just as he was approaching this
terrible promontory.
He was on the northern side of the promontory when the
storm came on, and as the wind was from the north, it Terrible gale.
blew directly upon the shore. For the fleet to make its
escape from the impending danger, it seemed necessary, therefore, to turn
the course of the ships back against the wind; but this, on account of the
sudden and terrific violence of the gale, it was impossible to do. The sails,
when they attempted to use them, were blown away by the howling gusts,
and the oars were broken to pieces by the tremendous dashing of the sea. It

soon appeared that the only hope of escape for the squadron was to press on
in the desperate attempt to double the promontory, and thus gain, if
possible, the sheltered water under its lee. The galleys, accordingly, went
on, the pilots and the seamen exerting their utmost to keep them away from
the shore.
All their efforts, however, to do this, were vain. The
merciless gales drove the vessels, one after another, Destruction of
upon the rocks, and dashed them to pieces, while the Mardonius's fleet at
Mount Athos.
raging sea wrenched the wretched mariners from the
wrecks to which they attempted to cling, and tossed them out into the
boiling whirlpools around, to the monsters that were ready there to devour
them, as if she were herself some ferocious monster, feeding her offspring
with their proper prey. A few, it is true, of the hapless wretches succeeded in
extricating themselves from the surf, by crawling up upon the rocks,
through the tangled sea-weed, until they were above the reach of the surges;
but when they had done so, they found themselves hopelessly imprisoned
between the impending precipices which frowned above them and the
frantic billows which were raging and roaring below. They gained, of
course, by their apparent escape, only a brief prolongation of suffering, for
they all soon miserably perished from exhaustion, exposure, and cold.
Mardonius had no desire to encounter this danger again.
Now the promontory of Mount Athos, though high and Plan of a canal.
rocky itself, was connected with the main land by an
isthmus level and low, and not very broad. Xerxes determined on cutting a
canal through this isthmus, so as to take his fleet of galleys across the neck,
and thus avoid the stormy navigation of the outward passage. Such a canal
would be of service not merely for the passage of the great fleet, but for the
constant communication which it would be necessary for Xerxes to
maintain with his own dominions during the whole period of the invasion.
It might have been expected that the Greeks would have
interfered to prevent the execution of such a work as The Greeks do not
this; but it seems that they did not, and yet there was a interfere.
considerable Greek population in that vicinity. The promontory of Athos
itself was quite extensive, being about thirty miles long and four or five
wide, and it had several towns upon it. The canal which Xerxes was to cut

across the neck of this peninsula was to be wide enough for two triremes to
pass each other. Triremes were galleys propelled by three banks of oars, and
were vessels of the largest class ordinarily employed; and as the oars by
which they were impelled required almost as great a breadth of water as the
vessels themselves, the canal was, consequently, to be very wide.
The engineers, accordingly, laid out the ground, and,
marking the boundaries by stakes and lines, as guides to Plans of the
the workmen, the excavation was commenced. Immense engineers.
numbers of men were set at work, arranged regularly in gangs, according to
the various nations which furnished them. As the excavation gradually
proceeded, and the trench began to grow deep, they placed ladders against
the sides, and stationed a series of men upon them; then the earth dug from
the bottom was hauled up from one to another, in a sort of basket or hod,
until it reached the top, where it was taken by other men and conveyed
away.
The work was very much interrupted and impeded, in
many parts of the line, by the continual caving in of the Prosecution of the
banks, on account of the workmen attempting to dig work.
perpendicularly down. In one section—the one which had been assigned to
the Phœnicians—this difficulty did not occur; for the Phœnicians, more
considerate than the rest, had taken the precaution to make the breadth of
their part of the trench twice as great at the top as it was below. By this
means the banks on each side were formed to a gradual slope, and
consequently stood firm. The canal was at length completed, and the water
was let in.
North of the promontory of Mount Athos the reader will
find upon the map the River Strymon, flowing south, not The Strymon
far from the boundary between Macedon and Thrace, bridged.
into the Ægean Sea. The army of Xerxes, in its march from the Hellespont,
would, of course, have to cross this river; and Xerxes having, by cutting the
canal across the isthmus of Mount Athos, removed an obstacle in the way of
his fleet, resolved next to facilitate the progress of his army by bridging the
Strymon.

The king also ordered a great number of granaries and
store-houses to be built at various points along the route Granaries and store-
which it was intended that his army should pursue. houses.
Some of these were on the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, and some on
the banks of the Strymon. To these magazines the corn raised in Asia for the
use of the expedition was conveyed, from time to time, in transport ships, as
fast as it was ready, and, being safely deposited, was protected by a guard.
No very extraordinary means of defense seems to have been thought
necessary at these points, for, although the scene of all these preliminary
arrangements was on the European side of the line, and in what was called
Greek territory, still this part of the country had been long under Persian
dominion. The independent states and cities of Greece were all further
south, and the people who inhabited them did not seem disposed to interrupt
these preparations. Perhaps they were not aware to what object and end all
these formidable movements on their northern frontier were tending.
Xerxes, during all this time, had remained in Persia. The
period at length arrived when, his preparations on the Xerxes leaves Susa,
frontiers being far advanced toward completion, he and begins his
march.
concluded to move forward at the head of his forces to
Sardis. Sardis was the great capital of the western part of his dominions,
and was situated not far from the frontier. He accordingly assembled his
forces, and, taking leave of his capital of Susa with much parade and many
ceremonies, he advanced toward Asia Minor. Entering and traversing Asia
Minor, he crossed the Halys, which had been, in former times, the western
boundary of the empire, though its limits had now been extended very far
beyond. Having crossed the Halys, the immense procession advanced into
Phrygia.
A very romantic tale is told of an interview between
Xerxes and a certain nobleman named Pythius, who The Meander.
resided in one of the Phrygian towns. The circumstances Celænæ.
were these: After crossing the Halys, which river flows north into the
Euxine Sea, the army went on to the westward through nearly the whole
extent of Phrygia, until at length they came to the sources of the streams
which flowed west into the Ægean Sea. One of the most remarkable of
these rivers was the Meander. There was a town built exactly at the source
of the Meander—so exactly, in fact, that the fountain from which the stream

took its rise was situated in the public square of the town, walled in and
ornamented like an artificial fountain in a modern city. The name of this
town was Celænæ.
When the army reached Celænæ and encamped there,
Pythius made a great entertainment for the officers, Pythius.
which, as the number was very large, was of course
attended with an enormous expense. Not satisfied with this, Pythius sent
word to the king that if he was, in any respect, in want of funds for his
approaching campaign, he, Pythius, would take great pleasure in supplying
him.
Xerxes was surprised at such proofs of wealth and
munificence from a man in comparatively a private The wealth of
station. He inquired of his attendants who Pythius was. Pythius.
They replied that, next to Xerxes himself, he was the richest man in the
world. They said, moreover, that he was as generous as he was rich. He had
made Darius a present of a beautiful model of a fruit-tree and of a vine, of
solid gold. He was by birth, they added, a Lydian.
Lydia was west of Phrygia, and was famous for its wealth. The River
Pactolus, which was so celebrated for its golden sands, flowed through the
country, and as the princes and nobles contrived to monopolize the treasures
which were found, both in the river itself and in the mountains from which
it flowed, some of them became immensely wealthy.
Xerxes was astonished at the accounts which he heard of
Pythius's fortune. He sent for him, and asked him what His interview with
was the amount of his treasures. This was rather an Xerxes.
ominous question; for, under such despotic governments as those of the
Persian kings, the only real safeguard of wealth was, often, the concealment
of it. Inquiry on the part of a government, in respect to treasures
accumulated by a subject, was, often, only a preliminary to the seizure and
confiscation of them.
Pythius, however, in reply to the king's question, said
that he had no hesitation in giving his majesty full The amount of
information in respect to his fortune. He had been Pythius's wealth.
making, he said, a careful calculation of the amount of it, with a view of

determining how much he could offer to contribute in aid of the Persian
campaign. He found, he said, that he had two thousand talents of silver, and
four millions, wanting seven thousand, of staters of gold.
The stater was a Persian coin. Even if we knew, at the present day, its exact
value, we could not determine the precise amount denoted by the sum
which Pythius named, the value of money being subject to such vast
fluctuations in different ages of the world. Scholars who have taken an
interest in inquiring into such points as these, have come to the conclusion
that the amount of gold and silver coin which Pythius thus reported to
Xerxes was equal to about thirty millions of dollars.
Pythius added, after stating the amount of the gold and
silver which he had at command, that it was all at the His offer to Xerxes.
service of the king for the purpose of carrying on the
war. He had, he said, besides his money, slaves and farms enough for his
own maintenance.
Xerxes was extremely gratified at this generosity, and at
the proof which it afforded of the interest which Pythius Gratification of
felt in the cause of the king. "You are the only man," Xerxes.
His reply to
said he, "who has offered hospitality to me or to my Pythius's offer.
army since I set out upon this march, and, in addition to
your hospitality, you tender me your whole fortune. I will not, however,
deprive you of your treasure. I will, on the contrary, order my treasurer to
pay to you the seven thousand staters necessary to make your four millions
complete. I offer you also my friendship, and will do any thing in my
power, now and hereafter, to serve you. Continue to live in the enjoyment of
your fortune. If you always act under the influence of the noble and
generous impulses which govern you now, you will never cease to be
prosperous and happy."
If we could end the account of Pythius and Xerxes here,
what generous and noble-minded men we might suppose Real character of
Pythius.
them to be! But alas! how large a portion of the apparent The entertainment
generosity and nobleness which shows itself among of silver and gold.
potentates and kings, turns into selfishness and
hypocrisy when closely examined. Pythius was one of the most merciless

tyrants that ever lived. He held all the people that lived upon his vast estates
in a condition of abject slavery, compelling them to toil continually in his
mines, in destitution and wretchedness, in order to add more and more to
his treasures. The people came to his wife with their bitter complaints. She
pitied them, but could not relieve them. One day, it is said that, in order to
show her husband the vanity and folly of living only to amass silver and
gold, and to convince him how little real power such treasures have to
satisfy the wants of the human soul, she made him a great entertainment, in
which there was a boundless profusion of wealth in the way of vessels and
furniture of silver and gold, but scarcely any food. There was every thing to
satisfy the eye with the sight of magnificence, but nothing to satisfy hunger.
The noble guest sat starving in the midst of a scene of unexampled riches
and splendor, because it was not possible to eat silver and gold.
And as for Xerxes's professions of gratitude and
friendship for Pythius, they were put to the test, a short Xerxes's gratitude
time after the transactions which we have above put to the test.
described, in a remarkable manner. Pythius had five sons. They were all in
Xerxes's army. By their departure on the distant and dangerous expedition
on which Xerxes was to lead them, their father would be left alone. Pythius,
under these circumstances, resolved to venture so far on the sincerity of his
sovereign's professions of regard as to request permission to retain one of
his sons at home with his father, on condition of freely giving up the rest.
Xerxes, on hearing this proposal, was greatly enraged.
"How dare you," said he, "come to me with such a He murders
Pythius's son.
demand? You and all that pertain to you are my slaves,
and are bound to do my bidding without a murmur. You deserve the severest
punishment for such an insolent request. In consideration, however, of your
past good behavior, I will not inflict upon you what you deserve. I will only
kill one of your sons—the one that you seem to cling to so fondly. I will
spare the rest." So saying, the enraged king ordered the son whom Pythius
had endeavored to retain to be slain before his eyes, and then directed that
the dead body should be split in two, and the two halves thrown, the one on
the right side of the road and the other on the left, that his army, as he said,
might "march between them."

On leaving Phrygia, the army moved on toward the
west. Their immediate destination as has already been Various objects of
said, was Sardis, where they were to remain until the interest observed by
the army.
ensuing spring. The historian mentions a number of
objects of interest which attracted the attention of Xerxes and his officers on
this march, which mark the geographical peculiarities of the country, or
illustrate, in some degree, the ideas and manners of the times.
There was one town, for example, situated, not like Celænæ, where a river
had its origin, but where one disappeared. The stream was a branch of the
Meander. It came down from the mountains like any other mountain torrent,
and then, at the town in question, it plunged suddenly down into a gulf or
chasm and disappeared. It rose again at a considerable distance below, and
thence flowed on, without any further evasions, to the Meander.
On the confines between Phrygia and Lydia the army came to a place where
the road divided. One branch turned toward the north, and led to Lydia; the
other inclined to the south, and conducted to Caria. Here, too, on the
frontier, was a monument which had been erected by Crœsus, the great king
of Lydia, who lived in Cyrus's day, to mark the eastern boundaries of his
kingdom. The Persians were, of course, much interested in looking upon
this ancient landmark, which designated not only the eastern limit of
Crœsus's empire, but also what was, in ancient times, the western limit of
their own.
There was a certain species of tree which grew in these
countries called the plane-tree. Xerxes found one of The plane-tree.
these trees so large and beautiful that it attracted his
special admiration. He took possession of it in his own name, and adorned it
with golden chains, and set a guard over it. This idolization of a tree was a
striking instance of the childish caprice and folly by which the actions of
the ancient despots were so often governed.
As the army advanced, they came to other places of
interest and objects of curiosity and wonder. There was a Artificial honey.
Salt lake.
district where the people made a sort of artificial honey Gold and silver
from grain, and a lake from which the inhabitants mines.
procured salt by evaporation, and mines, too, of silver

and of gold. These objects interested and amused the minds of the Persians
as they moved along, without, however, at all retarding or interrupting their
progress. In due time they reached the great city of Sardis in safety, and
here Xerxes established his head-quarters, and awaited the coming of
spring.
In the mean time, however, he sent heralds into Greece
to summon the country to surrender to him. This is a Xerxes summons
the Greeks to
common formality when an army is about to attack surrender.
either a town, a castle, or a kingdom. Xerxes's heralds They indignantly
crossed the Ægean Sea, and made their demands, in refuse.
Xerxes's name, upon the Greek authorities. As might
have been expected, the embassage was fruitless; and the heralds returned,
bringing with them, from the Greeks, not acts or proffers of submission, but
stern expressions of hostility and defiance. Nothing, of course, now
remained, but that both parties should prepare for the impending crisis.

Chapter V.

Crossing the Hellespont.
B.C. 480

A lthough the ancient Asia Minor was in the same
latitude as New York, there was yet very little Winter in Asia
Minor.
winter there. Snows fell, indeed, upon the summits of
the mountains, and ice formed occasionally upon quiet streams, and yet, in
general, the imaginations of the inhabitants, in forming mental images of
frost and snow, sought them not in their own winters, but in the cold and icy
regions of the north, of which, however, scarcely any thing was known to
them except what was disclosed by wild and exaggerated rumors and
legends.

Map of the Grecian Empire.
There was, however, a period of blustering winds and Destruction of the
chilly rains which was called winter, and Xerxes was bridge.
Indignation of
compelled to wait, before commencing his invasion, Xerxes.
until the inclement season had passed. As it was, he did His ridiculous

not wholly escape the disastrous effects of the wintery punishment of the
sea.
gales. A violent storm arose while he was at Sardis, and
broke up the bridge which he had built across the Hellespont. When the
tidings of this disaster were brought to Xerxes at his winter quarters, he was
very much enraged. He was angry both with the sea for having destroyed
the structure, and with the architects who had built it for not having made it
strong enough to stand against its fury. He determined to punish both the
waves and the workmen. He ordered the sea to be scourged with a
monstrous whip, and directed that heavy chains should be thrown into it, as
symbols of his defiance of its power, and of his determination to subject it
to his control. The men who administered this senseless discipline cried out
to the sea, as they did it, in the following words, which Xerxes had dictated
to them: "Miserable monster! this is the punishment which Xerxes your
master inflicts upon you, on account of the unprovoked and wanton injury
you have done him. Be assured that he will pass over you, whether you will
or no. He hates and defies you, object as you are, through your insatiable
cruelty, and the nauseous bitterness of your waters, of the common
abomination of mankind."
As for the men who had built the bridge, which had been found thus
inadequate to withstand the force of a wintery tempest, he ordered every
one of them to be beheaded.
The vengeance of the king being thus satisfied, a new set
of engineers and workmen were designated and ordered Xerxes orders a
to build another bridge. Knowing, as, of course, they new bridge to be
made.
now did, that their lives depended upon the stability of Its construction.
their structure, they omitted no possible precaution
which could tend to secure it. They selected the strongest ships, and
arranged them in positions which would best enable them to withstand the
pressure of the current. Each vessel was secured in its place by strong
anchors, placed scientifically in such a manner as to resist, to the best
advantage, the force of the strain to which they would be exposed. There
were two ranges of these vessels, extending from shore to shore, containing
over three hundred in each. In each range one or two vessels were omitted,
on the Asiatic side, to allow boats and galleys to pass through, in order to
keep the communication open. These omissions did not interfere with the

use of the bridge, as the superstructure and the roadway above was
continued over them.
The vessels which were to serve for the foundation of
the bridge being thus arranged and secured in their Mode of securing
the boats.
places, two immense cables were made and stretched
from shore to shore, each being fastened, at the ends, securely to the banks,
and resting in the middle on the decks of the vessels. For the fastenings of
these cables on the shore there were immense piles driven into the ground,
and huge rings attached to the piles. The cables, as they passed along the
decks of the vessels over the water, were secured to them all by strong
cordage, so that each vessel was firmly and indissolubly bound to all the
rest.
Over these cables a platform was made of trunks of
trees, with branches placed upon them to fill the The bridge finished.
interstices and level the surface. The whole was then
covered with a thick stratum of earth, which made a firm and substantial
road like that of a public highway. A high and close fence was also erected
on each side, so as to shut off the view of the water, which might otherwise
alarm the horses and the beasts of burden that were to cross with the army.
When the news was brought to Xerxes at Sardis that the
bridge was completed, and that all things were ready for Eclipse of the sun.
the passage, he made arrangements for commencing his
march. A circumstance, however, here occurred that at first alarmed him. It
was no less a phenomenon than an eclipse of the sun. Eclipses were
considered in those days as extraordinary and supernatural omens, and
Xerxes was naturally anxious to know what this sudden darkness was meant
to portend. He directed the magi to consider the subject, and to give him
their opinion. Their answer was, that, as the sun was the guardian divinity
of the Greeks, and the moon that of the Persians, the meaning of the sudden
withdrawal of the light of day doubtless was, that Heaven was about to
withhold its protection from the Greeks in the approaching struggle. Xerxes
was satisfied with this explanation, and the preparations for the march went
on.

The movement of the grand procession from the city of
Sardis was inconceivably splendid. First came the long March from Sardis.
trains of baggage, on mules, and camels, and horses, and
other beasts of burden, attended by the drivers, and the men who had the
baggage in charge. Next came an immense body of troops of all nations,
marching irregularly, but under the command of the proper officers. Then,
after a considerable interval, came a body of a thousand horse, splendidly
caparisoned, and followed by a thousand spearmen, who marched trailing
their spears upon the ground, in token of respect and submission to the king
who was coming behind them.
Next to these troops, and immediately in advance of the
king, were certain religious and sacred objects and Order of march.
personages, on which the people who gazed upon this Car of Jupiter.
Chariot of Xerxes.
gorgeous spectacle looked with the utmost awe and
veneration. There were, first, ten sacred horses, splendidly caparisoned,
each led by his groom, who was clothed in appropriate robes, as a sort of
priest officiating in the service of a god. Behind these came the sacred car
of Jupiter. This car was very large, and elaborately worked, and was
profusely ornamented with gold. It was drawn by eight white horses. No
human being was allowed to set his foot upon any part of it, and,
consequently, the reins of the horses were carried back, under the car, to the
charioteer, who walked behind. Xerxes's own chariot came next, drawn by
very splendid horses, selected especially for their size and beauty. His
charioteer, a young Persian noble, sat by his side.
Then came great bodies of troops. There was one corps
of two thousand men, the life-guards of the king, who Camp followers.
were armed in a very splendid and costly manner, to
designate their high rank in the army, and the exalted nature of their duty as
personal attendants on the sovereign. One thousand of these life-guards
were foot soldiers, and the other thousand horsemen. After the life-guards
came a body of ten thousand infantry, and after them ten thousand cavalry.
This completed what was strictly the Persian part of the army. There was an
interval of about a quarter of a mile in the rear of these bodies of troops, and
then came a vast and countless multitude of servants, attendants,
adventurers, and camp followers of every description—a confused,
promiscuous, disorderly, and noisy throng.

The immediate destination of this vast horde was
Abydos; for it was between Sestos, on the European Arrival at the plain
shore, and Abydos, on the Asiatic, that the bridge had of Troy.
been built. To reach Abydos, the route was north, through the province of
Mysia. In their progress the guides of the army kept well inland, so as to
avoid the indentations of the coast, and the various small rivers which here
flow westward toward the sea. Thus advancing, the army passed to the right
of Mount Ida, and arrived at last on the bank of the Scamander. Here they
encamped. They were upon the plain of Troy.
The world was filled, in those days, with the glory of the
military exploits which had been performed, some ages The grand sacrifice.
before, in the siege and capture of Troy; and it was the
custom for every military hero who passed the site of the city to pause in his
march and spend some time amid the scenes of those ancient conflicts, that
he might inspirit and invigorate his own ambition by the associations of the
spot, and also render suitable honors to the memories of those that fell
there. Xerxes did this. Alexander subsequently did it. Xerxes examined the
various localities, ascended the ruins of the citadel of Priam, walked over
the ancient battle fields, and at length, when his curiosity had thus been
satisfied, he ordered a grand sacrifice of a thousand oxen to be made, and a
libation of corresponding magnitude to be offered, in honor of the shades of
the dead heroes whose deeds had consecrated the spot.

Whatever excitement and exhilaration, however, Xerxes
himself may have felt, in approaching, under these Dejection of the
circumstances, the transit of the stream, where the real army.
Mode of enlistment.
labors and dangers of his expedition were to commence, Condition of the
his miserable and helpless soldiers did not share them. soldiers.
Privations and
Their condition and prospects were wretched in the hardships.
extreme. In the first place, none of them went willingly.
In modern times, at least in England and America, armies are recruited by
enticing the depraved and the miserable to enlist, by tendering them a
bounty, as it is called, that is, a sum of ready money, which, as a means of
temporary and often vicious pleasure, presents a temptation they can not
resist. The act of enlistment is, however, in a sense voluntary, so that those
who have homes, and friends, and useful pursuits in which they are
peacefully engaged, are not disturbed. It was not so with the soldiers of
Xerxes. They were slaves, and had been torn from their rural homes all over
the empire by a merciless conscription, from which there was no possible
escape. Their life in camp, too, was comfortless and wretched. At the
present day, when it is so much more difficult than it then was to obtain
soldiers, and when so much more time and attention are required to train
them to their work in the modern art of war, soldiers must be taken care of
when obtained; but in Xerxes's day it was much easier to get new supplies
of recruits than to incur any great expense in providing for the health and
comfort of those already in the service. The arms and trappings, it is true, of
such troops as were in immediate attendance on the king, were very
splendid and gay, though this was only decoration, after all, and the king's
decoration too, not theirs. In respect, however, to every thing like personal
comfort, whether of food and of clothing, or the means of shelter and
repose, the common soldiers were utterly destitute and wretched. They felt
no interest in the campaign; they had nothing to hope for from its success,
but a continuance, if their lives were spared, of the same miserable bondage
which they had always endured. There was, however, little probability even
of this; for whether, in the case of such an invasion, the aggressor was to
succeed or to fail, the destiny of the soldiers personally was almost
inevitable destruction. The mass of Xerxes's army was thus a mere herd of
slaves, driven along by the whips of their officers, reluctant, wretched, and
despairing.

