III. XERXES

Darius I died in 485, and was succeeded by Xerxes I. Both father and son were men of ability and culture, and it would be an error to think of the Greco-Persian War as a contest between civilization and barbarism. When Darius, before invading Greece, sent heralds to Athens and Sparta to demand earth and water as symbols of submission, both cities had put the heralds to death. Troubled by portents, Sparta now repented of this violation of international custom, and asked for two citizens to go to Persia and surrender themselves to any punishment that the Great King might exact in retribution. Sperthias and Bulis, both of old and wealthy families, volunteered, made their way to Xerxes, and offered to die in atonement for the killing of Darius’ messengers. Xerxes, says Herodotus,¹⁵ “answered with true greatness of soul that he would not act like the Lacedaemonians, who, by killing the heralds, had broken the laws which all men held in common. As he had blamed such conduct in them, he would never be guilty of it himself.”

Xerxes prepared leisurely but thoroughly for the second Persian attack upon Greece. For four years he collected troops and materials from all the provinces of his realm; and when, in 481, he at last set forth, his army was probably the largest ever assembled in history before our own century. Herodotus reckoned it, without moderation, at 2,641,000 fighting men, and an equal number of engineers, slaves, merchants, provisioners, and prostitutes; he tells us, with perhaps a twinkle in his eye, that when Xerxes’ army drank water whole rivers ran dry.¹⁶ It was, naturally and fatally, a highly heterogeneous force. There were Persians, Medes, Babylonians, Afghans, Indians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Sacae, Assyrians, Armenians, Colchians, Scyths, Paeonians, Mysians, Paphlagonians, Phrygians, Thracians, Thessalians, Locrians, Boeotians, Aeolians, Ionians, Lydians, Carians, Cilicians, Cypriotes, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Libyans, and many more. There were footmen, cavalrymen, chariots, elephants, and a fleet of transports and fighting triremes numbering, according to Herodotus, 1207 ships in all. When Greek spies were caught in the camp, and a general ordered their execution, Xerxes countermanded the order, spared the men, had them conducted through his forces, and then set them free, trusting that when they had reported to Athens and Sparta the extent of his preparations, the remainder of Greece would hasten to surrender.¹⁷

In the spring of 480 the great host reached the Hellespont, where Egyptian and Phoenician engineers had built a bridge that was among the most admired mechanical achievements of antiquity. If again we may follow Herodotus, 674 ships of trireme or penteconter size were distributed in two rows athwart the strait, each vessel facing the current, and moored with a heavy anchor. Then the builders stretched cables of flax or papyrus over each row of ships from bank to bank, bound the cables to every ship, and made them taut with capstans on the shore. Trees were cut and sawn into planks, and these, laid across the cables, were fastened to them and to one another. The planks were covered with brushwood, and this with earth, and the whole was trodden down to resemble a road. A bulwark was erected on each side of the causeway high enough to keep animals from taking fright at sight of the sea.¹⁸ Nevertheless many of the beasts, and some of the soldiers, had to be driven by the lash to trust themselves to the bridge. It stood the burden well, and in seven days and nights the entire host had passed over it successfully. A native of the region, seeing the spectacle, concluded that Xerxes was Zeus, and asked why the master of gods and men had taken so much trouble to conquer little Greece when he might have destroyed the presumptuous nation with one thunderbolt.¹⁹

The army marched overland through Thrace and down into Macedonia and Thessaly, while the Persian fleet, hugging the coasts, avoided the storms of the Aegean by passing southward through a canal dug by forced labor across the isthmus at Mt. Athos to the length of a mile and a quarter. Wherever the army ate two meals, we are told, the city that fed it was utterly ruined; Thasos spent four hundred silver talents—approximately a million dollars—in playing host to Xerxes for a day.²⁰ The northern Greeks. even to the Attic frontier, surrendered to fear or bribery, and allowed their troops to be added to Xerxes’ millions. Only Plataea and Thespiae, in the north, prepared to fight.