This helpless mass was overtaken one night, among the
gloomy and rugged defiles and passes of Mount Ida, by Storm on Mount
a dreadful storm of wind and rain, accompanied by Ida.
thunder and lightning. Unprovided as they were with the means of
protection against such tempests, they were thrown into confusion, and
spent the night in terror. Great numbers perished, struck by the lightning, or
exhausted by the cold and exposure; and afterward, when they encamped on
the plains of Troy, near the Scamander, the whole of the water of the stream
was not enough to supply the wants of the soldiers and the immense herds
of beasts of burden, so that many thousands suffered severely from thirst.
All these things conspired greatly to depress the spirits
of the men, so that, at last, when they arrived in the Abydos.
vicinity of Abydos, the whole army was in a state of
extreme dejection and despair. This, however, was of little consequence.
The repose of a master so despotic and lofty as Xerxes is very little
disturbed by the mental sorrows of his slaves. Xerxes reached Abydos, and
prepared to make the passage of the strait in a manner worthy of the
grandeur of the occasion.
The first thing was to make arrangements for a great
parade of his forces, not, apparently, for the purpose of Parade of the
accomplishing any useful end of military organization in troops.
the arrangement of the troops, but to gratify the pride and pleasure of the
sovereign with an opportunity of surveying them. A great white throne of
marble was accordingly erected on an eminence not far from the shore of
the Hellespont, from which Xerxes looked down with great complacency
and pleasure, on the one hand, upon the long lines of troops, the countless
squadrons of horsemen, the ranges of tents, and the vast herds of beasts of
burden which were assembled on the land, and, on the other hand, upon the
fleets of ships, and boats, and galleys at anchor upon the sea; while the
shores of Europe were smiling in the distance, and the long and magnificent
roadway which he had made lay floating upon the water, all ready to take
his enormous armament across whenever he should issue the command.
Any deep emotion of the human soul, in persons of a
sensitive physical organization, tends to tears; and Xerxes weeps.
The reason of it.
Xerxes's heart, being filled with exultation and pride,

and with a sense of inexpressible grandeur and sublimity as he looked upon
this scene, was softened by the pleasurable excitements of the hour, and
though, at first his countenance was beaming with satisfaction and pleasure,
his uncle Artabanus, who stood by his side, soon perceived that tears were
standing in his eyes. Artabanus asked him what this meant. It made him sad,
Xerxes replied, to reflect that, immensely vast as the countless multitude
before him was, in one hundred years from that time not one of them all
would be alive.
The tender-heartedness which Xerxes manifested on this
occasion, taken in connection with the stern and Comments of
unrelenting tyranny which he was exercising over the writers. Remarks of
mighty mass of humanity whose mortality he mourned, Artabanus.
has drawn forth a great variety of comments from
writers of every age who have repeated the story. Artabanus replied to it on
the spot by saying that he did not think that the king ought to give himself
too much uneasiness on the subject of human liability to death, for it
happened, in a vast number of cases, that the privations and sufferings of
men were so great, that often, in the course of their lives, they rather wished
to die than to live; and that death was, consequently, in some respects, to be
regarded, not as in itself a woe, but rather as the relief and remedy for woe.
There is no doubt that this theory of Artabanus, so far as it applied to the
unhappy soldiers of Xerxes, all marshaled before him when he uttered it,
was eminently true.
Xerxes admitted that what his uncle said was just, but it
was, he said, a melancholy subject, and so he changed Conversation with
the conversation. He asked his uncle whether he still Artabanus.
He renews his
entertained the same doubts and fears in respect to the warnings.
expedition that he had expressed at Susa when the plan
was first proposed in the council. Artabanus replied that he most sincerely
hoped that the prognostications of the vision would prove true, but that he
had still great apprehensions of the result. "I have been reflecting,"
continued he, "with great care on the whole subject, and it seems to me that
there are two dangers of very serious character to which your expedition
will be imminently exposed."

Xerxes wished to know what they were.
"They both arise," said Artabanus, "from the immense
magnitude of your operations. In the first place, you Anxiety of
Artabanus.
have so large a number of ships, galleys, and transports
in your fleet, that I do not see how, when you have gone down upon the
Greek coast, if a storm should arise, you are going to find shelter for them.
There are no harbors there large enough to afford anchorage ground for
such an immense number of vessels."
"And what is the other danger?" asked Xerxes.
"The other is the difficulty of finding food for such a vast multitude of men
as you have brought together in your armies. The quantity of food necessary
to supply such countless numbers is almost incalculable. Your granaries and
magazines will soon be exhausted, and then, as no country whatever that
you can pass through will have resources of food adequate for such a
multitude of mouths, it seems to me that your march must inevitably end in
a famine. The less resistance you meet with, and the further you
consequently advance, the worse it will be for you. I do not see how this
fatal result can possibly be avoided; and so uneasy and anxious am I on the
subject, that I have no rest or peace."
"I admit," said Xerxes, in reply, "that what you say is not
wholly unreasonable; but in great undertakings it will Xerxes is not
never do to take counsel wholly of our fears. I am convinced.
willing to submit to a very large portion of the evils to which I expose
myself on this expedition, rather than not accomplish the end which I have
in view. Besides, the most prudent and cautious counsels are not always the
best. He who hazards nothing gains nothing. I have always observed that in
all the affairs of human life, those who exhibit some enterprise and courage
in what they undertake are far more likely to be successful than those who
weigh every thing and consider every thing, and will not advance where
they can see any remote prospect of danger. If my predecessors had acted
on the principles which you recommend, the Persian empire would never
have acquired the greatness to which it has now attained. In continuing to
act on the same principles which governed them, I confidently expect the
same success. We shall conquer Europe, and then return in peace, I feel

assured, without encountering the famine which you dread so much, or any
other great calamity."
On hearing these words, and observing how fixed and
settled the determinations of Xerxes were, Artabanus Advice of
said no more on the general subject, but on one point he Artabanus
respect to
in

ventured to offer his counsel to his nephew, and that was employing the
on the subject of employing the Ionians in the war. The Ionians.
Ionians were Greeks by descent. Their ancestors had
crossed the Ægean Sea, and settled at various places along the coast of Asia
Minor, in the western part of the provinces of Caria, Lydia, and Mysia.
Artabanus thought it was dangerous to take these men to fight against their
countrymen. However faithfully disposed they might be in commencing the
enterprise, a thousand circumstances might occur to shake their fidelity and
lead them to revolt, when they found themselves in the land of their
forefathers, and heard the enemies against whom they had been brought to
contend speaking their own mother tongue.
Xerxes, however, was not convinced by Artabanus's
arguments. He thought that the employment of the Xerxes's opinion of
Ionians was perfectly safe. They had been eminently the Ionians.
faithful and firm, he said, under Histiæus, in the time of Darius's invasion of
Scythia, when Darius had left them to guard his bridge over the Danube.
They had proved themselves trustworthy then, and he would, he said,
accordingly trust them now. "Besides," he added, "they have left their
property, their wives and their children, and all else that they hold dear, in
our hands in Asia, and they will not dare, while we retain such hostages, to
do any thing against us."
Xerxes said, however, that since Artabanus was so much
concerned in respect to the result of the expedition, he Artabanus is
should not be compelled to accompany it any further, permitted to return.
but that he might return to Susa instead, and take charge of the government
there until Xerxes should return.
A part of the celebration on the great day of parade, on
which this conversation between the king and his uncle Sham sea fight.
was held, consisted of a naval sea fight, waged on the

Hellespont, between two of the nations of his army, for the king's
amusement. The Phœnicians were the victors in this combat. Xerxes was
greatly delighted with the combat, and, in fact, with the whole of the
magnificent spectacle which the day had displayed.
Soon after this, Xerxes dismissed Artabanus, ordering
him to return to Susa, and to assume the regency of the Xerxes's address.
empire. He convened, also, another general council of
the nobles of his court and the officers of the army, to announce to them that
the time had arrived for crossing the bridge, and to make his farewell
address to them before they should take their final departure from Asia. He
exhorted them to enter upon the great work before them with a determined
and resolute spirit, saying that if the Greeks were once subdued, no other
enemies able at all to cope with the Persians would be left on the habitable
globe.
On the dismission of the council, orders were given to
commence the crossing of the bridge the next day at Crossing the bridge.
sunrise. The preparations were made accordingly. In the
morning, as soon as it was light, and while waiting for the rising of the sun,
they burned upon the bridge all manner of perfumes, and strewed the way
with branches of myrtle, the emblem of triumph and joy. As the time for the
rising of the sun drew nigh, Xerxes stood with a golden vessel full of wine,
which he was to pour out as a libation as soon as the first dazzling beams
should appear above the horizon. When, at length, the moment arrived, he
poured out the wine into the sea, throwing the vessel in which it had been
contained after it as an offering. He also threw in, at the same time, a golden
goblet of great value, and a Persian cimeter. The ancient historian who
records these facts was uncertain whether these offerings were intended as
acts of adoration addressed to the sun, or as oblations presented to the sea—
a sort of peace offering, perhaps, to soothe the feelings of the mighty
monster, irritated and chafed by the chastisement which it had previously
received.

Xerxes crossing the Hellespont.
One circumstance indicated that the offering was Preliminary
intended for the sun, for, at the time of making it, Xerxes ceremonies.
addressed to the great luminary a sort of petition, which
might be considered either an apostrophe or a prayer, imploring its
protection. He called upon the sun to accompany and defend the expedition,
and to preserve it from every calamity until it should have accomplished its
mission of subjecting all Europe to the Persian sway.
The army then commenced its march. The order of
march was very much the same as that which had been The order of march.
observed in the departure from Sardis. The beasts of Movement
fleet.
of the

burden and the baggage were preceded and followed by
immense bodies of troops of all nations. The whole of the first day was
occupied by the passing of this part of the army. Xerxes himself, and the
sacred portion of the train, were to follow them on the second day.
Accordingly, there came, on the second day, first, an immense squadron of
horse, with garlands on the heads of the horsemen; next, the sacred horses
and the sacred car of Jupiter. Then came Xerxes himself, in his war chariot,
with trumpets sounding, and banners waving in the air. At the moment
when Xerxes's chariot entered upon the bridge, the fleet of galleys, which
had been drawn up in preparation near the Asiatic shore, were set in motion,

and moved in a long and majestic line across the strait to the European side,
accompanying and keeping pace with their mighty master in his progress.
Thus was spent the second day.
Five more days were consumed in getting over the
remainder of the army, and the immense trains of beasts Time occupied in
and of baggage which followed. The officers urged the the passage.
Scene of confusion.
work forward as rapidly as possible, and, toward the
end, as is always the case in the movement of such enormous masses, it
became a scene of inconceivable noise, terror, and confusion. The officers
drove forward men and beasts alike by the lashes of their whips—every one
struggling, under the influence of such stimulants, to get forward—while
fallen animals, broken wagons, and the bodies of those exhausted and dying
with excitement and fatigue, choked the way. The mighty mass was,
however, at last transferred to the European continent, full of anxious fears
in respect to what awaited them, but yet having very faint and feeble
conceptions of the awful scenes in which the enterprise of their reckless
leader was to end.

Chapter VI.

The Review of the Troops at Doriscus.
B.C. 480

A s soon as the expedition of Xerxes had crossed the
Hellespont and arrived safely on the European side, The fleet and the
army separate.
as narrated in the last chapter, it became necessary for The Chersonesus.
the fleet and the army to separate, and to move, for a
time, in opposite directions from each other. The reader will observe, by
examining the map, that the army, on reaching the European shore, at the
point to which they would be conducted by a bridge at Abydos, would find
themselves in the middle of a long and narrow peninsula called the
Chersonesus, and that, before commencing its regular march along the
northern coast of the Ægean Sea, it would be necessary first to proceed for
fifteen or twenty miles to the eastward, in order to get round the bay by
which the peninsula is bounded on the north and west. While, therefore, the
fleet went directly westward along the coast, the army turned to the
eastward, a place of rendezvous having been appointed on the northern
coast of the sea, where they were all soon to meet again.
The army moved on by a slow and toilsome progress
until it reached the neck of the peninsula, and then Sufferings from
thirst.
turning at the head of the bay, it moved westward again,
following the direction of the coast. The line of march was, however, laid at
some distance from the shore, partly for the sake of avoiding the
indentations made in the land by gulfs and bays, and partly for the sake of
crossing the streams from the interior at points so far inland that the water
found in them should be fresh and pure. Notwithstanding these precautions,
however, the water often failed. So immense were the multitudes of men
and of beasts, and so craving was the thirst which the heat and the fatigues
of the march engendered, that, in several instances, they drank the little
rivers dry.
The first great and important river which the army had to pass after entering
Europe was the Hebrus. Not far from the mouth of the Hebrus, where it

emptied into the Ægean Sea, was a great plain, which
was called the plain of Doriscus. There was an extensive The Hebrus.
Plain of Doriscus.
fortress here, which had been erected by the orders of
Darius when he had subjugated this part of the country. The position of this
fortress was an important one, because it commanded the whole region
watered by the Hebrus, which was a very fruitful and populous district.
Xerxes had been intending to have a grand review and enumeration of his
forces on entering the European territories, and he judged Doriscus to be a
very suitable place for his purpose. He could establish his own head-
quarters in the fortress, while his armies could be marshaled and reviewed
on the plain. The fleet, too, had been ordered to draw up to the shore at the
same spot, and when the army reached the ground, they found the vessels
already in the offing.
The army accordingly halted, and the necessary
arrangements were made for the review. The first thing Preparations for the
was to ascertain the numbers of the troops; and as the great review.
Mode of taking a
soldiers were too numerous to be counted, Xerxes census.
determined to measure the mighty mass as so much Immense numbers
of the troops.
bulk, and then ascertain the numbers by a computation.
They made the measure itself in the following manner: They counted off,
first, ten thousand men, and brought them together in a compact circular
mass, in the middle of the plain, and then marked a line upon the ground
inclosing them. Upon this line, thus determined, they built a stone wall,
about four feet high, with openings on opposite sides of it, by which men
might enter and go out. When the wall was built, soldiers were sent into the
inclosure—just as corn would be poured by a husbandman into a wooden
peck—until it was full. The mass thus required to fill the inclosure was
deemed and taken to be ten thousand men. This was the first filling of the
measure. These men were then ordered to retire, and a fresh mass was
introduced, and so on until the whole army was measured. The inclosure
was filled one hundred and seventy times with the foot soldiers before the
process was completed, indicating, as the total amount of the infantry of the
army, a force of one million seven hundred thousand men. This
enumeration, it must be remembered, included the land forces alone.
This method of measuring the army in bulk was applied only to the foot
soldiers; they constituted the great mass of the forces convened. There

were, however, various other bodies of troops in the
army, which, from their nature, were more The cavalry.
systematically organized than the common foot soldiers, Corps of Arabs and
Egyptians.
and so their numbers were known by the regular Sum total of the
enrollment. There was, for example, a cavalry force of army.
eighty thousand men. There was also a corps of Arabs,
on camels, and another of Egyptians, in war chariots, which together
amounted to twenty thousand. Then, besides these land forces, there were
half a million of men in the fleet. Immense as these numbers are, they were
still further increased, as the army moved on, by Xerxes's system of
compelling the forces of every kingdom and province through which he
passed to join the expedition; so that, at length, when the Persian king fairly
entered the heart of the Greek territory, Herodotus, the great narrator of his
history, in summing up the whole number of men regularly connected with
the army, makes a total of about five millions of men. One hundred
thousand men, which is but one fiftieth part of five millions, is considered,
in modern times, an immense army; and, in fact, half even of that number
was thought, in the time of the American Revolution, a sufficient force to
threaten the colonies with overwhelming destruction. "If ten thousand men
will not do to put down the rebellion," said an orator in the House of
Commons, "fifty thousand shall."
Herodotus adds that, besides the five millions regularly connected with the
army, there was an immense and promiscuous mass of women, slaves,
cooks, bakers, and camp followers of every description, that no human
powers could estimate or number.
But to return to the review. The numbers of the army
having been ascertained, the next thing was to marshal Various nations.
Dress and
and arrange the men by nations under their respective equipments.
leaders, to be reviewed by the king. A very full Uncouth costumes.
enumeration of these divisions of the army is given by
the historians of the day, with minute descriptions of the kind of armor
which the troops of the several nations wore. There were more than fifty of
these nations in all. Some of them were highly civilized, others were semi-
barbarous tribes; and, of course, they presented, as marshaled in long array
upon the plain, every possible variety of dress and equipment. Some were
armed with brazen helmets, and coats of mail formed of plates of iron;

others wore linen tunics, or rude garments made of the skins of beasts. The
troops of one nation had their heads covered with helmets, those of another
with miters, and of a third with tiaras. There was one savage-looking horde
that had caps made of the skin of the upper part of a horse's head, in its
natural form, with the ears standing up erect at the top, and the mane
flowing down behind. These men held the skins of cranes before them
instead of shields, so that they looked like horned monsters, half beast and
half bird, endeavoring to assume the guise and attitude of men. There was
another corps whose men were really horned, since they wore caps made
from the skins of the heads of oxen, with the horns standing. Wild beasts
were personated, too, as well as tame; for some nations were clothed in
lions' skins, and others in panthers' skins—the clothing being considered,
apparently, the more honorable, in proportion to the ferocity of the brute to
which it had originally belonged.
The weapons, too, were of every possible form and
guise. Spears—some pointed with iron, some with stone, Various weapons.
The lasso.
and others shaped simply by being burned to a point in
the fire; bows and arrows, of every variety of material and form, swords,
daggers, slings, clubs, darts, javelins, and every other imaginable species of
weapon which human ingenuity, savage or civilized, had then conceived.
Even the lasso—the weapon of the American aborigines of modern times—
was there. It is described by the ancient historian as a long thong of leather
wound into a coil, and finished in a noose at the end, which noose the rude
warrior who used the implement launched through the air at the enemy, and
entangling rider and horse together by means of it, brought them both to the
ground.
There was every variety of taste, too, in the fashion and
the colors of the dresses which were worn. Some were Dresses of various
of artificial fabrics, and dyed in various and splendid kinds.
hues. Some were very plain, the wearers of them affecting a simple and
savage ferocity in the fashion of their vesture. Some tribes had painted skins
—beauty, in their view, consisting, apparently, in hideousness. There was
one barbarian horde who wore very little clothing of any kind. They had
knotty clubs for weapons, and, in lieu of a dress, they had painted their
naked bodies half white and half a bright vermilion.

In all this vast array, the corps which stood at the head,
in respect to their rank and the costliness and elegance of The Immortals.
their equipment, was a Persian squadron of ten thousand Privileges
Immortals.
of the

men, called the Immortals. They had received this
designation from the fact that the body was kept always exactly full, as,
whenever any one of the number died, another soldier was instantly put into
his place, whose life was considered in some respects a continuation of the
existence of the man who had fallen. Thus, by a fiction somewhat
analogous to that by which the king, in England, never dies, these ten
thousand Persians were an immortal band. They were all carefully-selected
soldiers, and they enjoyed very unusual privileges and honors. They were
mounted troops, and their dress and their armor were richly decorated with
gold. They were accompanied in their campaigns by their wives and
families, for whose use carriages were provided which followed the camp,
and there was a long train of camels besides, attached to the service of the
corps, to carry their provisions and their baggage.
While all these countless varieties of land troops were
marshaling and arranging themselves upon the plain, The fleet.
each under its own officers and around its own
standards, the naval commanders were employed in bringing up the fleet of
galleys to the shore, where they were anchored in a long line not far from
the beach, and with their prows toward the land. Thus there was a space of
open water left between the line of vessels and the beach, along which
Xerxes's barge was to pass when the time for the naval part of the review
should arrive.
When all things were ready, Xerxes mounted his war
chariot and rode slowly around the plain, surveying Xerxes reviews the
attentively, and with great interest and pleasure, the long troops.
He reviews the
lines of soldiers, in all their variety of equipment and fleet.
costume, as they stood displayed before him. It required
a progress of many miles to see them all. When this review of the land
forces was concluded, the king went to the shore, and embarked on board a
royal galley which had been prepared for him, and there, seated upon the
deck under a gilded canopy, he was rowed by the oarsmen along the line of
ships, between their prows and the land. The ships were from many nations
as well as the soldiers, and exhibited the same variety of fashion and

equipment. The land troops had come from the inland realms and provinces
which occupied the heart of Asia, while the ships and the seamen had been
furnished by the maritime regions which extended along the coasts of the
Black, and the Ægean, and the Mediterranean Seas. Thus the people of
Egypt had furnished two hundred ships, the Phœnicians three hundred,
Cyprus fifty, the Cilicians and the Ionians one hundred each, and so with a
great many other nations and tribes.
The various squadrons which were thus combined in
forming this immense fleet were manned and officered, A lady admiral.
of course, from the nations that severally furnished Her abilities.
them, and one of them was actually commanded in person by a queen. The
name of this lady admiral was Artemisia. She was the Queen of Caria, a
small province in the southwestern part of Asia Minor, having
Halicarnassus for its capital. Artemisia, though in history called a queen,
was, in reality, more properly a regent, as she governed in the name of her
son, who was yet a child. The quota of ships which Caria was to furnish
was five. Artemisia, being a lady of ambitious and masculine turn of mind,
and fond of adventure, determined to accompany the expedition. Not only
her own vessels, but also those from some neighboring islands, were placed
under her charge, so that she commanded quite an important division of the
fleet. She proved, also, in the course of the voyage, to be abundantly
qualified for the discharge of her duties. She became, in fact, one of the
ablest and most efficient commanders in the fleet, not only maneuvering
and managing her own particular division in a very successful manner, but
also taking a very active and important part in the general consultations,
where what she said was listened to with great respect, and always had
great weight in determining the decisions. In the great battle of Salamis she
acted a very conspicuous part, as will hereafter appear.
The whole number of galleys of the first class in
Xerxes's fleet was more than twelve hundred, a number Number of vessels
abundantly sufficient to justify the apprehensions of in the fleet.
Artabanus that no harbor would be found capacious enough to shelter them
in the event of a sudden storm. The line which they formed on this
occasion, when drawn up side by side upon the shore for review, must have
extended many miles.

Xerxes moved slowly along this line in his barge,
attended by the officers of his court and the great Demaratus the
generals of his army, who surveyed the various ships as Greek.
they passed them, and noted the diverse national costumes and equipments
of the men with curiosity and pleasure. Among those who attended the king
on this occasion was a certain Greek named Demaratus, an exile from his
native land, who had fled to Persia, and had been kindly received by Darius
some years before. Having remained in the Persian court until Xerxes
succeeded to the throne and undertook the invasion of Greece, he concluded
to accompany the expedition.
The story of the political difficulties in which Demaratus
became involved in his native land, and which led to his Story of Demaratus.
flight from Greece, was very extraordinary. It was this:
The mother of Demaratus was the daughter of parents of
high rank and great affluence in Sparta, but in her Childhood of his
childhood her features were extremely plain and mother.
repulsive. Now there was a temple in the neighborhood of the place where
her parents resided, consecrated to Helen, a princess who, while she lived,
enjoyed the fame of being the most beautiful woman in the world. The
nurse recommended that the child should be taken every day to this temple,
and that petitions should be offered there at the shrine of Helen that the
repulsive deformity of her features might be removed. The mother
consented to this plan, only enjoining upon the nurse not to let any one see
the face of her unfortunate offspring in going and returning. The nurse
accordingly carried the child to the temple day after day, and holding it in
her arms before the shrine, implored the mercy of Heaven for her helpless
charge, and the bestowal upon it of the boon of beauty.
These petitions were, it seems, at length heard, for one day, when the nurse
was coming down from the temple, after offering her customary prayer, she
was met and accosted by a mysterious-looking woman, who asked her what
it was that she was carrying in her arms. The nurse replied that it was a
child. The woman wanted to look at it. The nurse refused to show the face
of the child, saying that she had been forbidden to do so. The woman,
however, insisted upon seeing its face, and at last the nurse consented and
removed the coverings. The stranger stroked down the face of the child,

saying, at the same time, that now that child should become the most
beautiful woman of Sparta.
Her words proved true. The features of the young girl
rapidly changed, and her countenance soon became as The change.
wonderful for its loveliness as it had been before for its
hideous deformity. When she arrived at a proper age, a certain Spartan
nobleman named Agetus, a particular friend of the king's, made her his
wife.
The name of the king of Sparta at that time was Ariston.
He had been twice married, and his second wife was still Ariston, king of
living, but he had no children. When he came to see and Sparta.
The agreement.
to know the beautiful wife of Agetus, he wished to
obtain her for himself, and began to revolve the subject in his mind, with a
view to discover some method by which he might hope to accomplish his
purpose. He decided at length upon the following plan. He proposed to
Agetus to make an exchange of gifts, offering to give to him any one object
which he might choose from all his, that is, Ariston's effects, provided that
Agetus would, in the same manner, give to Ariston whatever Ariston might
choose. Agetus consented to the proposal, without, however, giving it any
serious consideration. As Ariston was already married, he did not for a
moment imagine that his wife could be the object which the king would
demand. The parties to this foolish agreement confirmed the obligation of it
by a solemn oath, and then each made known to the other what he had
selected. Agetus gained some jewel, or costly garment, or perhaps a gilded
and embellished weapon, and lost forever his beautiful wife. Ariston
repudiated his own second wife, and put the prize which he had thus
surreptitiously acquired in her place as a third.
About seven or eight months after this time Demaratus
was born. The intelligence was brought to Ariston one Birth of Demaratus.
day by a slave, when he was sitting at a public tribunal. Demaratus
disowned.
Ariston seemed surprised at the intelligence, and His flight.
exclaimed that the child was not his. He, however,
afterward retracted this disavowal, and owned Demaratus as his son. The
child grew up, and in process of time, when his father died, he succeeded to
the throne. The magistrates, however, who had heard the declaration of his

father at the time of his birth, remembered it, and reported it to others; and
when Ariston died and Demaratus assumed the supreme power, the next
heir denied his right to the succession, and in process of time formed a
strong party against him. A long series of civil dissensions arose, and at
length the claims of Demaratus were defeated, his enemies triumphed, and
he fled from the country to save his life. He arrived at Susa near the close of
Darius's reign, and it was his counsel which led the king to decide the
contest among his sons for the right of succession, in favor of Xerxes, as
described at the close of the first chapter. Xerxes had remembered his
obligations to Demaratus for this interposition. He had retained him in the
royal court after his accession to the throne, and had bestowed upon him
many marks of distinction and honor.
Demaratus had decided to accompany Xerxes on his expedition into
Greece, and now, while the Persian officers were looking with so much
pride and pleasure on the immense preparations which they were making
for the subjugation of a foreign and hostile state, Demaratus, too, was in the
midst of the scene, regarding the spectacle with no less of interest, probably,
and yet, doubtless, with very different feelings, since the country upon
which this dreadful cloud of gloom and destruction was about to burst was
his own native land.
After the review was ended, Xerxes sent for Demaratus to come to the
castle. When he arrived, the king addressed him as follows:
"You are a Greek, Demaratus, and you know your
countrymen well; and now, as you have seen the fleet Question of Xerxes.
and the army that have been displayed here to-day, tell
me what is your opinion. Do you think that the Greeks will undertake to
defend themselves against such a force, or will they submit at once without
attempting any resistance?"
Demaratus seemed at first perplexed and uncertain, as if not knowing
exactly what answer to make to the question. At length he asked the king
whether it was his wish that he should respond by speaking the blunt and
honest truth, or by saying what would be polite and agreeable.
Xerxes replied that he wished him, of course, to speak the truth. The truth
itself would be what he should consider the most agreeable.

"Since you desire it, then," said Demaratus, "I will speak
the exact truth. Greece is the child of poverty. The Demaratus
inhabitants of the land have learned wisdom and describes Spartans.
the

discipline in the severe school of adversity, and their
resolution and courage are absolutely indomitable. They all deserve this
praise; but I speak more particularly of my own countrymen, the people of
Sparta. I am sure that they will reject any proposal which you may make to
them for submission to your power, and that they will resist you to the last
extremity. The disparity of numbers will have no influence whatever on
their decision. If all the rest of Greece were to submit to you, leaving the
Spartans alone, and if they should find themselves unable to muster more
than a thousand men, they would give you battle."
Xerxes expressed great surprise at this assertion, and
thought that Demaratus could not possibly mean what he Surprise of Xerxes.
seemed to say. "I appeal to yourself," said he; "would
you dare to encounter, alone, ten men? You have been the prince of the
Spartans, and a prince ought, at least, to be equal to two common men; so
that to show that the Spartans in general could be brought to fight a
superiority of force of even ten to one, it ought to appear that you would
dare to engage twenty. This is manifestly absurd. In fact, for any person to
pretend to be able or willing to fight under such a disparity of numbers,
evinces only pride and insolent presumption. And even this proportion of
ten to one, or even twenty to one, is nothing compared to the real disparity;
for, even if we grant to the Spartans as large a force as there is any
possibility of their obtaining, I shall then have a thousand to one against
them.
"Besides," continued the king, "there is a great
difference in the character of the troops. The Greeks are His displeasure.
all freemen, while my soldiers are all slaves—bound
absolutely to do my bidding, without complaint or murmur. Such soldiers as
mine, who are habituated to submit entirely to the will of another, and who
live under the continual fear of the lash, might, perhaps, be forced to go into
battle against a great superiority of numbers, or under other manifest
disadvantages; but free men, never. I do not believe that a body of Greeks
could be brought to engage a body of Persians, man for man. Every
consideration shows, thus, that the opinion which you have expressed is

unfounded. You could only have been led to entertain such an opinion
through ignorance and unaccountable presumption."
"I was afraid," replied Demaratus, "from the first, that,
by speaking the truth, I should offend you. I should not Demaratus's
apology.
have given you my real opinion of the Spartans if you His gratitude to
had not ordered me to speak without reserve. You Darius.
certainly can not suppose me to have been influenced by
a feeling of undue partiality for the men whom I commended, since they
have been my most implacable and bitter enemies, and have driven me into
hopeless exile from my native land. Your father, on the other hand, received
and protected me, and the sincere gratitude which I feel for the favors
which I have received from him and from you incline me to take the most
favorable view possible of the Persian cause.
"I certainly should not be willing, as you justly suppose,
to engage, alone, twenty men, or ten, or even one, unless Demaratus's
defense of the
there was an absolute necessity for it. I do not say that Spartans.
any single Lacedæmonian could successfully encounter
ten or twenty Persians, although in personal conflicts they are certainly not
inferior to other men. It is when they are combined in a body even though
that body be small, that their great superiority is seen.
"As to their being free, and thus not easily led into battle
in circumstances of imminent danger, it must be They are governed
by law.
considered that their freedom is not absolute, like that of
savages in a fray, where each acts according to his own individual will and
pleasure, but it is qualified and controlled by law. The Spartan soldiers are
not personal slaves, governed by the lash of a master, it is true; but they
have certain principles of obligation and duty which they all feel most
solemnly bound to obey. They stand in greater awe of the authority of this
law than your subjects do of the lash. It commands them never to fly from
the field of battle, whatever may be the number of their adversaries. It
commands them to preserve their ranks, to stand firm at the posts assigned
them, and there to conquer or die.
"This is the truth in respect to them. If what I say seems to you absurd, I
will in future be silent. I have spoken honestly what I think, because your

majesty commanded me to do so; and, notwithstanding what I have said, I
sincerely wish that all your majesty's desires and expectations may be
fulfilled."
The ideas which Demaratus thus appeared to entertain of danger to the
countless and formidable hosts of Xerxes's army, from so small and
insignificant a power as that of Sparta, seemed to Xerxes too absurd to
awaken any serious displeasure in his mind. He only smiled, therefore, at
Demaratus's fears, and dismissed him.
Leaving a garrison and a governor in possession of the
castle of Doriscus, Xerxes resumed his march along the Xerxes resumes his
march.
northern shores of the Ægean Sea, the immense swarms Division of the
of men filling all the roads, devouring every thing army.
capable of being used as food, either for beast or man,
and drinking all the brooks and smaller rivers dry. Even with this total
consumption of the food and the water which they obtained on the march,
the supplies would have been found insufficient if the whole army had
advanced through one tract of country. They accordingly divided the host
into three great columns, one of which kept near the shore; the other
marched far in the interior, and the third in the intermediate space. They
thus exhausted the resources of a very wide region. All the men, too, that
were capable of bearing arms in the nations that these several divisions
passed on the way, they compelled to join them, so that the army left, as it
moved along, a very broad extent of country trampled down, impoverished,
desolate, and full of lamentation and woe. The whole march was perhaps
the most gigantic crime against the rights and the happiness of man that
human wickedness has ever been able to commit.
The army halted, from time to time, for various
purposes, sometimes for the performance of what they The Strymon.
considered religions ceremonies, which were intended to Human sacrifices.
propitiate the supernatural powers of the earth and of the air. When they
reached the Strymon, where, it will be recollected, a bridge had been
previously built, so as to be ready for the army when it should arrive, they
offered a sacrifice of five white horses to the river. In the same region, too,
they halted at a place called the Nine Ways, where Xerxes resolved to offer
a human sacrifice to a certain god whom the Persians believed to reside in

the interior of the earth. The mode of sacrificing to this god was to bury the
wretched victims alive. The Persians seized, accordingly, by Xerxes's
orders, nine young men and nine girls from among the people of the
country, and buried them alive!
Marching slowly on in this manner, the army at length
reached the point upon the coast where the canal had Arrival at the canal.
been cut across the isthmus of Mount Athos. The town
which was nearest to this spot was Acanthus, the situation of which,
together with that of the canal, will be found upon the map. The fleet
arrived at this point by sea nearly at the same time with the army coming by
land. Xerxes examined the canal, and was extremely well satisfied with its
construction. He commended the chief engineer, whose name was
Artachæes, in the highest terms, for the successful manner in which he had
executed the work, and rendered him very distinguished honors.
It unfortunately happened, however, that, a few days
after the arrival of the fleet and the army at the canal, Death of the
and before the fleet had commenced the passage of it, engineer.
Burial of the
that Artachæes died. The king considered this event as a engineer.
serious calamity to him, as he expected that other
occasions would arrive on which he would have occasion to avail himself
of the engineer's talents and skill. He ordered preparations to be made for a
most magnificent burial, and the body was in due time deposited in the
grave with imposing funeral solemnities. A very splendid monument, too,
was raised upon the spot, which employed, for some time, all the
mechanical force of the army in its erection.
While Xerxes remained at Acanthus, he required the
people of the neighboring country to entertain his army A grand feast.
at a grand feast, the cost of which totally ruined them. Scene of revelry.
Not only was all the food of the vicinity consumed, but all the means and
resources of the inhabitants, of every kind, were exhausted in the additional
supplies which they had to procure from the surrounding regions. At this
feast the army in general ate, seated in groups upon the ground, in the open
air; but for Xerxes and the nobles of the court a great pavilion was built,
where tables were spread, and vessels and furniture of silver and gold,
suitable to the dignity of the occasion, were provided. Almost all the

property which the people of the region had accumulated by years of patient
industry was consumed at once in furnishing the vast amount of food which
was required for this feast, and the gold and silver plate which was to be
used in the pavilion. During the entertainment, the inhabitants of the
country waited upon their exacting and insatiable guests until they were
utterly exhausted by the fatigues of the service. When, at length, the feast
was ended, and Xerxes and his company left the pavilion, the vast assembly
outside broke up in disorder, pulled the pavilion to pieces, plundered the
tables of the gold and silver plate, and departed to their several
encampments, leaving nothing behind them.
The inhabitants of the country were so completely
impoverished and ruined by these exactions, that those Desolation and
who were not impressed into Xerxes's service and depopulationcountry.
of the

compelled to follow his army, abandoned their homes,
and roamed away in the hope of finding elsewhere the means of subsistence
which it was no longer possible to obtain on their own lands; and thus,
when Xerxes at last gave orders to the fleet to pass through the canal, and to
his army to resume its march, he left the whole region utterly depopulated
and desolate.
He went on to Therma, a port situated on the northwestern corner of the
Ægean Sea, which was the last of his places of rendezvous before his actual
advance into Greece.

Chapter VII.

The Preparations of the Greeks for Defense.
B.C. 480

W e must now leave, for a time, the operations of
Xerxes and his army, and turn our attention to the The Greeks.
Greeks, and to the preparations which they were making
to meet the emergency.
The two states of Greece which were most prominent in
the transactions connected with the invasion of Xerxes The two prominent
states of Greece.
were Athens and Sparta. By referring to the map, Athens
will be found to have been situated upon a promontory just without the
Peloponnesus, while Sparta, on the other hand, was in the center of a valley
which lay in the southern part of the peninsula. Each of these cities was the
center and strong-hold of a small but very energetic and powerful
commonwealth. The two states were entirely independent of each other, and
each had its own peculiar system of government, of usages, and of laws.
These systems, and, in fact, the characters of the two communities, in all
respects, were extremely dissimilar.
Both these states, though in name republics, had certain
magistrates, called commonly, in history, kings. These Greek kings.
kings were, however, in fact, only military chieftains,
commanders of the armies rather than sovereign rulers of the state. The
name by which such a chieftain was actually called by the people
themselves, in those days, was tyrannus, the name from which our word
tyrant is derived. As, however, the word tyrannus had none of that
opprobrious import which is associated with its English derivative, the latter
is not now a suitable substitute for the former. Historians, therefore,
commonly use the word king instead, though that word does not properly
express the idea. They were commanders, chieftains, hereditary generals,
but not strictly kings. We shall, however, often call them kings, in these
narratives, in conformity with the general usage. Demaratus, who had fled

from Sparta to seek refuge with Darius, and who was now accompanying
Xerxes on his march to Greece, was one of these kings.
It was a peculiarity in the constitution of Sparta that,
from a very early period of its history, there had been The two kings of
always two kings, who had each other, like the Roman Sparta.
consuls in later times. This custom was sustained partly by the idea that by
this division of the executive power of the state, the exercise of the power
was less likely to become despotic or tyrannical. It had its origin, however,
according to the ancient legends, in the following singular occurrences:
At a very early period in the history of Sparta, when the
people had always been accustomed, like other states, to Origin of the
custom of two
have one prince or chieftain, a certain prince died, kings.
leaving his wife, whose name was Argia, and two infant The twins.
children, as his survivors. The children were twins, and
the father had died almost immediately after they were born. Now the office
of king was in a certain sense hereditary, and yet not absolutely so; for the
people were accustomed to assemble on the death of the king, and
determine who should be his successor, choosing always, however, the
oldest son of the former monarch, unless there was some very extraordinary
and imperious reason for not doing so. In this case they decided, as usual,
that the oldest son should be king.
But here a very serious difficulty arose, which was, to determine which of
the twins was the oldest son. They resembled each other so closely that no
stranger could distinguish one from the other at all. The mother said that she
could not distinguish them, and that she did not know which was the first-
born. This was not strictly true; for she did, in fact, know, and only denied
her power to decide the question because she wished to have both of her
children kings.
In this perplexity the Spartans sent to the oracle at
Delphi to know what they were to do. The oracle gave, The Delphic oracle
as usual, an ambiguous and unsatisfactory response. It consulted.
directed the people to make both the children kings, but to render the
highest honors to the first-born. When this answer was reported at Sparta, it

only increased the difficulty; for how were they to render peculiar honors to
the first-born unless they could ascertain which the first-born was?
In this dilemma, some person suggested to the
magistrates that perhaps Argia really knew which was Plan for
ascertaining the
the eldest child, and that if so, by watching her, to see eldest.
whether she washed and fed one, uniformly, before the
other, or gave it precedence in any other way, by which her latent maternal
instinct or partiality might appear, the question might possibly be
determined. This plan was accordingly adopted. The magistrates contrived
means to place a servant maid in the house to watch the mother in the way
proposed, and the result was that the true order of birth was revealed. From
that time forward, while they were both considered as princes, the one now
supposed to be the first-born took precedence of the other.
When, however, the children arrived at an age to assume
the exercise of the governmental power, as there was no Civil dissensions.
perceptible difference between them in age, or strength, Two lines
established.
or accomplishments, the one who had been decided to be
the younger was little disposed to submit to the other. Each had his friends
and adherents, parties were formed, and a long and angry civil dissension
ensued. In the end the question was compromised, the command was
divided, and the system of having two chief magistrates became gradually
established, the power descending in two lines, from father to son, through
many generations. Of course there was perpetual jealousy and dissension,
and often open and terrible conflicts, between these two rival lines.
The Spartans were an agricultural people, cultivating the
valley in the southeastern part of the Peloponnesus, the Character of the
Spartans.
waters of which were collected and conveyed to the sea
by the River Eurotas and its branches. They lived in the plainest possible
manner, and prided themselves on the stern and stoical resolution with
which they rejected all the refinements and luxuries of society. Courage,
hardihood, indifference to life, and the power to endure without a murmur
the most severe and protracted sufferings, were the qualities which they
valued. They despised wealth just as other nations despise effeminacy and
foppery. Their laws discouraged commerce, lest it should make some of the
people rich. Their clothes were scanty and plain, their houses were

comfortless, their food was a coarse bread, hard and brown, and their
money was of iron. With all this, however, they were the most ferocious and
terrible soldiers in the world.
They were, moreover, with all their plainness of
manners and of life, of a very proud and lofty spirit. All Their lofty spirit.
agricultural toil, and every other species of manual labor
in their state, were performed by a servile peasantry, while the free citizens,
whose profession was exclusively that of arms, were as aristocratic and
exalted in soul as any nobles on earth. People are sometimes, in our day,
when money is so much valued, proud, notwithstanding their poverty. The
Spartans were proud of their poverty itself. They could be rich if they
chose, but they despised riches. They looked down on all the refinements
and delicacies of dress and of living from an elevation far above them. They
looked down on labor, too, with the same contempt. They were yet very
nice and particular about their dress and military appearance, though every
thing pertaining to both was coarse and simple, and they had slaves to wait
upon them even in their campaigns.
The Athenians were a totally different people. The
leading classes in their commonwealth were cultivated, The Athenians.
The city of Athens.
intellectual, and refined. The city of Athens was
renowned for the splendor of its architecture, its temples, its citadels, its
statues, and its various public institutions, which in subsequent times made
it the great intellectual center of Europe. It was populous and wealthy. It
had a great commerce and a powerful fleet. The Spartan character, in a
word, was stern, gloomy, indomitable, and wholly unadorned. The
Athenians were rich, intellectual, and refined. The two nations were nearly
equal in power, and were engaged in a perpetual and incessant rivalry.

Fate of the Persian Embassadors at Sparta
There were various other states and cities in Greece, but Sparta and Athens
Athens and Sparta were at this time the most defy the Persians.
considerable, and they were altogether the most resolute Earth and water.
Spirit of the
and determined in their refusal to submit to the Persian Spartans.
sway. In fact, so well known and understood was the
spirit of defiance with which these two powers were disposed to regard the
Persian invasion, that when Xerxes sent his summons demanding
submission, to the other states of Greece, he did not send any to these.
When Darius invaded Greece some years before, he had summoned Athens
and Sparta as well as the others, but his demands were indignantly rejected.
It seems that the custom was for a government or a prince, when
acknowledging the dominion of a superior power, to send, as a token of
territorial submission, a little earth and water, which was a sort of legal
form of giving up possession of their country to the sovereign who claimed
it. Accordingly, when Darius sent his embassadors into Greece to summon
the country to surrender, the embassadors, according to the usual form,
called upon the governments of the several states to send earth and water to
the king. The Athenians, as has been already said, indignantly refused to
comply with this demand. The Spartans, not content with a simple refusal,
seized the embassadors and threw them into a well, telling them, as they

went down, that if they wanted earth and water for the King of Persia, they
might get it there.
The Greeks had obtained some information of Xerxes's
designs against them before they received his summons. The blank tablets.
The first intelligence was communicated to the Spartans
by Demaratus himself, while he was at Susa, in the following singular
manner. It was the custom, in those days, to write with a steel point on a
smooth surface of wax. The wax was spread for this purpose on a board or
tablet of metal, in a very thin stratum, forming a ground upon which the
letters traced with the point were easily legible. Demaratus took two
writing-tablets such as these, and removing the wax from them, he wrote a
brief account of the proposed Persian invasion, by tracing the characters
upon the surface of the wood or metal itself, beneath; then, restoring the
wax so as to conceal the letters, he sent the two tablets, seemingly blank, to
Leonidas, king of Sparta. The messengers who bore them had other pretexts
for their journey, and they had various other articles to carry. The Persian
guards who stopped and examined the messengers from time to time along
the route, thought nothing of the blank tablets, and so they reached
Leonidas in safety.
Leonidas being a blunt, rough soldier, and not much
accustomed to cunning contrivances himself, was not Leonidas.
His wife discovers
usually much upon the watch for them from others, and the writing on the
when he saw no obvious communication upon the tablets.
tablets, he threw them aside, not knowing what the
sending of them could mean, and not feeling any strong interest in
ascertaining. His wife, however—her name was Gorgo—had more
curiosity. There was something mysterious about the affair, and she wished
to solve it. She examined the tablets attentively in every part, and at length
removed cautiously a little of the wax. The letters began to appear. Full of
excitement and pleasure, she proceeded with the work until the whole
cereous coating was removed. The result was, that the communication was
revealed, and Greece received the warning.
When the Greeks heard that Xerxes was at Sardis, they
sent three messengers in disguise, to ascertain the facts The three spies.
in respect to the Persian army assembled there, and, so

far as possible, to learn the plans and designs of the king. Notwithstanding
all the efforts of these men to preserve their concealment and disguise, they
were discovered, seized, and tortured by the Persian officer who took them,
until they confessed that they were spies. The officer was about to put them
to death, when Xerxes himself received information of the circumstances.
He forbade the execution, and directed, on the other hand, that the men
should be conducted through all his encampments, and be allowed to view
and examine every thing. He then dismissed them, with orders to return to
Greece and report what they had seen. He thought, he said, that the Greeks
would be more likely to surrender if they knew how immense his
preparations were for effectually vanquishing them if they attempted
resistance.
The city of Athens, being farther north than Sparta,
would be the one first exposed to danger from the Alarm at Athens.
The Greeks consult
invasion, and when the people heard of Xerxes's the Delphic oracle.
approach, the whole city was filled with anxiety and The responses.
alarm. Some of the inhabitants were panic-stricken, and
wished to submit; others were enraged, and uttered nothing but threats and
defiance. A thousand different plans of defense were proposed and eagerly
discussed. At length the government sent messengers to the oracle at
Delphi, to learn what their destiny was to be, and to obtain, if possible,
divine direction in respect to the best mode of averting the danger. The
messengers received an awful response, portending, in wild and solemn,
though dark and mysterious language, the most dreadful calamities to the
ill-fated city. The messengers were filled with alarm at hearing this reply.
One of the inhabitants of Delphi, the city in which the oracle was situated,
proposed to them to make a second application, in the character of the most
humble supplicants, and to implore that the oracle would give them some
directions in respect to the best course for them to pursue in order to avoid,
or, at least, to mitigate the impending danger. They did so, and after a time
they received an answer, vague, mysterious, and almost unintelligible, but
which seemed to denote that the safety of the city was connected in some
manner with Salamis, and with certain "wooden walls," to which the
inspired distich of the response obscurely alluded.
The messengers returned to Athens and reported the answer which they had
received. The people were puzzled and perplexed in their attempts to

understand it. It seems that the citadel of Athens had
been formerly surrounded by a wooden palisade. Some Various
thought that this was what was referred to by the interpretations
the oracle.
of

"wooden walls," and that the meaning of the oracle was
that they must rebuild the palisade, and then retreat to the citadel when the
Persians should approach, and defend themselves there.
Others conceived that the phrase referred to ships, and
that the oracle meant to direct them to meet their The Athenian fleet.
enemies with a fleet upon the sea. Salamis, which was
also mentioned by the oracle, was an island not far from Athens, being west
of the city, between it and the Isthmus of Corinth. Those who supposed that
by the "wooden walls" was denoted the fleet, thought that Salamis might
have been alluded to as the place near which the great naval battle was to be
fought. This was the interpretation which seemed finally to prevail.
The Athenians had a fleet of about two hundred galleys.
These vessels had been purchased and built, some time Themistocles.
before this, for the Athenian government, through the
influence of a certain public officer of high rank and influence, named
Themistocles. It seems that a large sum had accumulated in the public
treasury, the produce of certain mines belonging to the city, and a proposal
was made to divide it among the citizens, which would have given a small
sum to each man. Themistocles opposed this proposition, and urged instead
that the government should build and equip a fleet with the money. This
plan was finally adopted. The fleet was built, and it was now determined to
call it into active service to meet and repel the Persians, though the naval
armament of Xerxes was six times as large.
The next measure was to establish a confederation, if
possible, of the Grecian states, or at least of all those Proposed
confederation.
who were willing to combine, and thus to form an allied Council of Spartans
army to resist the invader. The smaller states were very and Athenians.
generally panic-stricken, and had either already signified
their submission to the Persian rule, or were timidly hesitating, in doubt
whether it would be safer for them to submit to the overwhelming force
which was advancing against them, or to join the Athenians and the
Spartans in their almost desperate attempts to resist it. The Athenians and

Spartans settled, for the time, their own quarrels, and held a council to take
the necessary measures for forming a more extended confederation.
All this took place while Xerxes was slowly advancing from Sardis to the
Hellespont, and from the Hellespont to Doriscus, as described in the
preceding chapter.
The council resolved on dispatching an embassy at once to all the states of
Greece, as well as to some of the remoter neighboring powers, asking them
to join the alliance.
The first Greek city to which these embassadors came
was Argos, which was the capital of a kingdom or state Embassy to Argos.
lying between Athens and Sparta, though within the
Peloponnesus. The states of Argos and of Sparta, being neighbors, had been
constantly at war. Argos had recently lost six thousand men in a battle with
the Spartans, and were, consequently, not likely to be in a very favorable
mood for a treaty of friendship and alliance.
When the embassadors had delivered their message, the
Argolians replied that they had anticipated such a The Argives reject
the propositions of
proposal from the time that they had heard that Xerxes the Spartans.
had commenced his march toward Greece, and that they
had applied, accordingly, to the oracle at Delphi, to know what it would be
best for them to do in case the proposal were made. The answer of the
oracle had been, they said, unfavorable to their entering into an alliance
with the Greeks. They were willing, however, they added, notwithstanding
this, to enter into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with the Spartans, for
thirty years, on condition that they should themselves have the command of
half the Peloponnesian troops. They were entitled to the command of the
whole, being, as they contended, the superior nation in rank, but they would
waive their just claim, and be satisfied with half, if the Spartans would
agree to that arrangement.
The Spartans replied that they could not agree to those conditions. They
were themselves, they said, the superior nation in rank, and entitled to the
whole command; and as they had two kings, and Argos but one, there was a
double difficulty in complying with the Argive demand. They could not

surrender one half of the command without depriving one of their kings of
his rightful power.
Thus the proposed alliance failed entirely, the people of Argos saying that
they would as willingly submit to the dominion of Xerxes as to the insolent
demands and assumptions of superiority made by the government of Sparta.
The embassadors among other countries which they
visited in their attempts to obtain alliance and aid, went Embassy to Sicily.
Demands of Gelon.
to Sicily. Gelon was the King of Sicily, and Syracuse
was his capital. Here the same difficulty occurred which had broken up the
negotiations at Argos. The embassadors, when they arrived at Syracuse,
represented to Gelon that, if the Persians subdued Greece, they would come
to Sicily next, and that it was better for him and for his countrymen that
they should meet the enemy while he was still at a distance, rather than to
wait until he came near. Gelon admitted the justice of this reasoning, and
said that he would furnish a large force, both of ships and men, for carrying
on the war, provided that he might have the command of the combined
army. To this, of course, the Spartans would not agree. He then asked that
he might command the fleet, on condition of giving up his claim to the land
forces. This proposition the Athenian embassadors rejected, saying to Gelon
that what they were in need of, and came to him to obtain, was a supply of
troops, not of leaders. The Athenians, they said, were to command the fleet,
being not only the most ancient nation of Greece, but also the most
immediately exposed to the invasion, so that they were doubly entitled to be
considered as the principals and leaders in the war.
Gelon then told the embassadors that, since they wished to obtain every
thing and to concede nothing, they had better leave his dominions without
delay, and report to their countrymen that they had nothing to expect from
Sicily.
The embassadors went then to Corcyra, a large island on
the western coast of Greece, in the Adriatic Sea. It is The embassadors
go to Corcyra.
now called Corfu. Here they seemed to meet with their
first success. The people of Corcyra acceded to the proposals made to them,
and promised at once to equip and man their fleet, and send it round into the
Ægean Sea. They immediately engaged in the work, and seemed to be

honestly intent on fulfilling their promises. They were, however, in fact,
only pretending. They were really undecided which cause to espouse, the
Greek or the Persian, and kept their promised squadron back by means of
various delays, until its aid was no longer needed.
But the most important of all these negotiations of the
Athenians and Spartans with the neighboring states were Thessaly.
those opened with Thessaly. Thessaly was a kingdom in
the northern part of Greece. It was, therefore, the territory which the Persian
armies would first enter, on turning the northwestern corner of the Ægean
Sea. There were, moreover, certain points in its geographical position, and
in the physical conformation of the country, that gave it a peculiar
importance in respect to the approaching conflict.
By referring to the map placed at the commencement of
the fifth chapter, it will be seen that Thessaly was a vast The River Peneus.
valley, surrounded on all sides by mountainous land, and The Vale of Tempe.
drained by the River Peneus and its branches. The Peneus flows eastwardly
to the Ægean Sea, and escapes from the great valley through a narrow and
romantic pass lying between the Mountains Olympus and Ossa. This pass
was called in ancient times the Olympic Straits, and a part of it formed a
romantic and beautiful glen called the Vale of Tempe. There was a road
through this pass, which was the only access by which Thessaly could be
entered from the eastward.
To the south of the Vale of Tempe, the mountains, as will
appear from the map, crowded so hard upon the sea as Straits of
not to allow any passage to the eastward of them. The Thermopylæ.
natural route of Xerxes, therefore, in descending into Greece, would be to
come down along the coast until he reached the mouth of the Peneus, and
then, following the river up through the Vale of Tempe into Thessaly, to
pass down toward the Peloponnesus on the western side of Ossa and Pelion,
and of the other mountains near the sea. If he could get through the
Olympic Straits and the Vale of Tempe, the way would be open and
unobstructed until he should reach the southern frontier of Thessaly, where
there was another narrow pass leading from Thessaly into Greece. This last
defile was close to the sea, and was called the Straits of Thermopylæ.

Thus Xerxes and his hosts, in continuing their march to
the southward, must necessarily traverse Thessaly, and Question to be
decided.
in doing so they would have two narrow and dangerous
defiles to pass—one at Mount Olympus, to get into the country, and the
other at Thermopylæ, to get out of it. It consequently became a point of
great importance to the Greeks to determine at which of these two passes
they should make their stand against the torrent which was coming down
upon them.
This question would, of course, depend very much upon
the disposition of Thessaly herself. The government of Messengers from
Thessaly.
that country, understanding the critical situation in which Negotiations.
they were placed, had not waited for the Athenians and
Spartans to send embassadors to them, but, at a very early period of the war
—before, in fact, Xerxes had yet crossed the Hellespont, had sent
messengers to Athens to concert some plan of action. These messengers
were to say to the Athenians that the government of Thessaly were
expecting every day to receive a summons from Xerxes, and that they must
speedily decide what they were to do; that they themselves were very
unwilling to submit to him, but they could not undertake to make a stand
against his immense host alone; that the southern Greeks might include
Thessaly in their plan of defense, or exclude it, just as they thought best. If
they decided to include it, then they must make a stand at the Olympic
Straits, that is, at the pass between Olympus and Ossa; and to do that, it
would be necessary to send a strong force immediately to take possession of
the pass. If, on the contrary, they decided not to defend Thessaly, then the
pass of Thermopylæ would be the point at which they must make their
stand, and in that case Thessaly must be at liberty to submit on the first
Persian summons.
The Greeks, after consultation on the subject, decided
that it would be best for them to defend Thessaly, and to Decision to defend
the Olympic Straits.
take their stand, accordingly, at the Straits of Olympus. Sailing of the fleet.
They immediately put a large force on board their fleet,
armed and equipped for the expedition. This was at the time when Xerxes
was just about crossing the Hellespont. The fleet sailed from the port of
Athens, passed up through the narrow strait called Euripus, lying between
the island of Eubœa and the main land, and finally landed at a favorable

point of disembarkation, south of Thessaly. From this point the forces
marched to the northward until they reached the Peneus, and then
established themselves at the narrowest part of the passage between the
mountains, strengthened their position there as much as possible, and
awaited the coming of the enemy. The amount of the force was ten thousand
men.
They had not been here many days before a messenger
came to them from the King of Macedon, which country, Advice of the King
it will be seen, lies immediately north of Thessaly, of Macedon.
earnestly dissuading them from attempting to make a stand at the Vale of
Tempe. Xerxes was coming on, he said, with an immense and
overwhelming force, one against which it would be utterly impossible for
them to make good their defense at such a point as that. It would be far
better for them to fall back to Thermopylæ, which, being a narrower and
more rugged pass, could be more easily defended.
Besides this, the messenger said that it was possible for Xerxes to enter
Thessaly without going through the Vale of Tempe at all. The country
between Thessaly and Macedon was mountainous, but it was not
impassable, and Xerxes would very probably come by that way. The only
security, therefore, for the Greeks, would be to fall back and intrench
themselves at Thermopylæ. Nor was there any time to be lost. Xerxes was
crossing the Hellespont, and the whole country was full of excitement and
terror.
The Greeks determined to act on this advice. They broke
up their encampment at the Olympic Straits, and, The Greeks fall
back to
retreating to the southward, established themselves at Thermopylæ.
Thermopylæ, to await there the coming of the conqueror.
The people of Thessaly then surrendered to Xerxes as soon as they received
his summons.
Xerxes, from his encampment at Therma, where we left
him at the close of the last chapter, saw the peaks of Xerxes visits
Thessaly.
Olympus and Ossa in the southern horizon. They were
distant perhaps fifty miles from where he stood. He inquired about them,
and was told that the River Peneus flowed between them to the sea, and that

through the same defile there lay the main entrance to Thessaly. He had
previously determined to march his army round the other way, as the King
of Macedon had suggested, but he said that he should like to see this defile.
So he ordered a swift Sidonian galley to be prepared, and, taking with him
suitable guides, and a fleet of other vessels in attendance on his galley, he
sailed to the mouth of the Peneus, and, entering that river, he ascended it
until he came to the defile.
Seen from any of the lower elevations which projected
from the bases of the mountains at the head of this Beautiful rural
defile, Thessaly lay spread out before the eye as one vast scene.
valley—level, verdant, fertile, and bounded by distant groups and ranges of
mountains, which formed a blue and beautiful horizon on every side.
Through the midst of this scene of rural loveliness the Peneus, with its
countless branches, gracefully meandered, gathering the water from every
part of the valley, and then pouring it forth in a deep and calm current
through the gap in the mountains at the observer's feet. Xerxes asked his
guides if it would be possible to find any other place where the waters of
the Peneus could be conducted to the sea. They replied that it would not be,
for the valley was bounded on every side by ranges of mountainous land.
"Then," said Xerxes, "the Thessalians were wise in
submitting at once to my summons; for, if they had not Conversation of
Xerxes at the
done so, I would have raised a vast embankment across Olympic Pass.
the valley here, and thus stopped the river, turned their
country into a lake, and drowned them all."

Chapter VIII.

The Advance of Xerxes into Greece.
B.C. 480

F rom Therma—the last of the great stations at which
the Persian army halted before its final descent upon Advance of the
army.
Greece—the army commenced its march, and the fleet Sailing of the fleet.
set sail, nearly at the same time, which was early in the
summer. The army advanced slowly, meeting with the usual difficulties and
delays, but without encountering any special or extraordinary occurrences,
until, after having passed through Macedon into Thessaly, and through
Thessaly to the northern frontier of Phocis, they began to approach the
Straits of Thermopylæ. What took place at Thermopylæ will be made the
subject of the next chapter. The movements of the fleet are to be narrated in
this.
In order distinctly to understand these movements, it is
necessary that the reader should first have a clear Sciathus.
Eubœa.
conception of the geographical conformation of the Straits of
coasts and seas along which the path of the expedition Artemisium and
lay. By referring to the map of Greece, we shall see that Euripus.
the course which the fleet would naturally take from
Therma to the southeastward, along the coast, was unobstructed and clear
for about a hundred miles. We then come to a group of four islands,
extending in a range at right angles to the coast. The only one of these
islands with which we have particularly to do in this history is the
innermost of them, which was named Sciathus. Opposite to these islands
the line of the coast, having passed around the point of a mountainous and
rocky promontory called Magnesia, turns suddenly to the westward, and
runs in that direction for about thirty miles, when it again turns to the
southward and eastward as before. In the sort of corner thus cut off by the
deflection of the coast lies the long island of Eubœa, which may be
considered, in fact, as almost a continuation of the continent, as it is a part
of the same conformation of country, and is separated from the main land
only by submerged valleys on the north and on the east. Into these sunken

valleys the sea of course flows, forming straits or channels. The one on the
north was, in ancient times, called Artemisium, and the one on the west, at
its narrowest point, Euripus. All these islands and coasts were high and
picturesque. They were also, in the days of Xerxes, densely populated, and
adorned profusely with temples, citadels, and towns.
On passing the southernmost extremity of the island of
Eubœa, and turning to the westward, we come to a Attica.
Saronic Gulf.
promontory of the main land, which constituted Attica, Island of Salamis.
and in the middle of which the city of Athens was
situated. Beyond this is a capacious gulf, called the Saronian Gulf. It lies
between Attica and the Peloponnesus. In the middle of the Saronian Gulf
lies the island of Ægina, and in the northern part of it the island of Salamis.
The progress of the Persian fleet was from Therma down the coast to
Sciathus, thence along the shores of Eubœa to its southern point, and so
round into the Saronian Gulf to the island of Salamis. The distance of this
voyage was perhaps two hundred and fifty miles. In accomplishing it the
fleet encountered many dangers, and met with a variety of incidents and
events, which we shall now proceed to describe.
The country, of course, was every where in a state of the
greatest excitement and terror. The immense army was Excitement of the
country.
slowly coming down by land, and the fleet, scarcely less Signals.
terrible, since its descents upon the coast would be so Sentinels.
fearfully sudden and overwhelming when they were
made, was advancing by sea. The inhabitants of the country were
consequently in a state of extreme agitation. The sick and the infirm, who
were, of course, utterly helpless in such a danger, exhibited every where the
spectacle of silent dismay. Mothers, wives, maidens, and children, on the
other hand, were wild with excitement and terror. The men, too full of
passion to fear, or too full of pride to allow their fears to be seen, were
gathering in arms, or hurrying to and fro with intelligence, or making hasty
arrangements to remove their wives and children from the scenes of cruel
suffering which were to ensue. They stationed watchmen on the hills to give
warning of the approach of the enemy. They agreed upon signals, and raised
piles of wood for beacon fires on every commanding elevation along the
coast; while all the roads leading from the threatened provinces to other
regions more remote from the danger were covered with flying parties,

endeavoring to make their escape, and carrying, wearily and in sorrow,
whatever they valued most and were most anxious to save. Mothers bore
their children, men their gold and silver, and sisters aided their sick or
feeble brothers to sustain the toil and terror of the flight.
All this time Xerxes was sitting in his war chariot, in the midst of his
advancing army, full of exultation, happiness, and pride at the thoughts of
the vast harvest of glory which all this panic and suffering were bringing
him in.
The fleet, at length—which was under the command of
Xerxes's brothers and cousins, whom he had appointed Movement of the
fleet.
the admirals of it—began to move down the coast from The ten
Therma, with the intention of first sweeping the seas reconnoitering
clear of any naval force which the Greeks might have galleys.
sent forward there to act against them, and then of
landing upon some point on the coast, wherever they could do so most
advantageously for co-operation with the army on the land. The advance of
the ships was necessarily slow. So immense a flotilla could not have been
otherwise kept together. The admirals, however, selected ten of the swiftest
of the galleys, and, after manning and arming them in the most perfect
manner, sent them forward to reconnoiter. The ten galleys were ordered to
advance rapidly, but with the greatest circumspection. They were not to
incur any needless danger, but, if they met with any detached ships of the
enemy, they were to capture them, if possible. They were, moreover, to be
constantly on the alert, to observe every thing, and to send back to the fleet
all important intelligence which they could obtain.
The ten galleys went on without observing any thing remarkable until they
reached the island of Sciathus. Here they came in sight of three Greek ships,
a sort of advanced guard, which had been stationed there to watch the
movements of the enemy.
The Greek galleys immediately hoisted their anchors and fled; the Persian
galleys manned their oars, and pressed on after them.
They overtook one of the guard-ships very soon, and,
after a short conflict, they succeeded in capturing it. The Guard-ships
captured.
Persians made prisoners of the officers and crew, and

then, selecting from among them the fairest and most Barbarous
ceremony.
noble-looking man, just as they would have selected a
bullock from a herd, they sacrificed him to one of their deities on the prow
of the captured ship. This was a religious ceremony, intended to signalize
and sanctify their victory.
The second vessel they also overtook and captured. The
crew of this ship were easily subdued, as the A heroic Greek.
overwhelming superiority of their enemies appeared to
convince them that all resistance was hopeless, and to plunge them into
despair. There was one man, however, who, it seems, could not be
conquered. He fought like a tiger to the last, and only ceased to deal his
furious thrusts and blows at the enemies that surrounded him when, after
being entirely covered with wounds, he fell faint and nearly lifeless upon
the bloody deck. When the conflict with him was thus ended, the murderous
hostility of his enemies seemed suddenly to be changed into pity for his
sufferings and admiration of his valor. They gathered around him, bathed
and bound up his wounds, gave him cordials, and at length restored him to
life. Finally, when the detachment returned to the fleet, some days
afterward, they carried this man with them, and presented him to the
commanders as a hero worthy of the highest admiration and honor. The rest
of the crew were made slaves.
The third of the Greek guard-ships contrived to escape,
or, rather, the crew escaped, while the vessel itself was One crew escape.
taken. This ship, in its flight, had gone toward the north, The alarm spread.
and the crew at last succeeded in running it on shore on the coast of
Thessaly, so as to escape, themselves, by abandoning the vessel to the
enemy. The officers and crew, thus escaping to the shore, went through
Thessaly into Greece, spreading the tidings every where that the Persians
were at hand. This intelligence was communicated, also, along the coast, by
beacon fires which the people of Sciathus built upon the heights of the
island as a signal, to give the alarm to the country southward of them,
according to the preconcerted plan. The alarm was communicated by other
fires built on other heights, and sentinels were stationed on every
commanding eminence on the highlands of Eubœa toward the south, to
watch for the first appearance of the enemy.

The Persian galleys that had been sent forward having
taken the three Greek guard-ships, and finding the sea Return of the
before them now clear of all appearances of an enemy, Persian galleys.
The monument of
concluded to return to the fleet with their prizes and their stones.
report. They had been directed, when they were
dispatched from the fleet, to lay up a monument of stones at the furthest
point which they should reach in their cruise: a measure often resorted to in
similar cases, by way of furnishing proof that a party thus sent forward have
really advanced as far as they pretend on their return. The Persian
detachment had actually brought the stones for the erection of their
landmark with them in one of their galleys. The galley containing the
stones, and two others to aid it, pushed on beyond Sciathus to a small rocky
islet standing in a conspicuous position in the sea, and there they built their
monument or cairn. The detachment then returned to meet the fleet. The
time occupied by this whole expedition was eleven days.
The fleet was, in the mean time, coming down along the
coast of Magnesia. The whole company of ships had Progress of the
fleet.
advanced safely and prosperously thus far, but now a
great calamity was about to befall them—the first of the series of disasters
by which the expedition was ultimately ruined. It was a storm at sea.
The fleet had drawn up for the night in a long and
shallow bay on the coast. There was a rocky promontory The fleet anchors in
at one end of this bay and a cape on the other, with a a bay.
long beach between them. It was a very good place of refuge and rest for
the night in calm weather, but such a bay afforded very little shelter against
a tempestuous wind, or even against the surf and swell of the sea, which
were sometimes produced by a distant storm. When the fleet entered this
bay in the evening, the sea was calm and the sky serene. The commanders
expected to remain there for the night, and to proceed on the voyage on the
following day.
The bay was not sufficiently extensive to allow of the
drawing up of so large a fleet in a single line along the A coming storm.
shore. The ships were accordingly arranged in several
lines, eight in all. The innermost of these lines was close to the shore; the
others were at different distances from it, and every separate ship was held

to the place assigned it by its anchors. In this position the fleet passed the
night in safety, but before morning there were indications of a storm. The
sky looked wild and lurid. A heavy swell came rolling in from the offing.
The wind began to rise, and to blow in fitful gusts. Its direction was from
the eastward, so that its tendency was to drive the fleet upon the shore. The
seamen were anxious and afraid, and the commanders of the several ships
began to devise, each for his own vessel, the best means of safety. Some,
whose vessels were small, drew them up upon the sand, above the reach of
the swell. Others strengthened the anchoring tackle, or added new anchors
to those already down. Others raised their anchors altogether, and attempted
to row their galleys away, up or down the coast, in hope of finding some
better place of shelter. Thus all was excitement and confusion in the fleet,
through the eager efforts made by every separate crew to escape the
impending danger.
In the mean time, the storm came on apace. The rising
and roughening sea made the oars useless, and the wind The storm rages.
howled frightfully through the cordage and the rigging.
The galleys soon began to be forced away from their moorings. Some were
driven upon the beach and dashed to pieces by the waves. Some were
wrecked on the rocks at one or the other of the projecting points which
bounded the bay on either hand. Some foundered at their place of
anchorage. Vast numbers of men were drowned. Those who escaped to the
shore were in hourly dread of an attack from the inhabitants of the country.
To save themselves, if possible, from this danger, they dragged up the
fragments of the wrecked vessels upon the beach, and built a fort with them
on the shore. Here they intrenched themselves, and then prepared to defend
their lives, armed with the weapons which, like the materials for their fort,
were washed up, from time to time, by the sea.
The storm continued for three days. It destroyed about
three hundred galleys, besides an immense number of Destruction of
many vessels.
provision transports and other smaller vessels. Great Plunder of the
numbers of seamen, also, were drowned. The inhabitants wrecks.
of the country along the coast enriched themselves with Scyllias, the famous
diver.
the plunder which they obtained from the wrecks, and
from the treasures, and the gold and silver vessels, which continued for
some time to be driven up upon the beach by the waves. The Persians

themselves recovered, it was said, a great deal of valuable treasure, by
employing a certain Greek diver, whom they had in their fleet, to dive for it
after the storm was over. This diver, whose name was Scyllias, was famed
far and wide for his power of remaining under water. As an instance of what
they believed him capable of performing, they said that when, at a certain
period subsequent to these transactions, he determined to desert to the
Greeks, he accomplished his design by diving into the sea from the deck of
a Persian galley, and coming up again in the midst of the Greek fleet, ten
miles distant!
After three days the storm subsided. The Persians then repaired the damages
which had been sustained, so far as it was now possible to repair them,
collected what remained of the fleet, took the shipwrecked mariners from
their rude fortification on the beach, and set sail again on their voyage to the
southward.
In the mean time, the Greek fleet had assembled in the
arm of the sea lying north of Eubœa, and between Dissensions in the
Eubœa and the main land. It was an allied fleet, made up Greek fleet.
Jealousy of the
of contributions from various states that had finally Athenians.
agreed to come into the confederacy. As is usually the
case, however, with allied or confederate forces, they were not well agreed
among themselves. The Athenians had furnished far the greater number of
ships, and they considered themselves, therefore, entitled to the command;
but the other allies were envious and jealous of them on account of that
very superiority of wealth and power which enabled them to supply a
greater portion of the naval force than the rest. They were willing that one
of the Spartans should command, but they would not consent to put
themselves under an Athenian. If an Athenian leader were chosen, they
would disperse, they said, and the various portions of the fleet return to
their respective homes.
The Athenians, though burning with resentment at this
unjust declaration, were compelled to submit to the Situation of the
Athenians.
necessity of the case. They could not take the
confederates at their word, and allow the fleet to be broken up, for the
defense of Athens was the great object for which it was assembled. The
other states might make their peace with the conqueror by submission, but

the Athenians could not do so. In respect to the rest of Greece, Xerxes
wished only for dominion. In respect to Athens, he wished for vengeance.
The Athenians had burned the Persian city of Sardis, and he had determined
to give himself no rest until he had burned Athens in return.
It was well understood, therefore, that the assembling of the fleet, and
giving battle to the Persians where they now were, was a plan adopted
mainly for the defense and benefit of the Athenians. The Athenians,
accordingly, waived their claim to command, secretly resolving that, when
the war was over, they would have their revenge for the insult and injury.
A Spartan was accordingly appointed commander of the
fleet. His name was Eurybiades. Eurybiades
appointed
commander.
Things were in this state when the two fleets came in
sight of each other in the strait between the northern end of Eubœa and the
main land. Fifteen of the Persian galleys, advancing incautiously some
miles in front of the rest, came suddenly upon the Greek fleet, and were all
captured. The crews were made prisoners and sent into Greece. The
remainder of the fleet entered the strait, and anchored at the eastern
extremity of it, sheltered by the promontory of Magnesia, which now lay to
the north of them.
The Greeks were amazed at the immense magnitude of
the Persian fleet, and the first opinion of the Debates in the
commanders was, that it was wholly useless for them to Greek council.
Dismay of the
attempt to engage them. A council was convened, and, Eubœans.
after a long and anxious debate, they decided that it was
best to retire to the southward. The inhabitants of Eubœa, who had been
already in a state of great excitement and terror at the near approach of so
formidable an enemy, were thrown, by this decision of the allies, into a state
of absolute dismay. It was abandoning them to irremediable and hopeless
destruction.
The government of the island immediately raised a very
large sum of money, and went with it to Themistocles, The Greek leaders
one of the most influential of the Athenian leaders, and bribed.
offered it to him if he would contrive any way to persuade the commanders
of the fleet to remain and give the Persians battle where they were.

Themistocles took the money, and agreed to the condition. He went with a
small part of it—though this part was a very considerable sum—to
Eurybiades, the commander-in-chief, and offered it to him if he would
retain the fleet in its present position. There were some other similar
offerings made to other influential men, judiciously selected. All this was
done in a very private manner, and, of course, Themistocles took care to
reserve to himself the lion's share of the Eubœan contribution. The effect of
this money in altering the opinions of the naval officers was marvelous. A
new council was called, the former decision was annulled, and the Greeks
determined to give their enemies battle where they were.
The Persians had not been unmindful of the danger that
the Greeks might retreat by retiring through the Euripus, Precautions of the
and so escape them. In order to prevent this, they Persians.
secretly sent off a fleet of two hundred of their strongest and fleetest
galleys, with orders to sail round Eubœa and enter the Euripus from the
south, so as to cut off the retreat of the Greeks in that quarter. They thought
that by this plan the Greek fleet would be surrounded, and could have no
possible mode of escape. They remained, therefore, with the principal fleet,
at the outer entrance of the northern strait for some days, before attacking
the Greeks, in order to give time for the detachment to pass round the
island.
The Persians sent off the two hundred galleys with great
secrecy, not desiring that the Greeks should discover Designs of the
Persians
their design of thus intercepting their retreat. They did discovered.
discover it, however, for this was the occasion on which
the great diver, Scyllias, made his escape from one fleet to the other by
swimming under water ten miles, and he brought the Greeks the tidings.[E]
The Greeks dispatched a small squadron of ships with
orders to proceed southward into the Euripus, to meet The Greeks decide
to give battle.
this detachment which the Persians sent round; and, in Euripus and
the mean time, they determined themselves to attack the Artemisium.
main Persian fleet without any delay. Notwithstanding
their absurd dissensions and jealousies, and the extent to which the leaders
were influenced by intrigues and bribes, the Greeks always evinced an
undaunted and indomitable spirit when the day of battle came. It was,

moreover, in this case, exceedingly important to defend the position which
they had taken. By referring to the map once more, it will be seen that the
Euripus was the great highway to Athens by sea, as the pass of Thermopylæ
was by land. Thermopylæ was west of Artemisium, where the fleet was now
stationed, and not many miles from it. The Greek army had made its great
stand at Thermopylæ, and Xerxes was fast coming down the country with
all his forces to endeavor to force a passage there. The Persian fleet, in
entering Artemisium, was making the same attempt by sea in respect to the
narrow passage of Euripus; and for either of the two forces, the fleet or the
army, to fail of making good the defense of its position, without a desperate
effort to do so, would justly be considered a base betrayal and abandonment
of the other.
The Greeks therefore advanced, one morning, to the
attack of the Persians, to the utter astonishment of the Advance of the
Greeks.
latter, who believed that their enemies were insane when The battle.
they thus saw them coming into the jaws, as they A stormy night.
thought, of certain destruction. Before night, however, Scene of terror.
they were to change their opinions in respect to the
insanity of their foes. The Greeks pushed boldly on into the midst of the
Persian fleet, where they were soon surrounded. They then formed
themselves into a circle, with the prows of the vessels outward, and the
sterns toward the center within, and fought in this manner with the utmost
desperation all the day. With the night a storm came on, or, rather, a series
of thunder-showers and gusts of wind, so severe that both fleets were glad
to retire from the scene of contest. The Persians went back toward the east,
the Greeks to the westward, toward Thermopylæ—each party busy in
repairing their wrecks, taking care of their wounded, and saving their
vessels from the tempest. It was a dreadful night. The Persians, particularly,
spent it in the midst of scenes of horror. The wind and the current, it seems,
set outward, toward the sea, and carried the masses and fragments of the
wrecked vessels, and the swollen and ghastly bodies of the dead, in among
the Persian fleet, and so choked up the surface of the water that the oars
became entangled and useless. The whole mass of seamen in the Persian
fleet, during this terrible night, were panic-stricken and filled with horror.
The wind, the perpetual thunder, the concussions of the vessels with the
wrecks and with one another, and the heavy shocks of the seas, kept them in

continual alarm; and the black and inscrutable darkness was rendered the
more dreadful, while it prevailed, by the hideous spectacle which, at every
flash of lightning, glared brilliantly upon every eye from the wide surface of
the sea. The shouts and cries of officers vociferating orders, of wounded
men writhing in agony, of watchmen and sentinels in fear of collisions,
mingled with the howling wind and roaring seas, created a scene of
indescribable terror and confusion.
The violence of the sudden gale was still greater further out at sea, and the
detachment of ships which had been sent around Eubœa was wholly
dispersed and destroyed by it.
The storm was, however, after all, only a series of
summer evening showers, such as to the inhabitants of A calm after the
storm.
peaceful dwellings on the land have no terror, but only
come to clear the sultry atmosphere in the night, and in the morning are
gone. When the sun rose, accordingly, upon the Greeks and Persians on the
morning after their conflict, the air was calm, the sky serene, and the sea as
blue and pure as ever. The bodies and the wrecks had been floated away
into the offing. The courage or the ferocity, whichever we choose to call it,
of the combatants, returned, and they renewed the conflict. It continued,
with varying success, for two more days.
During all this time the inhabitants of the island of
Eubœa were in the greatest distress and terror. They Terror of the
Eubœans.
watched these dreadful conflicts from the heights, Their plans.
uncertain how the struggle would end, but fearing lest
their defenders should be beaten, in which case the whole force of the
Persian fleet would be landed on their island, to sweep it with pillage and
destruction. They soon began to anticipate the worst, and, in preparation for
it, they removed their goods—all that could be removed—and drove their
cattle down to the southern part of the island, so as to be ready to escape to
the main land. The Greek commanders, finding that the fleet would
probably be compelled to retreat in the end, sent to them here,
recommending that they should kill their cattle and eat them, roasting the
flesh at fires which they should kindle on the plain. The cattle could not be
transported, they said, across the channel, and it was better that the flying
population should be fed, than that the food should fall into Persian hands.

If they would dispose of their cattle in this manner, Eurybiades would
endeavor, he said, to transport the people themselves and their valuable
goods across into Attica.
How many thousand peaceful and happy homes were broken up and
destroyed forever by this ruthless invasion!
In the mean time, the Persians, irritated by the obstinate
resistance of the Greeks, were, on the fourth day, The Greeks retire.
Inscription on the
preparing for some more vigorous measures, when they rocks.
saw a small boat coming toward the fleet from down the
channel. It proved to contain a countryman, who came to tell them that the
Greeks had gone away. The whole fleet, he said, had sailed off to the
southward, and abandoned those seas altogether. The Persians did not, at
first, believe this intelligence. They suspected some ambuscade or
stratagem. They advanced slowly and cautiously down the channel. When
they had gone half down to Thermopylæ, they stopped at a place called
Histiæa, where, upon the rocks on the shore, they found an inscription
addressed to the Ionians—who, it will be recollected, had been brought by
Xerxes as auxiliaries, contrary to the advice of Artabanus—entreating them
not to fight against their countrymen. This inscription was written in large
and conspicuous characters on the face of the cliff, so that it could be read
by the Ionian seamen as they passed in their galleys.
The fleet anchored at Histiæa, the commanders being
somewhat uncertain in respect to what it was best to do. The commanders of
Their suspense was very soon relieved by a messenger the Persian fleet
summoned to
from Xerxes, who came in a galley up the channel from Thermopylæ.
Thermopylæ, with the news that Xerxes had arrived at
Thermopylæ, had fought a great battle there, defeated the Greeks, and
obtained possession of the pass, and that any of the officers of the fleet who
chose to do so might come and view the battle ground. This intelligence and
invitation produced, throughout the fleet, a scene of the wildest excitement,
enthusiasm, and joy. All the boats and smaller vessels of the fleet were put
into requisition to carry the officers down. When they arrived at
Thermopylæ the tidings all proved true. Xerxes was in possession of the
pass, and the Greek fleet was gone.

Chapter IX.

The Battle of Thermopylæ.
B.C. 480

T he pass of Thermopylæ was not a ravine among
mountains, but a narrow space between mountains The pass of
Thermopylæ.
and the sea. The mountains landward were steep and
inaccessible; the sea was shoal. The passage between them was narrow for
many miles along the shore, being narrowest at the ingress and egress. In
the middle the space was broader. The place was celebrated for certain
warm springs which here issued from the rocks, and which had been used in
former times for baths.
The position had been considered, long before Xerxes's
day, a very important one in a military point of view, as Its situation.
it was upon the frontier between two Greek states that
were frequently at war. One of these states, of course, was Thessaly. The
other was Phocis, which lay south of Thessaly. The general boundary
between these two states was mountainous, and impassable for troops, so
that each could invade the territories of the other only by passing round
between the mountains and the shore at Thermopylæ.
The Phocæans, in order to keep the Thessalians out, had,
in former times, built a wall across the way, and put up Ancient
intrenchments.
gates there, which they strongly fortified. In order still View at
further to increase the difficulty of forcing a passage, Thermopylæ.
they conducted the water of the warm springs over the
ground without the wall, in such a way as to make the surface continually
wet and miry. The old wall had now fallen to ruins, but the miry ground
remained. The place was solitary and desolate, and overgrown with a
confused and wild vegetation. On one side the view extended far and wide
over the sea, with the highlands of Eubœa in the distance, and on the other
dark and inaccessible mountains rose, covered with forests, indented with
mysterious and unexplored ravines, and frowning in a wild and gloomy
majesty over the narrow passway which crept along the shore below.

The Greeks, when they retired from Thessaly, fell back
upon Thermopylæ, and established themselves there. The allied forces.
They had a force variously estimated, from three to four Leonidas
Spartan.
the

thousand men. These were from the different states of
Greece, some within and some without the Peloponnesus—a few hundred
men only being furnished, in general, from each state or kingdom. Each of
these bodies of troops had its own officers, though there was one general-
in-chief, who commanded the whole. This was Leonidas the Spartan. He
had brought with him three hundred Spartans, as the quota furnished by that
city. These men he had specially selected himself, one by one, from among
the troops of the city, as men on whom he could rely.
It will be seen from the map that Thermopylæ is at some distance from the
Isthmus of Corinth, and that of the states which would be protected by
making a stand at the pass, some were without the isthmus and some within.
These states, in sending each a few hundred men only to Thermopylæ, did
not consider that they were making their full contribution to the army, but
only sending forward for the emergency those that could be dispatched at
once; and they were all making arrangements to supply more troops as soon
as they could be raised and equipped for the service. In the mean time,
however, Xerxes and his immense hordes came on faster than they had
expected, and the news at length came to Leonidas, in the pass, that the
Persians, with one or two millions of men, were at hand, while he had only
three or four thousand at Thermopylæ to oppose them. The question arose,
What was to be done?
Those of the Greeks who came from the Peloponnesus
were in favor of abandoning Thermopylæ, and falling Debate in regard to
back to the isthmus. The isthmus, they maintained, was defending
Thermopylæ.
as strong and as favorable a position as the place where The decision.
they were; and, by the time they had reached it, they
would have received great re-enforcements; whereas, with so small a force
as they had then at command, it was madness to attempt to resist the Persian
millions. This plan, however, was strongly opposed by all those Greeks who
represented countries without the Peloponnesus; for, by abandoning
Thermopylæ, and falling back to the isthmus, their states would be left
wholly at the mercy of the enemy. After some consultation and debate, it
was decided to remain at Thermopylæ. The troops accordingly took up their

positions in a deliberate and formal manner, and, intrenching themselves as
strongly as possible, began to await the onset of the enemy. Leonidas and
his three hundred were foremost in the defile, so as to be the first exposed
to the attack. The rest occupied various positions along the passage, except
one corps, which was stationed on the mountains above, to guard the pass in
that direction. This corps was from Phocis, which, being the state nearest to
the scene of conflict, had furnished a larger number of soldiers than any
other. Their division numbered a thousand men. These being stationed on
the declivity of the mountain, left only two or three thousand in the defile
below.
From what has been said of the stern and savage
character of the Spartans, one would scarcely expect in Character of the
them any indications or displays of personal vanity. Spartans.
Their pride.
There was one particular, it seems, however, in regard to
which they were vain, and that was in respect to their hair. They wore it
very long. In fact, the length of the hair was, in their commonwealth, a
mark of distinction between freemen and slaves. All the agricultural and
mechanical labors were performed, as has already been stated, by the
slaves, a body which constituted, in fact, the mass of the population; and the
Spartan freemen, though very stern in their manners, and extremely simple
and plain in their habits of life, were, it must be remembered, as proud and
lofty in spirit as they were plain and poor. They constituted a military
aristocracy, and a military aristocracy is always more proud and
overbearing than any other.
It must be understood, therefore, that these Spartan
soldiers were entirely above the performance of any The Spartans adorn
useful labors; and while they prized, in character, the themselves
battle.
for the

savage ferocity of the tiger, they had a taste, in person,
for something like his savage beauty too. They were never, moreover, more
particular and careful in respect to their personal appearance than when they
were going into battle. The field of battle was their particular theater of
display, not only of the substantial qualities of strength, fortitude, and valor,
but also of such personal adornments as were consistent with the plainness
and severity of their attire, and could be appreciated by a taste as rude and
savage as theirs. They proceeded, therefore, when established at their post
in the throat of the pass, to adorn themselves for the approaching battle.

In the mean time the armies of Xerxes were
approaching. Xerxes himself, though he did not think it Approach of
Xerxes.
possible that the Greeks could have a sufficient force to The Persian
offer him any effectual resistance, thought it probable horseman.
that they would attempt to make a stand at the pass, and, His observation.
when he began to draw near to it, he sent forward a
horseman to reconnoiter the ground. The horseman rode into the pass a little
way, until he came in sight of the enemy. He stopped upon an eminence to
survey the scene, being all ready to turn in an instant, and fly at the top of
his speed, in case he should be pursued. The Spartans looked upon him as
he stood there, but seemed to consider his appearance as a circumstance of
no moment, and then went on with their avocations. The horseman found,
as he leisurely observed them, that there was an intrenchment thrown across
the straits, and that the Spartans were in front of it. There were other forces
behind, but these the horseman could not see. The Spartans were engaged,
some of them in athletic sports and gymnastic exercises, and the rest in
nicely arranging their dress, which was red and showy in color, though
simple and plain in form, and in smoothing, adjusting, and curling their
hair. In fact, they seemed to be, one and all, preparing for an entertainment.
And yet these men were actually preparing themselves to be slaughtered, to
be butchered, one by one, by slow degrees, and in the most horrible and
cruel manner; and they knew perfectly well that it was so. The adorning of
themselves was for this express and particular end.
The horseman, when he had attentively noticed all that
was to be seen, rode slowly back to Xerxes, and reported Report of the
the result. The king was much amused at hearing such horseman.
an account from his messenger. He sent for Demaratus, the Spartan refugee,
with whom, the reader will recollect, he held a long conversation in respect
to the Greeks at the close of the great review at Doriscus. When Demaratus
came, Xerxes related to him what the messenger had reported. "The
Spartans in the pass," said he, "present, in their encampment, the
appearance of being out on a party of pleasure. What does it mean? You will
admit now, I suppose, that they do not intend to resist us."
Demaratus shook his head. "Your majesty does not
know the Greeks," said he, "and I am very much afraid Conversation with

that, if I state what I know respecting them, I shall Demaratus.
offend you. These appearances which your messenger
observed indicate to me that the men he saw were a body of Spartans, and
that they supposed themselves on the eve of a desperate conflict. Those are
the men, practicing athletic feats, and smoothing and adorning their hair,
that are the most to be feared of all the soldiers of Greece. If you can
conquer them, you will have nothing beyond to fear."
Xerxes thought this opinion of Demaratus extremely
absurd. He was convinced that the party in the pass was Xerxes encamps at
the pass.
some small detachment that could not possibly be
thinking of serious resistance. They would, he was satisfied, now that they
found that the Persians were at hand, immediately retire down the pass, and
leave the way clear. He advanced, therefore, up to the entrance of the pass,
encamped there, and waited several days for the Greeks to clear the way.
The Greeks remained quietly in their places, paying apparently no attention
whatever to the impending and threatening presence of their formidable
foes.
At length Xerxes concluded that it was time for him to
act. On the morning, therefore, of the fifth day, he called Troops sent into the
pass.
out a detachment of his troops, sufficient, as he thought,
for the purpose, and sent them down the pass, with orders to seize all the
Greeks that were there, and bring them, alive, to him. The detachment that
he sent was a body of Medes, who were considered as the best troops in the
army, excepting always the Immortals, who, as has been before stated, were
entirely superior to the rest. The Medes, however, Xerxes supposed, would
find no difficulty in executing his orders.
The detachment marched, accordingly, into the pass. In a
few hours a spent and breathless messenger came from Defeat of the
them, asking for re-enforcements. The re-enforcements Persian detachment.
were sent. Toward night a remnant of the whole body came back, faint and
exhausted with a long and fruitless combat, and bringing many of their
wounded and bleeding comrades with them. The rest they had left dead in
the defile.

Xerxes was both astonished and enraged at these results.
He determined that this trifling should continue no The Immortals
longer. He ordered the Immortals themselves to be called out.
called out on the following morning, and then, placing himself at the head
of them, he advanced to the vicinity of the Greek intrenchments. Here he
ordered a seat or throne to be placed for him upon an eminence, and, taking
his seat upon it, prepared to witness the conflict. The Greeks, in the mean
time, calmly arranged themselves on the line which they had undertaken to
defend, and awaited the charge. Upon the ground, on every side, were lying
the mangled bodies of the Persians slain the day before, some exposed fully
to view, ghastly and horrid spectacles, others trampled down and half buried
in the mire.
The Immortals advanced to the attack, but they made no
impression. Their superior numbers gave them no The Immortals
advance to the
advantage, on account of the narrowness of the defile. charge.
The Greeks stood, each corps at its own assigned station Valor of the Greeks.
on the line, forming a mass so firm and immovable that
the charge of the Persians was arrested on encountering it as by a wall. In
fact, as the spears of the Greeks were longer than those of the Persians, and
their muscular and athletic strength and skill were greater, it was found that
in the desperate conflict which raged, hour after hour, along the line, the
Persians were continually falling, while the Greek ranks continued entire.
Sometimes the Greeks would retire for a space, falling back with the utmost
coolness, regularity, and order; and then, when the Persians pressed on in
pursuit, supposing that they were gaining the victory, the Greeks would turn
so soon as they found that the ardor of pursuit had thrown the enemies' lines
somewhat into confusion, and, presenting the same firm and terrible front as
before, would press again upon the offensive, and cut down their enemies
with redoubled slaughter. Xerxes, who witnessed all these things from
among the group of officers around him upon the eminence, was kept
continually in a state of excitement and irritation. Three times he leaped
from his throne, with loud exclamations of vexation and rage.
All, however, was of no avail. When night came the
Immortals were compelled to withdraw, and leave the The Immortals
repulsed.
Greeks in possession of their intrenchments.

Things continued substantially in this state for one or
two days longer, when one morning a Greek countryman Treachery of
Ephialtes.
appeared at the tent of Xerxes, and asked an audience of
the king. He had something, he said, of great importance to communicate to
him. The king ordered him to be admitted. The Greek said that his name
was Ephialtes, and that he came to inform the king that there was a secret
path leading along a wild and hidden chasm in the mountains, by which he
could guide a body of Persians to the summit of the hills overhanging the
pass at a point below the Greek intrenchment. This point being once
attained, it would be easy, Ephialtes said, for the Persian forces to descend
into the pass below the Greeks, and thus to surround them and shut them in,
and that the conquest of them would then be easy. The path was a secret
one, and known to very few. He knew it, however, and was willing to
conduct a detachment of troops through it, on condition of receiving a
suitable reward.
The king was greatly surprised and delighted at this
intelligence. He immediately acceded to Ephialtes's Joy of Xerxes.
proposals, and organized a strong force to be sent up the
path that very night.
On the north of Thermopylæ there was a small stream,
which came down through a chasm in the mountains to Course of the path.
the sea. The path which Ephialtes was to show
commenced here, and following the bed of this stream up the chasm, it at
length turned to the southward through a succession of wild and trackless
ravines, till it came out at last on the declivities of the mountains near the
lower part of the pass, at a place where it was possible to descend to the
defile below. This was the point which the thousand Phocæans had been
ordered to take possession of and guard, when the plan for the defense of
the pass was first organized. They were posted here, not with the idea of
repelling any attack from the mountains behind them—for the existence of
the path was wholly unknown to them—but only that they might command
the defile below, and aid in preventing the Persians from going through,
even if those who were in the defile were defeated or slain.

The Persian detachment toiled all night up the steep and
dangerous pathway, among rocks, chasms, and A Persian
precipices, frightful by day, and now made still more detachment
the path.
sent up

frightful by the gloom of the night. They came out at
last, in the dawn of the morning, into valleys and glens high up the declivity
of the mountain, and in the immediate vicinity of the Phocæan
encampment. The Persians were concealed, as they advanced, by the groves
and thickets of stunted oaks which grew here, but the morning air was so
calm and still, that the Phocæan sentinels heard the noise made by their
trampling upon the leaves as they came up the glen. The Phocæans
immediately gave the alarm. Both parties were completely surprised. The
Persians had not expected to find a foe at this elevation, and the Greeks who
had ascended there had supposed that all beyond and above them was an
impassable and trackless desolation.
There was a short conflict, The Phocæans were driven
off their ground. They retreated up the mountain, and The Phocæans
toward the southward. The Persians decided not to retreat.
pursue them. On the other hand, they descended toward the defile, and took
up a position on the lower declivities of the mountain, which enabled them
to command the pass below; there they paused, and awaited Xerxes's
orders.
The Greeks in the defile perceived at once that they were
now wholly at the mercy of their enemies. They might The Greeks
yet retreat, it is true, for the Persian detachment had not surrounded.
yet descended to intercept them; but, if they remained where they were,
they would, in a few hours, be hemmed in by their foes; and even if they
could resist, for a little time, the double onset which would then be made
upon them, their supplies would be cut off, and there would be nothing
before them but immediate starvation. They held hurried councils to
determine what to do.
There is some doubt as to what took place at these
councils, though the prevailing testimony is, that Resolution of
Leonidas.
Leonidas recommended that they should retire—that is, Leonidas dismisses
that all except himself and the three hundred Spartans the other Greeks.

should do so. "You," said he, addressing the other Greeks, "are at liberty, by
your laws, to consider, in such cases as this, the question of expediency, and
to withdraw from a position which you have taken, or stand and maintain it,
according as you judge best. But by our laws, such a question, in such a
case, is not to be entertained. Wherever we are posted, there we stand, come
life or death, to the end. We have been sent here from Sparta to defend the
pass of Thermopylæ. We have received no orders to withdraw. Here,
therefore, we must remain; and the Persians, if they go through the pass at
all, must go through it over our graves. It is, therefore, your duty to retire.
Our duty is here, and we will remain and do it."
After all that may be said of the absurdity and folly of
throwing away the lives of three hundred men in a case His noble
like this, so utterly and hopelessly desperate, there is still generosity.
something in the noble generosity with which Leonidas dismissed the other
Greeks, and in the undaunted resolution with which he determined himself
to maintain his ground, which has always strongly excited the admiration of
mankind. It was undoubtedly carrying the point of honor to a wholly
unjustifiable extreme, and yet all the world, for the twenty centuries which
have intervened since these transactions occurred, while they have
unanimously disapproved, in theory, of the course which Leonidas pursued,
have none the less unanimously admired and applauded it.
In dismissing the other Greeks, Leonidas retained with
him a body of Thebans, whom he suspected of a design Leonidas retains the
of revolting to the enemy. Whether he considered his Thebans.
decision to keep them in the pass equivalent to a sentence of death, and
intended it as a punishment for their supposed treason, or only that he
wished to secure their continued fidelity by keeping them closely to their
duty, does not appear. At all events, he retained them, and dismissed the
other allies. Those dismissed retreated to the open country below. The
Spartans and the Thebans remained in the pass. There were also, it was said,
some other troops, who, not willing to leave the Spartans alone in this
danger, chose to remain with them and share their fate. The Thebans
remained very unwillingly.
The next morning Xerxes prepared for his final effort.
He began by solemn religious services, in the presence Xerxes attacks him.
Terrible combat.

of his army, at an early hour; and then, after breakfasting Death of Leonidas.
quietly, as usual, and waiting, in fact, until the business
part of the day had arrived, he gave orders to advance. His troops found
Leonidas and his party not at their intrenchments, as before, but far in
advance of them. They had come out and forward into a more open part of
the defile, as if to court and anticipate their inevitable and dreaded fate.
Here a most terrible combat ensued; one which, for a time, seemed to have
no other object than mutual destruction, until at length Leonidas himself
fell, and then the contest for the possession of his body superseded the
unthinking and desperate struggles of mere hatred and rage. Four times the
body, having been taken by the Persians, was retaken by the Greeks: at last
the latter retreated, bearing the dead body with them past their
intrenchment, until they gained a small eminence in the rear of it, at a point
where the pass was wider. Here the few that were still left gathered together.
The detachment which Ephialtes had guided were coming up from below.
The Spartans were faint and exhausted with their desperate efforts, and
were bleeding from the wounds they had received; their swords and spears
were broken to pieces, their leader and nearly all their company were slain.
But the savage and tiger-like ferocity which animated them continued
unabated till the last. They fought with tooth and nail when all other
weapons failed them, and bit the dust at last, as they fell, in convulsive and
unyielding despair. The struggle did not cease till they were all slain, and
every limb of every man ceased to quiver.
There were stories in circulation among mankind after
this battle, importing that one or two of the corps Stories of the battle.
The two invalids.
escaped the fate of the rest. There were two soldiers, it
was said, that had been left in a town near the pass, as invalids, being
afflicted with a severe inflammation of the eyes. One of them, when he
heard that the Spartans were to be left in the pass, went in, of his own
accord, and joined them, choosing to share the fate of his comrades. It was
said that he ordered his servant to conduct him to the place. The servant did
so, and then fled himself, in great terror. The sick soldier remained and
fought with the rest. The other of the invalids was saved, but, on his return
to Sparta, he was considered as stained with indelible disgrace for what his
countrymen regarded a base dereliction from duty in not sharing his
comrade's fate.

There was also a story of another man, who had been sent away on some
mission into Thessaly, and who did not return until all was over; and also of
two others who had been sent to Sparta, and were returning when they
heard of the approaching conflict. One of them hastened into the pass, and
was killed with his companions. The other delayed, and was saved. Whether
any or all of these rumors were true, is not now certain; there is, however,
no doubt that, with at most a few exceptions such as these, the whole three
hundred were slain.
The Thebans, early in the conflict, went over in a body to the enemy.
Xerxes came after the battle to view the ground. It was
covered with many thousands of dead bodies, nearly all Xerxes views the
of whom, of course, were Persians. The wall of the ground. His treatment of the
intrenchment was broken down, and the breaches in it body of Leonidas.
choked up by the bodies. The morasses made by the
water of the springs were trampled into deep mire, and were full of the
mutilated forms of men and of broken weapons. When Xerxes came at last
to the body of Leonidas, and was told that that was the man who had been
the leader of the band, he gloried over it in great exaltation and triumph. At
length he ordered the body to be decapitated, and the headless trunk to be
nailed to a cross.
Xerxes then commanded that a great hole should be dug,
and ordered all the bodies of the Persians that had been Message to the
killed to be buried in it, except only about a thousand, fleet.
which he left upon the ground. The object of this was to conceal the extent
of the loss which his army had sustained. The more perfectly to accomplish
this end, he caused the great grave, when it was filled up, to be strewed over
with leaves, so as to cover and conceal all indications of what had been
done. This having been carefully effected, he sent the message to the fleet,
which was alluded to at the close of the last chapter, inviting the officers to
come and view the ground.
The operations of the fleet described in the last chapter, and those of the
army narrated in this, took place, it will be remembered, at the same time,
and in the same vicinity too; for, by referring to the map, it will appear that
Thermopylæ was upon the coast, exactly opposite to the channel or arm of

the sea lying north of Eubœa, where the naval contests had been waged; so
that, while Xerxes had been making his desperate efforts to get through the
pass, his fleet had been engaged in a similar conflict with the squadrons of
the Greeks, directly opposite to him, twenty or thirty miles in the offing.
After the battle of Thermopylæ was over, Xerxes sent
for Demaratus, and inquired of him how many more Xerxes sends for
such soldiers there were in Greece as Leonidas and his Demaratus.
Conversation with
three hundred Spartans. Demaratus replied that he could Demaratus.
not say how many precisely there were in Greece, but
that there were eight thousand such in Sparta alone. Xerxes then asked the
opinion of Demaratus as to the course best to be pursued for making the
conquest of the country. This conversation was held in the presence of
various nobles and officers, among whom was the admiral of the fleet, who
had come, with the various other naval commanders, as was stated in the
last chapter, to view the battle-field.
Demaratus said that he did not think that the king could
easily get possession of the Peloponnesus by marching Plans proposed by
to it directly, so formidable would be the opposition that him.
he would encounter at the isthmus. There was, however, he said, an island
called Cythera, opposite to the territories of Sparta, and not far from the
shore, of which he thought that the king could easily get possession, and
which, once fully in his power, might be made the base of future operations
for the reduction of the whole peninsula, as bodies of troops could be
dispatched from it to the main land in any numbers and at any time. He
recommended, therefore, that three hundred ships, with a proper
complement of men, should be detached from the fleet, and sent round at
once to take possession of that island.
To this plan the admiral of the fleet was totally opposed.
It was natural that he should be so, since the detaching Opposition of the
of three hundred ships for this enterprise would greatly admiral.
weaken the force under his command. It would leave the fleet, he told the
king, a miserable remnant, not superior to that of the enemy, for they had
already lost four hundred ships by storms. He thought it infinitely
preferable that the fleet and the army should advance together, the one by
sea and the other on the land, and complete their conquests as they went

along. He advised the king, too, to beware of Demaratus's advice. He was a
Greek, and, as such, his object was, the admiral believed, to betray and ruin
the expedition.
After hearing these conflicting opinions, the king
decided to follow the admiral's advice. "I will adopt your Decision of Xerxes.
counsel," said he, "but I will not hear any thing said
against Demaratus, for I am convinced that he is a true and faithful friend to
me." Saying this, he dismissed the council.

Chapter X.

The Burning of Athens.
B.C. 480

W hen the officers of the Persian fleet had satisfied
themselves with examining the battle-field at The officers return
to their vessels.
Thermopylæ, and had heard the narrations given by the The Greek fleet
soldiers of the terrible combats that had been fought retire to Salamis.
with the desperate garrison which had been stationed to
defend the pass, they went back to their vessels, and prepared to make sail
to the southward, in pursuit of the Greek fleet. The Greek fleet had gone to
Salamis. The Persians in due time overtook them there, and a great naval
conflict occurred, which is known in history as the battle of Salamis, and
was one of the most celebrated naval battles of ancient times. An account of
this battle will form the subject of the next chapter. In this we are to follow
the operations of the army on the land.
As the Pass of Thermopylæ was now in Xerxes's possession, the way was
open before him to all that portion of the great territory which lay north of
the Peloponnesus. Of course, before he could enter the peninsula itself, he
must pass the Isthmus of Corinth, where he might, perhaps, encounter some
concentrated resistance. North of the isthmus, however, there was no place
where the Greeks could make a stand. The country was all open, or, rather,
there were a thousand ways open through the various valleys and glens, and
along the banks of the rivers. All that was necessary was to procure guides
and proceed.
The Thessalians were very ready to furnish guides. They
had submitted to Xerxes before the battle of The Thessalians.
Their hostility to
Thermopylæ, and they considered themselves, the Phocæans.
accordingly, as his allies. They had, besides, a special
interest in conducting the Persian army, on account of the hostile feelings
which they entertained toward the people immediately south of the pass,
into whose territories Xerxes would first carry his ravages. This people
were the Phocæans. Their country, as has already been stated, was separated

from Thessaly by impassable mountains, except where the Straits of
Thermopylæ opened a passage; and through this pass both nations had been
continually making hostile incursions into the territory of the other for
many years before the Persian invasion. The Thessalians had surrendered
readily to the summons of Xerxes, while the Phocæans had determined to
resist him, and adhere to the cause of the Greeks in the struggle. They were
suspected of having been influenced, in a great measure, in their
determination to resist, by the fact that the Thessalians had decided to
surrender. They were resolved that they would not, on any account, be upon
the same side with their ancient and inveterate foes.
The hostility of the Thessalians to the Phocæans was
equally implacable. At the last incursion which they had Defeat of the
Thessalians.
made into the Phocæan territory, they had been defeated
by means of stratagems in a manner which tended greatly to vex and irritate
them. There were two of these stratagems, which were both completely
successful, and both of a very extraordinary character.
The first was this. The Thessalians were in the Phocæan
country in great force, and the Phocæans had found Phocæan stratagem.
A spectral army.
themselves utterly unable to expel them. Under these
circumstances, a body of the Phocæans, six hundred in number, one day
whitened their faces, their arms and hands, their clothes, and all their
weapons, with chalk, and then, at the dead of night—perhaps, however,
when the moon was shining—made an onset upon the camp of the enemy.
The Thessalian sentinels were terrified and ran away, and the soldiers,
awakened from their slumbers by these unearthly-looking troops, screamed
with fright, and fled in all directions, in utter confusion and dismay. A night
attack is usually a dangerous attempt, even if the assaulting party is the
strongest, as, in the darkness and confusion which then prevail, the
assailants can not ordinarily distinguish friends from foes, and so are in
great danger, amid the tumult and obscurity, of slaying one another. That
difficulty was obviated in this case by the strange disguise which the
Phocæans had assumed. They knew that all were Thessalians who were not
whitened like themselves. The Thessalians were totally discomfited and
dispersed by this encounter.

The other stratagem was of a different character, and
was directed against a troop of cavalry. The Thessalian Thessalian cavalry.
cavalry were renowned throughout the world. The broad
plains extending through the heart of their country contained excellent
fields for training and exercising such troops, and the mountains which
surrounded it furnished grassy slopes and verdant valleys, that supplied
excellent pasturage for the rearing of horses. The nation was very strong,
therefore, in this species of force, and many of the states and kingdoms of
Greece, when planning their means of internal defense, and potentates and
conquerors, when going forth on great campaigns, often considered their
armies incomplete unless there was included in them a corps of Thessalian
cavalry.
A troop of this cavalry had invaded Phocis, and the
Phocæans, conscious of their inability to resist them in Pitfall for the
cavalry.
open war, contrived to entrap them in the following They are caught in
manner. They dug a long trench in the ground, and then it.
putting in baskets or casks sufficient nearly to fill the
space, they spread over the top a thin layer of soil. They then concealed all
indications that the ground had been disturbed, by spreading leaves over the
surface. The trap being thus prepared, they contrived to entice the
Thessalians to the spot by a series of retreats, and at length led them into the
pitfall thus provided for them. The substructure of casks was strong enough
to sustain the Phocæans, who went over it as footmen, but was too fragile to
bear the weight of the mounted troops. The horses broke through, and the
squadron was thrown into such confusion by so unexpected a disaster, that,
when the Phocæans turned and fell upon them, they were easily overcome.
These things had irritated and vexed the Thessalians very much. They were
eager for revenge, and they were very ready to guide the armies of Xerxes
into the country of their enemies in order to obtain it.
The troops advanced accordingly, awakening every
where, as they came on, the greatest consternation and Advance of the
terror among the inhabitants, and producing on all sides army.
Cruelties and
scenes of indescribable anguish and suffering. They atrocities.
came into the valley of the Cephisus, a beautiful river
flowing through a delightful and fertile region, which contained many cities

and towns, and was filled every where with an industrious rural population.
Through this scene of peace, and happiness, and plenty, the vast horde of
invaders swept on with the destructive force of a tornado. They plundered
the towns of every thing which could be carried away, and destroyed what
they were compelled to leave behind them. There is a catalogue of twelve
cities in this valley which they burned. The inhabitants, too, were treated
with the utmost cruelty. Some were seized, and compelled to follow the
army as slaves; others were slain; and others still were subjected to
nameless cruelties and atrocities, worse sometimes than death. Many of the
women, both mothers and maidens, died in consequence of the brutal
violence with which the soldiers treated them.
The most remarkable of the transactions connected with
Xerxes's advance through the country of Phocis, on his The sacred town of
way to Athens, were those connected with his attack Delphi.
upon Delphi. Delphi was a sacred town, the seat of the oracle. It was in the
vicinity of Mount Parnassus and of the Castalian spring, places of very
great renown in the Greek mythology.
Parnassus was the name of a short mountainous range
rather than of a single peak, though the loftiest summit Mount Parnassus.
of the range was called Parnassus too. This summit is
found, by modern measurement, to be about eight thousand feet high, and it
is covered with snow nearly all the year. When bare it consists only of a
desolate range of rocks, with mosses and a few Alpine plants growing on
the sheltered and sunny sides of them. From the top of Parnassus travelers
who now visit it look down upon almost all of Greece as upon a map. The
Gulf of Corinth is a silver lake at their feet, and the plains of Thessaly are
seen extending far and wide to the northward, with Olympus, Pelion, and
Ossa, blue and distant peaks, bounding the view.
Parnassus has, in fact, a double summit, between the
peaks of which a sort of ravine commences, which, as it Summit of
extends down the mountain, becomes a beautiful valley, Parnassus.
The Castalian
shaded with rows of trees, and adorned with slopes of spring.
verdure and banks of flowers. In a glen connected with
this valley there is a fountain of water springing copiously from among the
rocks, in a grove of laurels. This fountain gives rise to a stream, which, after

bounding over the rocks, and meandering between mossy banks for a long
distance down the mountain glens, becomes a quiet lowland stream, and
flows gently through a fertile and undulating country to the sea. This
fountain was the famous Castalian spring. It was, as the ancient Greek
legends said, the favorite resort and residence of Apollo and the Muses, and
its waters became, accordingly, the symbol and the emblem of poetical
inspiration.
The city of Delphi was built upon the lower declivities of the Parnassian
ranges, and yet high above the surrounding country. It was built in the form
of an amphitheater, in a sort of lap in the hill where it stood, with steep
precipices descending to a great depth on either side. It was thus a position
of difficult access, and was considered almost impregnable in respect to its
military strength. Besides its natural defenses, it was considered as under
the special protection of Apollo.
Delphi was celebrated throughout the world, in ancient
times, not only for the oracle itself, but for the The oracle.
magnificence of the architectural structures, the Architectural
structures.
boundless profusion of the works of art, and the Works of art.
immense value of the treasures which, in process of
time, had been accumulated there. The various powers and potentates that
had resorted to it to obtain the responses of the oracle, had brought rich
presents, or made costly contributions in some way, to the service of the
shrine. Some had built temples, others had constructed porches or
colonnades. Some had adorned the streets of the city with architectural
embellishments; others had caused statues to be erected; and others had
made splendid donations of vessels of gold and silver, until at length the
wealth and magnificence of Delphi was the wonder of the world. All
nations resorted to it, some to see its splendors, and others to obtain the
counsel and direction of the oracle in emergencies of difficulty or danger.
In the time of Xerxes, Delphi had been for several
hundred years in the enjoyment of its fame as a place of Inspiration of the
oracle.
divine inspiration. It was said to have been originally Its discovery.
discovered in the following manner. Some herdsmen on
the mountains, watching their flocks, observed one day a number of goats
performing very strange and unaccountable antics among some crevices in

the rocks, and, going to the place, they found that a mysterious wind was
issuing from the crevices, which produced an extraordinary exhilaration on
all who breathed it. Every thing extraordinary was thought, in those days, to
be supernatural and divine, and the fame of this discovery was spread every
where, the people supposing that the effect produced upon the men and
animals by breathing the mysterious air was a divine inspiration. A temple
was built over the spot, priests and priestesses were installed, a city began
to rise, and in process of time Delphi became the most celebrated oracle in
the world; and as the vast treasures which had been accumulated there
consisted mainly of gifts and offerings consecrated to a divine and sacred
service, they were all understood to be under divine protection. They were
defended, it is true, in part by the inaccessibleness of the position of Delphi,
and by the artificial fortifications which had been added from time to time
to increase the security, but still more by the feeling which every where
prevailed, that any violence offered to such a shrine would be punished by
the gods as sacrilege. The account of the manner in which Xerxes was
repulsed, as related by the ancient historians, is somewhat marvelous. We,
however, in this case, as in all others, transmit the story to our readers as the
ancient historians give it to us.
The main body of the army pursued its way directly
southward toward the city of Athens, which was now the Panic of the
Delphians.
great object at which Xerxes aimed. A large detachment, They apply to the
however, separating from the main body, moved more to oracle.
the westward, toward Delphi. Their plan was to plunder
the temples and the city, and send the treasures to the king. The Delphians,
on hearing this, were seized with consternation. They made application
themselves to the oracle, to know what they were to do in respect to the
sacred treasures. They could not defend them, they said, against such a host,
and they inquired whether they should bury them in the earth, or attempt to
remove them to some distant place of safety.
The oracle replied that they were to do nothing at all in
respect to the sacred treasures. The divinity, it said, was Response of the
able to protect what was its own. They, on their part, had oracle.
only to provide for themselves, their wives, and their children.

On hearing this response, the people dismissed all care in respect to the
treasures of the temple and of the shrine, and made arrangements for
removing their families and their own effects to some place of safety toward
the southward. The military force of the city and a small number of the
inhabitants alone remained.
When the Persians began to draw near, a prodigy
occurred in the temple, which seemed intended to warn The prodigy in the
the profane invaders away. It seems that there was a suit temple.
of arms, of a costly character doubtless, and highly decorated with gold and
gems—the present, probably, of some Grecian state or king—which were
hung in an inner and sacred apartment of the temple, and which it was
sacrilegious for any human hand to touch. These arms were found, on the
day when the Persians were approaching, removed to the outward front of
the temple. The priest who first observed them was struck with amazement
and awe. He spread the intelligence among the soldiers and the people that
remained, and the circumstance awakened in them great animation and
courage.
Nor were the hopes of divine interposition which this
wonder awakened disappointed in the end; for, as soon Discomfiture of the
as the detachment of Persians came near the hill on Persians.
The spirit warriors.
which Delphi was situated, loud thunder burst from the
sky, and a bolt, descending upon the precipices near the town, detached two
enormous masses of rock, which rolled down upon the ranks of the
invaders. The Delphian soldiers, taking advantage of the scene of panic and
confusion which this awful visitation produced, rushed down upon their
enemies and completed their discomfiture. They were led on and assisted in
this attack by the spirits of two ancient heroes, who had been natives of the
country, and to whom two of the temples of Delphi had been consecrated.
These spirits appeared in the form of tall and full-armed warriors, who led
the attack, and performed prodigies of strength and valor in the onset upon
the Persians; and then, when the battle was over, disappeared as
mysteriously as they came.
In the mean time the great body of the army of Xerxes,
with the monarch at their head, was advancing on Consternation at
Athens.
Athens. During his advance the city had been in a

continual state of panic and confusion. In the first place, The inhabitants
advised to fly.
when the Greek fleet had concluded to give up the
contest in the Artemisian Channel, before the battle of Thermopylæ, and
had passed around to Salamis, the commanders in the city of Athens had
given up the hope of making any effectual defense, and had given orders
that the inhabitants should save themselves by seeking a refuge wherever
they could find it. This annunciation, of course, filled the city with dismay,
and the preparations for a general flight opened every where scenes of
terror and distress, of which those who have never witnessed the evacuation
of a city by its inhabitants can scarcely conceive.
The immediate object of the general terror was, at this
time, the Persian fleet; for the Greek fleet, having Scenes of misery.
determined to abandon the waters on that side of Attica,
left the whole coast exposed, and the Persians might be expected at any
hour to make a landing within a few miles of the city. Scarcely, however,
had the impending of this danger been made known to the city, before the
tidings of one still more imminent reached it, in the news that the Pass of
Thermopylæ had been carried, and that, in addition to the peril with which
the Athenians were threatened by the fleet on the side of the sea, the whole
Persian army was coming down upon them by land. This fresh alarm
greatly increased, of course, the general consternation. All the roads leading
from the city toward the south and west were soon covered with parties of
wretched fugitives, exhibiting as they pressed forward, weary and
wayworn, on their toilsome and almost hopeless flight, every possible phase
of misery, destitution, and despair. The army fell back to the isthmus,
intending to make a stand, if possible, there, to defend the Peloponnesus.
The fugitives made the best of their way to the sea-coast, where they were
received on board transport ships sent thither from the fleet, and conveyed,
some to Ægina, some to Salamis, and others to other points on the coasts
and islands to the south, wherever the terrified exiles thought there was the
best prospect of safety.
Some, however, remained at Athens. There was a part of
the population who believed that the phrase "wooden Some of the
walls," used by the oracle, referred, not to the ships of inhabitants remain.
the fleet, but to the wooden palisade around the citadel. They accordingly

repaired and strengthened the palisade, and established themselves in the
fortress with a small garrison which undertook to defend it.
The citadel of Athens, or the Acropolis, as it was called,
was the richest, and most splendid, and magnificent Situation of the
fortress in the world. It was built upon an oblong rocky Acropolis.
Magnificent
hill, the sides of which were perpendicular cliffs, except architectural
at one end, where alone the summit was accessible. This structures.
Statue of Minerva.
summit presented an area of an oval form, about a The Parthenon.
thousand feet in length and five hundred broad, thus
containing a space of about ten acres. This area upon the summit, and also
the approaches at the western end, were covered with the most grand,
imposing, and costly architectural structures that then existed in the whole
European world. There were temples, colonnades, gateways, stairways,
porticoes, towers, and walls, which, viewed as a whole, presented a most
magnificent spectacle, that excited universal admiration, and which, when
examined in detail, awakened a greater degree of wonder still by the
costliness of the materials, the beauty and perfection of the workmanship,
and the richness and profusion of the decorations, which were seen on every
hand. The number and variety of statues of bronze and of marble which had
been erected in the various temples and upon the different platforms were
very great. There was one, a statue of Minerva, which was executed by
Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, after the celebrated battle of Marathon,
in the days of Darius, which, with its pedestal, was sixty feet high. It stood
on the left of the grand entrance, towering above the buildings in full view
from the country below, and leaning upon its long spear like a colossal
sentinel on guard. In the distance, on the right, from the same point of view,
the great temple called the Parthenon was to be seen, a temple which was,
in some respects, the most celebrated in the world. The ruins of these
edifices remain to the present day, standing in desolate and solitary
grandeur on the rocky hill which they once so richly adorned.
When Xerxes arrived at Athens, he found, of course, no
difficulty in obtaining possession of the city itself, since Xerxes at Athens.
it had been deserted by its inhabitants, and left
defenseless. The people that remained had all crowded into the citadel.
They had built the wooden palisade across the only approach by which it
was possible to get near the gates, and they had collected large stones on the

tops of the rocks, to roll down upon their assailants if they should attempt to
ascend.

The Citadel at Athens.
Xerxes, after ravaging and burning the town, took up a Athens burned.
position upon a hill opposite to the citadel, and there he
had engines constructed to throw enormous arrows, on which tow that had
been dipped in pitch was wound. This combustible envelopment of the
arrows was set on fire before the weapon was discharged, and a shower of
the burning missiles thus formed was directed toward the palisade. The
wooden walls were soon set on fire by them, and totally consumed. The
access to the Acropolis was, however, still difficult, being by a steep
acclivity, up which it was very dangerous to ascend so long as the besiegers
were ready to roll down rocks upon their assailants from above.
At last, however, after a long conflict and much
slaughter, Xerxes succeeded in forcing his way into the The citadel taken
citadel. Some of his troops contrived to find a path by and fired.
which they could climb up to the walls. Here, after a desperate combat with
those who were stationed to guard the place, they succeeded in gaining
admission, and then opened the gates to their comrades below. The Persian
soldiers, exasperated with the resistance which they had encountered, slew

the soldiers of the garrison, perpetrated every imaginable violence on the
wretched inhabitants who had fled there for shelter, and then plundered the
citadel and set it on fire.
The heart of Xerxes was filled with exultation and joy as
he thus arrived at the attainment of what had been the Exaltation of
chief and prominent object of his campaign. To plunder Xerxes.
Messenger sent to
and destroy the city of Athens had been the great Susa.
pleasure that he had promised himself in all the mighty
preparations that he had made. This result was now realized, and he
dispatched a special messenger immediately to Susa with the triumphant
tidings.

Chapter XI.

The Battle of Salamis.
B.C. 480

S alamis is an island of a very irregular form, lying in
the Saronian Gulf, north of Ægina, and to the Situation of
Salamis.
westward of Athens. What was called the Port of Athens
was on the shore opposite to Salamis, the city itself being situated on
elevated land four or five miles back from the sea. From this port to the bay
on the southern side of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was lying, it was
only four or five miles more, so that, when Xerxes burned the city, the
people on board the galleys in the fleet might easily see the smoke of the
conflagration.
The Isthmus of Corinth was west of Salamis, some
fifteen miles, across the bay. The army, in retreating Movements of the
fleet and the army.
from Athens toward the isthmus, would have necessarily
to pass round the bay in a course somewhat circuitous, while the fleet, in
following them, would pass in a direct line across it. The geographical
relations of these places, a knowledge of which is necessary to a full
understanding of the operations of the Greek and Persian forces, will be
distinctly seen by comparing the above description with the map placed at
the commencement of the fifth chapter.
It had been the policy of the Greeks to keep the fleet and
army as much as possible together, and thus, during the Policy of the
Greeks.
time in which the troops were attempting a concentration Reasons for
at Thermopylæ, the ships made their rendezvous in the retreating to
Artemisian Strait or Channel, directly opposite to that Salamis.
A council of war.
point of the coast. There they fought, maintaining their
position desperately, day after day, as long as Leonidas and his Spartans
held their ground on the shore. Their sudden disappearance from those
waters, by which the Persians had been so much surprised, was caused by
their having received intelligence that the pass had been carried and
Leonidas destroyed. They knew then that Athens would be the next point of

resistance by the land forces. They therefore fell back to Salamis, or, rather,
to the bay lying between Salamis and the Athenian shore, that being the
nearest position that they could take to support the operations of the army in
their attempts to defend the capital. When, however, the tidings came to
them that Athens had fallen, and that what remained of the army had
retreated to the isthmus, the question at once arose whether the fleet should
retreat too, across the bay, to the isthmus shore, with a view to co-operate
more fully with the army in the new position which the latter had taken, or
whether it should remain where it was, and defend itself as it best could
against the Persian squadrons which would soon be drawing near. The
commanders of the fleet held a consultation to consider this question.
In this consultation the Athenian and the Corinthian
leaders took different views. In fact, they were very near Consultations and
debates.
coming into open collision. Such a difference of opinion, Conflicting views.
considering the circumstances of the case, was not at all
surprising. It might, indeed, have naturally been expected to arise, from the
relative situation of the two cities, in respect to the danger which threatened
them. If the Greek fleet were to withdraw from Salamis to the isthmus, it
might be in a better position to defend Corinth, but it would, by such a
movement, be withdrawing from the Athenian territories, and abandoning
what remained in Attica wholly to the conqueror. The Athenians were,
therefore, in favor of maintaining the position at Salamis, while the
Corinthians were disposed to retire to the shores of the isthmus, and co-
operate with the army there.
The council was convened to deliberate on this subject
before the news arrived of the actual fall of Athens, The council breaks
although, inasmuch as the Persians were advancing into up in confusion.
Attica in immense numbers, and there was no Greek force left to defend the
city, they considered its fall as all but inevitable. The tidings of the capture
and destruction of Athens came while the council was in session. This
seemed to determine the question. The Corinthian commanders, and those
from the other Peloponnesian cities, declared that it was perfectly absurd to
remain any longer at Salamis, in a vain attempt to defend a country already
conquered. The council was broken up in confusion, each commander
retiring to his own ship, and the Peloponnesians resolving to withdraw on
the following morning. Eurybiades, who, it will be recollected, was the

commander-in-chief of all the Greek fleet, finding thus that it was
impossible any longer to keep the ships together at Salamis, since a part of
them would, at all events, withdraw, concluded to yield to the necessity of
the case and to conduct the whole fleet to the isthmus. He issued his orders
accordingly, and the several commanders repaired to their respective ships
to make the preparations. It was night when the council was dismissed, and
the fleet was to move in the morning.
One of the most influential and distinguished of the
Athenian officers was a general named Themistocles. Themistocles.
Very soon after he had returned to his ship from this Interview with
Mnesiphilus.
council, he was visited by another Athenian named
Mnesiphilus, who, uneasy and anxious in the momentous crisis, had come
in his boat, in the darkness of the night, to Themistocles's ship, to converse
with him on the plans of the morrow. Mnesiphilus asked Themistocles what
was the decision of the council.
"To abandon Salamis," said Themistocles, "and retire to the isthmus."
"Then," said Mnesiphilus, "we shall never have an opportunity to meet the
enemy. I am sure that if we leave this position the fleet will be wholly
broken up, and that each portion will go, under its own commander, to
defend its own state or seek its own safety, independently of the rest. We
shall never be able to concentrate our forces again. The result will be the
inevitable dissolution of the fleet as a combined and allied force, in spite of
all that Eurybiades or any one else can do to prevent it."
Mnesiphilus urged this danger with so much earnestness
and eloquence as to make a very considerable Themistocles seeks
impression on the mind of Themistocles. Themistocles Eurybiades.
said nothing, but his countenance indicated that he was very strongly
inclined to adopt Mnesiphilus's views. Mnesiphilus urged him to go
immediately to Eurybiades, and endeavor to induce him to obtain a reversal
of the decision of the council. Themistocles, without expressing either
assent or dissent, took his boat, and ordered the oarsmen to row him to the
galley of Eurybiades. Mnesiphilus, having so far accomplished his object,
went away.

Themistocles came in his boat to the side of
Eurybiades's galley. He said that he wished to speak Urges a new
with the general on a subject of great importance. council.
Eurybiades, when this was reported to him, sent to invite Themistocles to
come on board. Themistocles did so, and he urged upon the general the
same arguments that Mnesiphilus had pressed upon him, namely, that if the
fleet were once to move from their actual position, the different squadrons
would inevitably separate, and could never be assembled again. He urged
Eurybiades, therefore, very strenuously to call a new council, with a view of
reversing the decision that had been made to retire, and of resolving instead
to give battle to the Persians at Salamis.
Eurybiades was persuaded, and immediately took
measures for convening the council again. The The council
summons, sent around thus at midnight, calling upon the convened again.
principal officers of the fleet to repair again in haste to the commander's
galley, when they had only a short time before been dismissed from it,
produced great excitement. The Corinthians, who had been in favor of the
plan of abandoning Salamis, conjectured that the design might be to
endeavor to reverse that decision, and they came to the council determined
to resist any such attempt, if one should be made.
When the officers had arrived, Themistocles began
immediately to open the discussion, before, in fact, Themistocles
Eurybiades had stated why he had called them together. rebuked.
A Corinthian officer interrupted and rebuked him for presuming to speak
before his time. Themistocles retorted upon the Corinthian, and continued
his harangue. He urged the council to review their former decision, and to
determine, after all, to remain at Salamis. He, however, now used different
arguments from those which he had employed when speaking to Eurybiades
alone; for to have directly charged the officers themselves with the design
of which he had accused them to Eurybiades, namely, that of abandoning
their allies, and retiring with their respective ships, each to his own coast, in
case the position at Salamis were to be given up, would only incense them,
and arouse a hostility which would determine them against any thing that he
might propose.

He therefore urged the expediency of remaining at
Salamis on other grounds. Salamis was a much more Themistocles's
advantageous position, he said, than the coast of the arguments for
remaining at
isthmus, for a small fleet to occupy in awaiting an attack Salamis.
from a large one. At Salamis they were defended in part
by the projections of the land, which protected their flanks, and prevented
their being assailed, except in front, and their front they might make a very
narrow one. At the isthmus, on the contrary, there was a long, unvaried, and
unsheltered coast, with no salient points to give strength or protection to
their position there. They could not expect to derive serious advantage from
any degree of co-operation with the army on the land which would be
practicable at the isthmus, while their situation at sea there would be far
more exposed and dangerous than where they then were. Besides, many
thousands of the people had fled to Salamis for refuge and protection, and
the fleet, by leaving its present position, would be guilty of basely
abandoning them all to hopeless destruction, without even making an effort
to save them.
This last was, in fact, the great reason why the Athenians
were so unwilling to abandon Salamis. The unhappy Fugitives at
fugitives with which the island was thronged were their Salamis.
Views of the
wives and children, and they were extremely unwilling Corinthians.
to go away and leave them to so cruel a fate as they
knew would await them if the fleet were to be withdrawn. The Corinthians,
on the other hand, considered Athens as already lost, and it seemed madness
to them to linger uselessly in the vicinity of the ruin which had been made,
while there were other states and cities in other quarters of Greece yet to be
saved. The Corinthian speaker who had rebuked Themistocles at first,
interrupted him again, angrily, before he finished his appeal.
"You have no right to speak," said he. "You have no
longer a country. When you cease to represent a power, Excitement in the
council.
you have no right to take a part in our councils."
This cruel retort aroused in the mind of Themistocles a
strong feeling of indignation and anger against the Indignation of
Corinthian. He loaded his opponent, in return, with bitter Themistocles.
reproaches, and said, in conclusion, that as long as the Athenians had two

hundred ships in the fleet, they had still a country—one, too, of sufficient
importance to the general defense to give them a much better title to be
heard in the common consultations than any Corinthian could presume to
claim.
Then turning to Eurybiades again, Themistocles implored him to remain at
Salamis, and give battle to the Persians there, as that was, he said, the only
course by which any hope remained to them of the salvation of Greece. He
declared that the Athenian part of the fleet would never go to the isthmus. If
the others decided on going there, they, the Athenians, would gather all the
fugitives they could from the island of Salamis and from the coasts of
Attica, and make the best of their way to Italy, where there was a territory to
which they had some claim, and, abandoning Greece forever, they would
found a new kingdom there.
Eurybiades, the commander-in-chief, if he was not
convinced by the arguments that Themistocles had Eurybiades decides
offered, was alarmed at his declaration that the Athenian to remain at
Salamis.
ships would abandon the cause of the Greeks if the fleet An earthquake.
abandoned Salamis; he accordingly gave his voice very
decidedly for remaining where they were. The rest of the officers finally
acquiesced in this decision, and the council broke up, the various members
of it returning each to his own command. It was now nearly morning. The
whole fleet had been, necessarily, during the night in a state of great
excitement and suspense, all anxious to learn the result of these
deliberations. The awe and solemnity which would, of course, pervade the
minds of men at midnight, while such momentous questions were pending,
were changed to an appalling sense of terror, toward the dawn, by an
earthquake which then took place, and which, as is usually the case with
such convulsions, not only shook the land, but was felt by vessels on the
sea. The men considered this phenomenon as a solemn warning from
heaven, and measures were immediately adopted for appeasing, by certain
special sacrifices and ceremonies, the divine displeasure which the shock
seemed to portend.
In the mean time, the Persian fleet, which we left, it will
be recollected, in the channels between Eubœa and the Advance of the
Persians.
main land, near to Thermopylæ, had advanced when

they found that the Greeks had left those waters, and, following their
enemies to the southward through the channel called the Euripus, had
doubled the promontory called Sunium, which is the southern promontory
of Attica, and then, moving northward again along the western coast of
Attica, had approached Phalerum, which was not far from Salamis. Xerxes,
having concluded his operations at Athens, advanced to the same point by
land.
The final and complete success of the Persian expedition
seemed now almost sure. All the country north of the Perilous situation of
peninsula had fallen. The Greek army had retreated to the Greeks.
the isthmus, having been driven from every other post, and its last forlorn
hope of being able to resist the advance of its victorious enemies was
depending there. And the commanders of the Persian fleet, having driven
the Greek squadrons in the same manner from strait to strait and from sea to
sea, saw the discomfited galleys drawn up, in apparently their last place of
refuge, in the Bay of Salamis, and only waiting to be captured and
destroyed.
In a word, every thing seemed ready for the decisive and
final blow, and Xerxes summoned a grand council of Xerxes summons a
council of war.
war on board one of the vessels of the fleet as soon as he
arrived at Phalerum, to decide upon the time and manner of striking it.
The convening of this council was arranged, and the
deliberations themselves conducted, with great parade Pompous
preparations.
and ceremony. The princes of the various nations
represented in the army and in the fleet, and the leading Persian officers and
nobles, were summoned to attend it. It was held on board one of the
principal galleys, where great preparations had been made for receiving so
august an assemblage. A throne was provided for the king, and seats for the
various commanders according to their respective ranks, and a conspicuous
place was assigned to Artemisia, the Carian queen, who, the reader will
perhaps recollect, was described as one of the prominent naval
commanders, in the account given of the great review at Doriscus.
Mardonius appeared at the council as the king's representative and the
conductor of the deliberations, there being required, according to the
parliamentary etiquette of those days, in such royal councils as these, a sort

of mediator, to stand between the king and his counselors, as if the monarch
himself was on too sublime an elevation of dignity and grandeur to be
directly addressed even by princes and nobles.
Accordingly, when the council was convened and the
time arrived for opening the deliberations, the king Views of the
directed Mardonius to call upon the commanders Persian officers.
present, one by one, for their sentiments on the question whether it were
advisable or not to attack the Greek fleet at Salamis. Mardonius did so.
They all advised that the attack should be made, urging severally various
considerations to enforce their opinions, and all evincing a great deal of zeal
and ardor in the cause, and an impatient desire that the great final conflict
should come on.
When, however, it came to Artemisia's turn to speak, it
appeared that she was of a different sentiment from the Views of Queen
Artemisia.
rest. She commenced her speech with something like an Artemisa's
apology for presuming to give the king her council. She arguments against
said that, notwithstanding her sex, she had performed attacking the Greek
fleet.
her part, with other commanders, in the battles which
had already occurred, and that she was, perhaps, entitled accordingly, in the
consultations which were held, to express her opinion. "Say, then, to the
king," she continued, addressing Mardonius, as all the others had done,
"that my judgment is, that we should not attack the Greek fleet at Salamis,
but, on the contrary, that we should avoid a battle. It seems to me that we
have nothing to gain, but should put a great deal at hazard by a general
naval conflict at the present time. The truth is, that the Greeks, always
terrible as combatants, are rendered desperate now by the straits to which
they are reduced and the losses that they have sustained. The seamen of our
fleet are as inferior to them in strength and courage as women are to men. I
am sure that it will be a very dangerous thing to encounter them in their
present chafed and irritated temper. Whatever others may think, I myself
should not dare to answer for the result.
"Besides, situated as they are," continued Artemisia, "a battle is what they
must most desire, and, of course, it is adverse to our interest to accord it to
them. I have ascertained that they have but a small supply of food, either in
their fleet or upon the island of Salamis, while they have, besides their

troops, a great multitude of destitute and helpless fugitives to be fed. If we
simply leave them to themselves under the blockade in which our position
here now places them, they will soon be reduced to great distress. Or, if we
withdraw from them, and proceed at once to the Peloponnesus, to co-
operate with the army there, we shall avoid all the risk of a battle, and I am
sure that the Greek fleet will never dare to follow or to molest us."
The several members of the council listened to this
unexpected address of Artemisia with great attention and Effect of
interest, but with very different feelings. She had many Artemisia's speech.
Feelings of the
friends among the counselors, and they were anxious council.
and uneasy at hearing her speak in this manner, for they
knew very well that it was the king's decided intention that a battle should
be fought, and they feared that, by this bold and strenuous opposition to it,
Artemisia would incur the mighty monarch's displeasure. There were others
who were jealous of the influence which Artemisia enjoyed, and envious of
the favor with which they knew that Xerxes regarded her. These men were
secretly pleased to hear her uttering sentiments by which they confidently
believed that she would excite the anger of the king, and wholly lose her
advantageous position. Both the hopes and the fears, however, entertained
respectively by the queen's enemies and friends, proved altogether
groundless. Xerxes was not displeased. On the contrary, he applauded
Artemisia's ingenuity and eloquence in the highest terms, though he said,
nevertheless, that he would follow the advice of the other counselors. He
dismissed the assembly, and gave orders to prepare for battle.
In the mean time a day or two had passed away, and the
Greeks, who had been originally very little inclined to Discontent among
acquiesce in the decision which Eurybiades had made, the Greeks.
under the influence of Themistocles, to remain at Salamis and give the
Persians battle, became more and more dissatisfied and uneasy as the great
crisis drew nigh. In fact, the discontent and disaffection which appeared in
certain portions of the fleet became so decided and so open, that
Themistocles feared that some of the commanders would actually revolt,
and go away with their squadrons in a body, in defiance of the general
decision to remain. To prevent such a desertion as this, he contrived the
following very desperate stratagem.

He had a slave in his family named Sicinnus, who was
an intelligent and educated man, though a slave. In fact, Sicinnus.
Bold stratagem of
he was the teacher of Themistocles's children. Instances Themistocles.
of this kind, in which slaves were refined and cultivated He sends Sicinnus
men, were not uncommon in ancient times, as slaves to the Persians.
were, in many instances, captives taken in war, who
before their captivity had occupied as high social positions as their masters.
Themistocles determined to send Sicinnus to the Persian fleet with a
message from him, which should induce the Persians themselves to take
measures to prevent the dispersion of the Greek fleet. Having given the
slave, therefore, his secret instructions, he put him into a boat when night
came on, with oarsmen who were directed to row him wherever he should
require them to go. The boat pushed off stealthily from Themistocles's
galley, and, taking care to keep clear of the Greek ships which lay at anchor
near them, went southward toward the Persian fleet. When the boat reached
the Persian galleys, Sicinnus asked to see the commander, and, on being
admitted to an interview with him, he informed him that he came from
Themistocles, who was the leader, he said, of the Athenian portion of the
Greek fleet.
"I am charged," he added, "to say to you from
Themistocles that he considers the cause of the Greeks Message of
as wholly lost, and he is now, accordingly, desirous Themistocles.
himself of coming over to the Persian side. This, however, he can not
actually and openly do, on account of the situation in which he is placed in
respect to the rest of the fleet. He has, however, sent me to inform you that
the Greek fleet is in a very disordered and helpless condition, being
distracted by the dissensions of the commanders, and the general
discouragement and despair of the men; that some divisions are secretly
intending to make their escape; and that, if you can prevent this by
surrounding them, or by taking such positions as to intercept any who may
attempt to withdraw, the whole squadron will inevitably fall into your
hands."
Having made this communication, Sicinnus went on board his boat again,
and returned to the Greek fleet as secretly and stealthily as he came.

The Persians immediately determined to resort to the
measures which Themistocles had recommended to Measures of the
prevent the escape of any part of the Greek fleet. There Persians.
The Persians take
was a small island between Salamis and the coast of possession of the
Attica, that is, on the eastern side of Salamis, called Psyttalia.
Psyttalia, which was in such a position as to command,
in a great measure, the channel of water between Salamis and the main land
on this side. The Persians sent forward a detachment of galleys to take
possession of this island in the night. By this means they hoped to prevent
the escape of any part of the Greek squadron in that direction. Besides, they
foresaw that in the approaching battle the principal scene of the conflict
must be in that vicinity, and that, consequently, the island would become the
great resort of the disabled ships and the wounded men, since they would
naturally seek refuge on the nearest land. To preoccupy this ground,
therefore, seemed an important step. It would enable them, when the
terrible conflict should come on, to drive back any wretched refugees who
might attempt to escape from destruction by seeking the shore.
By taking possession of this island, and stationing
galleys in the vicinity of it, all which was done secretly The Greeks
hemmed in.
in the night, the Persians cut off all possibility of escape
for the Greeks in that direction. At the same time, they sent another
considerable detachment of their fleet to the westward, which was the
direction toward the isthmus, ordering the galleys thus sent to station
themselves in such a manner as to prevent any portion of the Greek fleet
from going round the island of Salamis, and making their escape through
the northwestern channel. By this means the Greek fleet was environed on
every side—hemmed in, though they were not aware of it, in such a way as
to defeat any attempt which any division might make to retire from the
scene.
The first intelligence which the Greeks received of their
being thus surrounded was from an Athenian general Aristides.
named Aristides, who came one night from the island of
Ægina to the Greek fleet, making his way with great difficulty through the
lines of Persian galleys. Aristides had been, in the political conflicts which
had taken place in former years at Athens, Themistocles's great rival and
enemy. He had been defeated in the contests which had taken place, and had

been banished from Athens. He now, however, made his way through the
enemy's lines, incurring, in doing it, extreme difficulty and danger, in order
to inform his countrymen of their peril, and to assist, if possible, in saving
them.
When he reached the Greek fleet, the commanders were
in council, agitating, in angry and incriminating debates, He makes his way
through the Persian
the perpetually recurring question whether they should fleet.
retire to the isthmus, or remain where they were.
Aristides called Themistocles out of the council. Themistocles was very
much surprised at seeing his ancient enemy thus unexpectedly appear.
Aristides introduced the conversation by saying that he
thought that at such a crisis they ought to lay aside every Interview between
Aristides and
private animosity, and only emulate each other in the Themistocles.
efforts and sacrifices which they could respectively Their conversation.
make to defend their country; that he had, accordingly,
come from Ægina to join the fleet, with a view of rendering any aid that it
might be in his power to afford; that it was now wholly useless to debate the
question of retiring to the isthmus, for such a movement was no longer
possible. "The fleet is surrounded," said he. "The Persian galleys are
stationed on every side. It was with the utmost difficulty that I could make
my way through the lines. Even if the whole assembly, and Eurybiades
himself, were resolved on withdrawing to the isthmus, the thing could not
now be done. Return, therefore, and tell them this, and say that to defend
themselves where they are is the only alternative that now remains."
In reply to this communication, Themistocles said that nothing could give
him greater pleasure than to learn what Aristides had stated. "The
movement which the Persians have made," he said, "was in consequence of
a communication which I myself sent to them. I sent it, in order that some
of our Greeks, who seem so very reluctant to fight, might be compelled to
do so. But you must come yourself into the assembly," he added, "and make
your statement directly to the commanders. They will not believe it if they
hear it from me. Come in, and state what you have seen."
Aristides accordingly entered the assembly, and
informed the officers who were convened that to retire Aristides
communicates his

from their present position was no longer possible, since intelligence to the
assembly.
the sea to the west was fully guarded by lines of Persian
ships, which had been stationed there to intercept them. He had just come in
himself, he said, from Ægina, and had found great difficulty in passing
through the lines, though he had only a single small boat, and was favored
by the darkness of the night. He was convinced that the Greek fleet was
entirely surrounded.
Having said this, Aristides withdrew. Although he could come, as a witness,
to give his testimony in respect to facts, he was not entitled to take any part
in the deliberations.
The assembly was thrown into a state of the greatest
possible excitement by the intelligence which Aristides Effect of Aristides
had communicated. Instead of producing harmony intelligence.
among them, it made the discord more violent and uncontrollable. Of those
who had before wished to retire, some were now enraged that they had not
been allowed to do so while the opportunity remained; others disbelieved
Aristides's statements, and were still eager to go; while the rest, confirmed
in their previous determination to remain where they were, rejoiced to find
that retreat was no longer possible. The debate was confused and violent. It
turned, in a great measure, on the degree of credibility to be attached to the
account which Aristides had given them. Many of the assembly wholly
disbelieved it. It was a stratagem, they maintained, contrived by the
Athenian party, and those who wished to remain, in order to accomplish
their end of keeping the fleet from changing its position.
The doubts, however, which the assembly felt in respect
to the truth of Aristides's tidings were soon dispelled by Further news.
Adventurous
new and incontestable evidence; for, while the debate courage of
was going on, it was announced that a large galley—a Parætius.
trireme, as it was called—had come in from the Persian Gratitude of the
Greeks.
fleet. This galley proved to be a Greek ship from the
island of Tenos, one which Xerxes, in prosecution of his plan of compelling
those portions of the Grecian territories that he had conquered, or that had
surrendered to him, to furnish forces to aid him in subduing the rest, had
pressed into his service. The commander of this galley, unwilling to take
part against his countrymen in the conflict, had decided to desert the Persian

fleet by taking advantage of the night, and to come over to the Greeks. The
name of the commander of this trireme was Parætius. He confirmed fully all
that Aristides had said. He assured the Greeks that they were completely
surrounded, and that nothing remained for them but to prepare, where they
were, to meet the attack which would certainly be made upon them in the
morning. The arrival of this trireme was thus of very essential service to the
Greeks. It put an end to their discordant debates, and united them, one and
all, in the work of making resolute preparations for action. This vessel was
also of very essential service in the conflict itself which ensued; and the
Greeks were so grateful to Parætius and to his comrades for the adventurous
courage which they displayed in coming over under such circumstances, in
such a night, to espouse the cause and to share the dangers of their
countrymen, that after the battle they caused all their names to be engraved
upon a sacred tripod, made in the most costly manner for the purpose, and
then sent the tripod to be deposited at the oracle of Delphi, where it long
remained a monument of this example of Delian patriotism and fidelity.
As the morning approached, the preparations were
carried forward with ardor and energy, on board both Final preparations
for battle.
fleets, for the great struggle which was to ensue. Plans
were formed; orders were given; arms were examined and placed on the
decks of the galleys, where they would be most ready at hand. The officers
and soldiers gave mutual charges and instructions to each other in respect to
the care of their friends and the disposal of their effects—charges and
instructions which each one undertook to execute for his friend in case he
should survive him. The commanders endeavored to animate and encourage
their men by cheerful looks, and by words of confidence and
encouragement. They who felt resolute and strong endeavored to inspirit the
weak and irresolute, while those who shrank from the approaching contest,
and dreaded the result of it, concealed their fears, and endeavored to appear
impatient for the battle.
Xerxes caused an elevated seat or throne to be prepared
for himself on an eminence near the shore, upon the Xerxes's throne.
main land, in order that he might be a personal witness His scribes.
Summary
of the battle. He had a guard and other attendants around punishment.
him. Among these were a number of scribes or
secretaries, who were prepared with writing materials to record the events

which might take place, as they occurred, and especially to register the
names of those whom Xerxes should see distinguishing themselves by their
courage or by their achievements. He justly supposed that these
arrangements, the whole fleet being fully informed in regard to them, would
animate the several commanders with strong emulation, and excite them to
make redoubled exertions to perform their part well. The record which was
thus to be kept, under the personal supervision of the sovereign, was with a
view to punishments too, as well as to honors and rewards; and it happened
in many instances during the battle that ensued, that commanders, who,
after losing their ships, escaped to the shore, were brought up before
Xerxes's throne, and there expiated their fault or their misfortune,
whichever it might have been, by being beheaded on the spot, without
mercy. Some of the officers thus executed were Greeks, brutally slaughtered
for not being successful in fighting, by compulsion, against their own
countrymen.
As the dawn approached, Themistocles called together
as many of the Athenian forces as it was possible to Speech of
convene, assembling them at a place upon the shore of Themistocles.
He embarks his
Salamis where he could conveniently address them, and men.
there made a speech to them, as was customary with the
Greek commanders before going into battle. He told them that, in such
contests as that in which they were about to engage, the result depended,
not on the relative numbers of the combatants, but on the resolution and
activity which they displayed. He reminded them of the instances in which
small bodies of men, firmly banded together by a strict discipline, and
animated by courage and energy, had overthrown enemies whose numbers
far exceeded their own. The Persians were more numerous, he admitted,
than they, but still the Greeks would conquer them. If they faithfully obeyed
their orders, and acted strictly and perseveringly in concert, according to the
plans formed by the commanders, and displayed the usual courage and
resolution of Greeks, he was sure of victory.
As soon as Themistocles had finished his speech, he ordered his men to
embark, and the fleet immediately afterward formed itself in battle array.
Notwithstanding the strictness of the order and
discipline which generally prevailed in Greek Excitement and
confusion.

armaments of every kind, there was great excitement Commencement of
the battle.
and much confusion in the fleet while making all these
preparations, and this excitement and confusion increased continually as the
morning advanced and the hour for the conflict drew nigh. The passing of
boats to and fro, the dashing of the oars, the clangor of the weapons, the
vociferations of orders by the officers and of responses by the men, mingled
with each other in dreadful turmoil, while all the time the vast squadrons
were advancing toward each other, each party of combatants eager to begin
the contest. In fact, so full of wild excitement was the scene, that at length
the battle was found to be raging on every side, while no one knew or could
remember how it began. Some said that a ship, which had been sent away a
short time before to Ægina to obtain succors, was returning that morning,
and that she commenced the action as she came through the Persian lines.
Others said the Greek squadron advanced as soon as they could see, and
attacked the Persians; and there were some whose imaginations were so
much excited by the scene that they saw a female form portrayed among the
dim mists of the morning, that urged the Greeks onward by beckonings and
calls. They heard her voice, they said, crying to them, "Come on! come on!
this is no time to linger on your oars."
However this may be, the battle was soon furiously
raging on every part of the Bay of Salamis, exhibiting a Fury of the conflict.
Modern naval
wide-spread scene of conflict, fury, rage, despair, and battles.
death, such as had then been seldom witnessed in any Observations of
naval conflict, and such as human eyes can now never Xerxes.
look upon again. In modern warfare the smoke of the
guns soon draws an impenetrable veil over the scene of horror, and the
perpetual thunder of the artillery overpowers the general din. In a modern
battle, therefore, none of the real horrors of the conflict can either be heard
or seen by any spectator placed beyond the immediate scene of it. The
sights and the sounds are alike buried and concealed beneath the smoke and
the noise of the cannonading. There were, however, no such causes in this
case to obstruct the observations which Xerxes was making from his throne
on the shore. The air was calm, the sky serene, the water was smooth, and
the atmosphere was as transparent and clear at the end of the battle as at the
beginning. Xerxes could discern every ship, and follow it with his eye in all
its motions. He could see who advanced and who retreated. Out of the

hundreds of separate conflicts he could choose any one, and watch the
progress of it from the commencement to the termination. He could see the
combats on the decks, the falling of repulsed assailants into the water, the
weapons broken, the wounded carried away, and swimmers struggling like
insects on the smooth surface of the sea. He could see the wrecks, too,
which were drifted upon the shores, and the captured galleys, which, after
those who defended them had been vanquished—some killed, others
thrown overboard, and others made prisoners—were slowly towed away by
the victors to a place of safety.
There was one incident which occurred in this scene, as
Xerxes looked down upon it from the eminence where Artemisia.
he sat, which greatly interested and excited him, though Enemies of
Artemisia.
he was deceived in respect to the true nature of it. The
incident was one of Artemisia's stratagems. It must be premised, in relating
the story, that Artemisia was not without enemies among the officers of the
Persian fleet. Many of them were envious of the high distinction which she
enjoyed, and jealous of the attention which she received from the king, and
of the influence which she possessed over him. This feeling showed itself
very distinctly at the grand council, when she gave her advice, in
connection with that of the other commanders, to the king. Among the most
decided of her enemies was a certain captain named Damasithymus.
Artemisia had had a special quarrel with him while the fleet was coming
through the Hellespont, which, though settled for the time, left the minds of
both parties in a state of great hostility toward each other.
It happened, in the course of the battle, that the ship
which Artemisia personally commanded and that of Stratagem of
Artemisia.
Damasithymus were engaged, together with other
Persian vessels, in the same part of the bay; and at a time when the ardor
and confusion of the conflict was at its height, the galley of Artemisia, and
some others that were in company with hers, became separated from the
rest, perhaps by the too eager pursuit of an enemy, and as other Greek ships
came up suddenly to the assistance of their comrades, the Persian vessels
found themselves in great danger, and began to retreat, followed by their
enemies. We speak of the retreating galleys as Persian, because they were
on the Persian side in the contest, though it happened that they were really
ships from Greek nations, which Xerxes had bribed or forced into his

service. The Greeks knew them to be enemies, by the Persian flag which
they bore.
In the retreat, and while the ships were more or less
mingled together in the confusion, Artemisia perceived She attacks
that the Persian galley nearest her was that of Damasithymus. Artemisia kills
Damasithymus. She immediately caused her own Damasithymus.
Persian flag to be pulled down, and, resorting to such
other artifices as might tend to make her vessel appear to be a Greek galley,
she began to act as if she were one of the pursuers instead of one of the
pursued. She bore down upon the ship of Damasithymus, saying to her crew
that to attack and sink that ship was the only way to save their own lives.
They accordingly attacked it with the utmost fury. The Athenian ships
which were near, seeing Artemisia's galley thus engaged, supposed that it
was one of their own, and pressed on, leaving the vessel of Damasithymus
at Artemisia's mercy. It was such mercy as would be expected of a woman
who would volunteer to take command of a squadron of ships of war, and
go forth on an active campaign to fight for her life among such ferocious
tigers as Greek soldiers always were, considering it all an excursion of
pleasure. Artemisia killed Damasithymus and all of his crew, and sunk his
ship, and then, the crisis of danger being past, she made good her retreat
back to the Persian lines. She probably felt no special animosity against the
crew of this ill-fated vessel, but she thought it most prudent to leave no man
alive to tell the story.
Xerxes watched this transaction from his place on the
hill with extreme interest and pleasure. He saw the Xerxes's opinion of
her valor.
vessel of Artemisia bearing down upon the other, which
last he supposed, of course, from Artemisia's attacking it, was a vessel of
the enemy. The only subject of doubt was whether the attacking ship was
really that of Artemisia. The officers who stood about Xerxes at the time
that the transaction occurred assured him that it was. They knew it well by
certain peculiarities in its construction. Xerxes then watched the progress of
the contest with the most eager interest, and, when he saw the result of it, he
praised Artemisia in the highest terms, saying that the men in his fleet
behaved like women, while the only woman in it behaved like a man.

Thus Artemisia's exploit operated like a double stratagem. Both the Greeks
and the Persians were deceived, and she gained an advantage by both the
deceptions. She saved her life by leading the Greeks to believe that her
galley was their friend, and she gained great glory and renown among the
Persians by making them believe that the vessel which she sunk was that of
an enemy.
Though these and some of the other scenes and incidents
which Xerxes witnessed as he looked down upon the Progress of the
battle.
battle gave him pleasure, yet the curiosity and interest The Persians give
with which he surveyed the opening of the contest were way.
gradually changed to impatience, vexation, and rage as Heroism of
Aristides.
he saw in its progress that the Greeks were every where He captures
gaining the victory. Notwithstanding the discord and Psyttalia.
animosity which had reigned among the commanders in
their councils and debates, the men were united, resolute, and firm when the
time arrived for action; and they fought with such desperate courage and
activity, and, at the same time, with so much coolness, circumspection, and
discipline, that the Persian lines were, before many hours, every where
compelled to give way. A striking example of the indomitable and efficient
resolution which, on such occasions, always characterized the Greeks, was
shown in the conduct of Aristides. The reader will recollect that the
Persians, on the night before the battle, had taken possession of the island of
Psyttalia—which was near the center of the scene of contest—for the
double purpose of enabling themselves to use it as a place of refuge and
retreat during the battle, and of preventing their enemies from doing so.
Now Aristides had no command. He had been expelled from Athens by the
influence of Themistocles and his other enemies. He had come across from
Ægina to the fleet at Salamis, alone, to give his countrymen information of
the dispositions which the Persians had made for surrounding them. When
the battle began, he had been left, it seems, on the shore of Salamis a
spectator. There was a small body of troops left there also, as a guard to the
shore. In the course of the combat, when Aristides found that the services of
this guard were no longer likely to be required where they were, he placed
himself at the head of them, obtained possession of boats or a galley,
transported the men across the channel, landed them on the island of

Psyttalia, conquered the post, and killed every man that the Persians had
stationed there.
When the day was spent, and the evening came on, it
was found that the result of the battle was a Greek The Greeks
victory, and yet it was not a victory so decisive as to victorious.
Repairing damages.
compel the Persians wholly to retire. Vast numbers of
the Persian ships were destroyed, but still so many remained, that when at
night they drew back from the scene of the conflict, toward their anchorage
ground at Phalerum, the Greeks were very willing to leave them unmolested
there. The Greeks, in fact, had full employment on the following day in
reassembling the scattered remnants of their own fleet, repairing the
damages that they had sustained, taking care of their wounded men, and, in
a word, attending to the thousand urgent and pressing exigencies always
arising in the service of a fleet after a battle, even when it has been
victorious in the contest. They did not know in exactly what condition the
Persian fleet had been left, nor how far there might be danger of a renewal
of the conflict on the following day. They devoted all their time and
attention, therefore, to strengthening their defenses and reorganizing the
fleet, so as to be ready in case a new assault should be made upon them.
But Xerxes had no intention of any new attack. The loss
of this battle gave a final blow to his expectations of Xerxes resolves on
flight.
being able to carry his conquests in Greece any further.
He too, like the Greeks, employed his men in industrious and vigorous
efforts to repair the damages which had been done, and to reassemble and
reorganize that portion of the fleet which had not been destroyed. While,
however, his men were doing this, he was himself revolving in his mind,
moodily and despairingly, plans, not for new conflicts, but for the safest and
speediest way of making his own personal escape from the dangers around
him, back to his home in Susa.
In the mean time, the surface of the sea, far and wide in
every direction, was covered with the wrecks, and The sea after the
battle.
remnants, and fragments strewed over it by the battle. Fulfillment of an
Dismantled hulks, masses of entangled spars and ancient prophecy.
rigging, broken oars, weapons of every description, and
the swollen and ghastly bodies of the dead, floated on the rolling swell of

the sea wherever the winds or the currents carried them. At length many of
these mournful memorials of the strife found their way across the whole
breadth of the Mediterranean, and were driven up upon the beach on the
coast of Africa, at a barbarous country called Colias. The savages dragged
the fragments up out of the sand to use as fuel for their fires, pleased with
their unexpected acquisitions, but wholly ignorant, of course, of the nature
of the dreadful tragedy to which their coming was due. The circumstance,
however, explained to the Greeks an ancient prophecy which had been
uttered long before in Athens, and which the interpreters of such mysteries
had never been able to understand. The prophecy was this:

The Colian dames on Afric's shores
Shall roast their food with Persian oars.

Chapter XII.

The Return of Xerxes To Persia.
B.C. 480

M ardonius, it will be recollected, was the
commander-in-chief of the forces of Xerxes, and Mardonius.
His apprehensions
thus, next to Xerxes himself, he was the officer highest after the battle.
in rank of all those who attended the expedition. He was,
in fact, a sort of prime minister, on whom the responsibility for almost all
the measures for the government and conduct of the expedition had been
thrown. Men in such positions, while they may expect the highest rewards
and honors from their sovereign in case of success, have always reason to
apprehend the worst of consequences to themselves in case of failure. The
night after the battle of Salamis, accordingly, Mardonius was in great fear.
He did not distrust the future success of the expedition if it were allowed to
go on; but, knowing the character of such despots as those who ruled great
nations in that age of the world, he was well aware that he might reasonably
expect, at any moment, the appearance of officers sent from Xerxes to cut
off his head.
His anxiety was increased by observing that Xerxes
seemed very much depressed, and very restless and Depression of
Xerxes.
uneasy, after the battle, as if he were revolving in his
mind some extraordinary design. He presently thought that he perceived
indications that the king was planning a retreat. Mardonius, after much
hesitation, concluded to speak to him, and endeavor to dispel his anxieties
and fears, and lead him to take a more favorable view of the prospects of
the expedition. He accordingly accosted him on the subject somewhat as
follows:
"It is true," said he, "that we were not as successful in
the combat yesterday as we desired to be; but this Mardonius's
address to him.
reverse, as well as all the preceding disasters that we
have met with, is, after all, of comparatively little moment. Your majesty
has gone steadily on, accomplishing most triumphantly all the substantial

objects aimed at in undertaking the expedition. Your troops have advanced
successfully by land against all opposition. With them you have traversed
Thrace, Macedon, and Thessaly. You have fought your way, against the
most desperate resistance, through the Pass of Thermopylæ. You have
overrun all Northern Greece. You have burned Athens. Thus, far from there
being any uncertainty or doubt in respect to the success of the expedition,
we see that all the great objects which you proposed by it are already
accomplished. The fleet, it is true, has now suffered extensive damage; but
we must remember that it is upon the army, not upon the fleet, that our
hopes and expectations mainly depend. The army is safe; and it can not be
possible that the Greeks can hereafter bring any force into the field by
which it can be seriously endangered."
By these and similar sentiments, Mardonius endeavored
to revive and restore the failing courage and resolution Mardonius offers to
complete the
of the king. He found, however, that he met with very conquest of Greece.
partial success. Xerxes was silent, thoughtful, and
oppressed apparently with a sense of anxious concern. Mardonius finally
proposed that, even if the king should think it best to return himself to Susa,
he should not abandon the enterprise of subduing Greece, but that he should
leave a portion of the army under his (Mardonius's) charge, and he would
undertake, he said, to complete the work which had been so successfully
begun. Three hundred thousand men, he was convinced, would be sufficient
for the purpose.
This suggestion seems to have made a favorable
impression on the mind of Xerxes. He was disposed, in Effect of
fact, to be pleased with any plan, provided it opened the Mardonius's
address.
way for his own escape from the dangers in which he
imagined that he was entangled. He said that he would consult some of the
other commanders upon the subject. He did so, and then, before coming to a
final decision, he determined to confer with Artemisia. He remembered that
she had counseled him not to attack the Greeks at Salamis, and, as the result
had proved that counsel to be eminently wise, he felt the greater confidence
in asking her judgment again.
He accordingly sent for Artemisia, and, directing all the
officers, as well as his own attendants, to retire, he held Xerxes consults

a private consultation with her in respect to his plans. Artemisia.

"Mardonius proposes," said he, "that the expedition should on no account
be abandoned in consequence of this disaster, for he says that the fleet is a
very unimportant part of our force, and that the army still remains
unharmed. He proposes that, if I should decide myself to return to Persia, I
should leave three hundred thousand men with him, and he undertakes, if I
will do so, to complete, with them, the subjugation of Greece. Tell me what
you think of this plan. You evinced so much sagacity in foreseeing the result
of this engagement at Salamis, that I particularly wish to know your
opinion."
Artemisia, after pausing a little to reflect upon the
subject, saying, as she hesitated, that it was rather Artemisia hesitates.
difficult to decide, under the extraordinary Her advice to
Xerxes.
circumstances in which they were placed, what it really
was best to do, came at length to the conclusion that it would be wisest for
the king to accede to Mardonius's proposal. "Since he offers, of his own
accord, to remain and undertake to complete the subjugation of Greece, you
can, very safely to yourself, allow him to make the experiment. The great
object which was announced as the one which you had chiefly in view in
the invasion of Greece, was the burning of Athens. This is already
accomplished. You have done, therefore, what you undertook to do, and
can, consequently, now return yourself, without dishonor. If Mardonius
succeeds in his attempt, the glory of it will redound to you. His victories
will be considered as only the successful completion of what you began. On
the other hand, if he fails, the disgrace of failure will be his alone, and the
injury will be confined to his destruction. In any event, your person, your
interests, and your honor are safe, and if Mardonius is willing to take the
responsibility and incur the danger involved in the plan that he proposes, I
would give him the opportunity."
Xerxes adopted the view of the subject which Artemisia
thus presented with the utmost readiness and pleasure. Xerxes adopts
Artemesia's advice.
That advice is always very welcome which makes the
course that we had previously decided upon as the most agreeable seem the
most wise. Xerxes immediately determined on returning to Persia himself,
and leaving Mardonius to complete the conquest. In carrying out this

design, he concluded to march to the northward by land, accompanied by a
large portion of his army and by all his principal officers, until he reached
the Hellespont. Then he was to give up to Mardonius the command of such
troops as should be selected to remain in Greece, and, crossing the
Hellespont, return himself to Persia with the remainder.
If, as is generally the case, it is a panic that causes a
flight, a flight, in its turn, always increases a panic. It His anxiety
happened, in accordance with this general law, that, as increases.
Xerxes commences
soon as the thoughts of Xerxes were once turned toward his retreat.
an escape from Greece, his fears increased, and his mind He sends his family
to Ephesus.
became more and more the prey of a restless uneasiness
and anxiety lest he should not be able to effect his escape. He feared that the
bridge of boats would have been broken down, and then how would he be
able to cross the Hellespont? To prevent the Greek fleet from proceeding to
the northward, and thus intercepting his passage by destroying the bridge,
he determined to conceal, as long as possible, his own departure.
Accordingly, while he was making the most efficient and rapid
arrangements on the land for abandoning the whole region, he brought up
his fleet by sea, and began to build, by means of the ships, a floating bridge
from the main land to the island of Salamis, as if he were intent only on
advancing. He continued this work all day, postponing his intended retreat
until the night should come, in order to conceal his movements. In the
course of the day he placed all his family and family relatives on board of
Artemisia's ship, under the charge of a tried and faithful domestic.
Artemisia was to convey them, as rapidly as possible, to Ephesus, a strong
city in Asia Minor, where Xerxes supposed that they would be safe.
In the night the fleet, in obedience to the orders which Xerxes had given
them, abandoned their bridge and all their other undertakings, and set sail.
They were to make the best of their way to the Hellespont, and post
themselves there to defend the bridge of boats until Xerxes should arrive.
On the following morning, accordingly, when the sun rose, the Greeks
found, to their utter astonishment, that their enemies were gone.
A scene of the greatest animation and excitement on
board the Greek fleet at once ensued. The commanders Excitement in the
Greek fleet.
resolved on an immediate pursuit. The seamen hoisted

their sails, raised their anchors, and manned their oars, The Persians
pursued.
and the whole squadron was soon in rapid motion. The
fleet went as far as to the island of Andros, looking eagerly all around the
horizon, in every direction, as they advanced, but no signs of the fugitives
were to be seen. The ships then drew up to the shore, and the commanders
were convened in an assembly, summoned by Eurybiades, on the land, for
consultation.
A debate ensued, in which the eternal enmity and
dissension between the Athenian and Peloponnesian Debate among the
generals.
Greeks broke out anew. There was, however, now some
reason for the disagreement. The Athenian cause was already ruined. Their
capital had been burned, their country ravaged, and their wives and children
driven forth to exile and misery. Nothing remained now for them but hopes
of revenge. They were eager, therefore, to press on, and overtake the
Persian galleys in their flight, or, if this could not be done, to reach the
Hellespont before Xerxes should arrive there, and intercept his passage by
destroying the bridge. This was the policy which Themistocles advocated.
Eurybiades, on the other hand, and the Peloponnesian commanders, urged
the expediency of not driving the Persians to desperation by harassing them
too closely on their retreat. They were formidable enemies after all, and, if
they were now disposed to retire and leave the country, it was the true
policy of the Greeks to allow them to do so. To destroy the bridge of boats
would only be to take effectual measures for keeping the pest among them.
Themistocles was outvoted. It was determined best to allow the Persian
forces to retire.
Themistocles, when he found that his counsels were
overruled, resorted to another of the audacious Themistocles
outvoted.
stratagems that marked his career, which was to send a Another stratagem
second pretended message of friendship to the Persian of Themistocles.
king. He employed the same Sicinnus on this occasion His message to
Xerxes.
that he had sent before into the Persian fleet, on the eve
of the battle of Salamis. A galley was given to Sicinnus, with a select crew
of faithful men. They were all put under the most solemn oaths never to
divulge to any person, under any circumstances, the nature and object of
their commission. With this company, Sicinnus left the fleet secretly in the
night, and went to the coast of Attica. Landing here, he left the galley, with

the crew in charge of it, upon the shore, and, with one or two select
attendants, he made his way to the Persian camp, and desired an interview
with the king. On being admitted to an audience, he said to Xerxes that he
had been sent to him by Themistocles, whom he represented as altogether
the most prominent man among the Greek commanders, to say that the
Greeks had resolved on pressing forward to the Hellespont, to intercept him
on his return, but that he, Themistocles, had dissuaded them from it, under
the influence of the same friendship for Xerxes which had led him to send a
friendly communication to the Persians before the late battle; that, in
consequence of the arguments and persuasions of Themistocles, the Greek
squadrons would remain where they then were, on the southern coasts,
leaving Xerxes to retire without molestation.
All this was false, but Themistocles thought it would
serve his purpose well to make the statement; for, in case Duplicity of
Themistocles.
he should, at any future time, in following the ordinary
fate of the bravest and most successful Greek generals, be obliged to fly in
exile from his country to save his life, it might be important for him to have
a good understanding beforehand with the King of Persia, though a good
understanding, founded on pretensions so hypocritical and empty as these,
would seem to be worthy of very little reliance. In fact, for a Greek general,
discomfited in the councils of his own nation, to turn to the Persian king
with such prompt and cool assurance, for the purpose of gaining his
friendship by tendering falsehoods so bare and professions so hollow, was
an instance of audacious treachery so original and lofty as to be almost
sublime.
Xerxes pressed on with the utmost diligence toward the
north. The country had been ravaged and exhausted by Retreat of Xerxes.
his march through it in coming down, and now, in Horrors retreat.
of the

returning, he found infinite difficulty in obtaining
supplies of food and water for his army. Forty-five days were consumed in
getting back to the Hellespont. During all this time the privations and
sufferings of the troops increased every day. The soldiers were spent with
fatigue, exhausted with hunger, and harassed with incessant apprehensions
of attacks from their enemies. Thousands of the sick and wounded that
attempted at first to follow the army, gave out by degrees as the columns
moved on. Some were left at the encampments; others lay down by the

road-sides, in the midst of the day's march, wherever their waning strength
finally failed them; and every where broken chariots, dead and dying beasts
of burden, and the bodies of soldiers, that lay neglected where they fell,
encumbered and choked the way. In a word, all the roads leading toward the
northern provinces exhibited in full perfection those awful scenes which
usually mark the track of a great army retreating from an invasion.
The men were at length reduced to extreme distress for
food. They ate the roots and stems of the herbage, and Sufferings from
finally stripped the very bark from the trees and hunger. Famine and disease.
devoured it, in the vain hope that it might afford some
nutriment to re-enforce the vital principle, for a little time at least, in the
dreadful struggle which it was waging within them. There are certain forms
of pestilential disease which, in cases like this, always set in to hasten the
work which famine alone would be too slow in performing. Accordingly, as
was to have been expected, camp fevers, choleras, and other corrupt and
infectious maladies, broke out with great violence as the army advanced
along the northern shores of the Ægean Sea; and as every victim to these
dreadful and hopeless disorders helped, by his own dissolution, to taint the
air for all the rest, the wretched crowd was, in the end, reduced to the last
extreme of misery and terror.
At length Xerxes, with a miserable remnant of his
troops, arrived at Abydos, on the shores of the Xerxes crosses the
Hellespont. He found the bridge broken down. The Hellespont.
winds and storms had demolished what the Greeks had determined to spare.
The immense structure, which it had cost so much toil and time to rear, had
wholly disappeared, leaving no traces of its existence, except the wrecks
which lay here and there half buried in the sand along the shore. There were
some small boats at hand, and Xerxes, embarking in one of them, with a
few attendants in the others, and leaving the exhausted and wretched
remnant of his army behind, was rowed across the strait, and landed at last
safely again on the Asiatic shores.

The Return of Xerxes To Persia.
The place of his landing was Sestos. From Sestos he Fate of Mardonius.
went to Sardis, and from Sardis he proceeded, in a short
time, to Susa. Mardonius was left in Greece. Mardonius was a general of
great military experience and skill, and, when left to himself, he found no
great difficulty in reorganizing the army, and in putting it again in an
efficient condition. He was not able, however, to accomplish the
undertaking which he had engaged to perform. After various adventures,
prosperous and adverse, which it would be foreign to our purpose here to
detail, he was at last defeated in a great battle, and killed on the field. The
Persian army was now obliged to give up the contest, and was expelled
from Greece finally and forever.
When Xerxes reached Susa, he felt overjoyed to find
himself once more safe, as he thought, in his own Xerxes arrives at
palaces. He looked back upon the hardships, exposures, Susa.Xerxes's dissolute
and perils through which he had passed, and, thankful life.
for having so narrowly escaped from them, he
determined to encounter no such hazards again. He had had enough of
ambition and glory. He was now going to devote himself to ease and
pleasure. Such a man would not naturally be expected to be very scrupulous
in respect to the means of enjoyment, or to the character of the companions

whom he would select to share his pleasures, and the life of the king soon
presented one continual scene of dissipation, revelry, and vice. He gave
himself up to such prolonged carousals, that one night was sometimes
protracted through the following day into another. The administration of his
government was left wholly to his ministers, and every personal duty was
neglected, that he might give himself to the most abandoned and profligate
indulgence of his appetites and passions.
He had three sons who might be considered as heirs to
his throne—Darius, Hystaspes, and Artaxerxes. His three sons.
Artabanus, captain
Hystaspes was absent in a neighboring province. The of the guard.
others were at home. He had also a very prominent
officer in his court, whose name, Artabanus, was the same with that of the
uncle who had so strongly attempted to dissuade him from undertaking the
conquest of Greece. Artabanus the uncle disappears finally from view at the
time when Xerxes dismissed him to return to Susa at the first crossing of
the Hellespont. This second Artabanus was the captain of the king's body-
guard and, consequently, the common executioner of the despot's decrees.
Being thus established in his palace, surrounded by his family, and
protected by Artabanus and his guard, the monarch felt that all his toils and
dangers were over, and that there was nothing now before him but a life of
ease, of pleasure, and of safety. Instead of this, he was, in fact, in the most
imminent danger. Artabanus was already plotting his destruction.
One day, in the midst of one of his carousals, he became
angry with his oldest son Darius for some cause, and He assassinates
Xerxes.
gave Artabanus an order to kill him. Artabanus neglected
to obey this order. The king had been excited with wine when he gave it,
and Artabanus supposed that all recollection of the command would pass
away from his mind with the excitement that occasioned it. The king did
not, however, so readily forget. The next day he demanded why his order
had not been obeyed. Artabanus now began to fear for his own safety, and
he determined to proceed at once to the execution of a plan which he had
long been revolving, of destroying the whole of Xerxes's family, and
placing himself on the throne in their stead. He contrived to bring the king's
chamberlain into his schemes, and, with the connivance and aid of this
officer, he went at night into the king's bed-chamber, and murdered the
monarch in his sleep.

Leaving the bloody weapon with which the deed had
been perpetrated by the side of the victim, Artabanus Artaxerxes kills his
brother.
went immediately into the bed-chamber of Artaxerxes,
the youngest son, and, awaking him suddenly, he told him, with tones of
voice and looks expressive of great excitement and alarm, that his father
had been killed, and that it was his brother Darius that had killed him. "His
motive is," continued Artabanus, "to obtain the throne, and, to make the
more sure of an undisturbed possession of it, he is intending to murder you
next. Rise, therefore, and defend your life."
Artaxerxes was aroused to a sudden and uncontrollable
paroxysm of anger at this intelligence. He seized his He succeeds to the
throne.
weapon, and rushed into the apartment of his innocent
brother, and slew him on the spot. Other summary assassinations of a
similar kind followed in this complicated tragedy. Among the victims,
Artabanus and all his adherents were slain, and at length Artaxerxes took
quiet possession of the throne, and reigned in his father's stead.
The End.

Footnotes
[A] His history in given in the first chapter of Darius the Great.
[B] For a more particular account of the transaction, and for an engraving
illustrating this scene, see the history of Darius.
[C] Plutarch, who gives an account of these occurrences, varies the orthography
of the name. We, however, retain the name as given by Herodotus.
[D] See Frontispiece.
[E] There is reason to suppose that Scyllias made his escape by night in a boat,
managing the circumstances, however, in such a way as to cause the story to be
circulated that he swam.

Transcriber's Notes

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reader's convenience.
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