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138 fflSTORY OF GREECE. whom he had expected most, his rage broke out in such fierce threats, that they stole away from the fleet in the night, and departed homeward.i Such a capital desertion made future naval struggle stiU more hopeless, and Xerxes, though at first breathing revenge, and talking about a vast mole or bridge to be thrown across the strait to Salamis, speedily ended by giving orders to the whole fleet to leave Phalerum in the night, — not without disembarking, however, the best soldiers who served on board.2 They were to make straight for the Hellespont, and there to guard the bridge against his arrival.^ This resolution was prompted by Mardonius, who saw the real terror which beset his master, and read therein sufficient evidence of danger to himself. When Xerxes despatched to Susa intelli- gence of his disastrous overthrow, the feeling at home was not simply that of violent grief for the calamity, and fear for the personal safety of the monarch, — it was farther imbittered by ' This important fact is not stated by Herodotus, but it is distinctly given in Diodorus, xi, 19. It seems probable enough. If the tragedy of Phrynichus, entitled Phoenissce, had been preserved, we should have known more about the position and behavior of the Phenician contingent in this invasion. It was represented at Athens only three years after the battle of Salamis, in B.C. 477 or 476, with Themistokles as choregus, four years earlier than the Persse of ^schylus, which was afSrmed by Glaukus to have been {TrapaTreTvoiTja^ai) altered from it. The Chorus in the Phoenissa consisted of Phenician women, possibly the widows of those Phenicians whom Xerxes had caused to be beheaded after the battle (Herodot. viii, 90, as Dr. Blomfield supposes, Prcef. ad JEsch. Pers. p. ix), or only of Phenicians absent on the expedition. The fragments remaining of this tragedy, which gained the pi'ize, are too scanty to sustain anv conjectures as to its scheme or details (see Welcker Griechische Tragced. vol. i, p. 26 ; and Droysen, PhrjTiichos, .^schylos, und die Trilogie, pp. 4-6). * Herodot. ix, 32. 3 Herodot. viii, 97-107. Such was the terror of these retreating seamen, that they are said to have mistaken the projecting cliffs of Cape Zoster (about half-way between Peirasus and Sunium) for ships, and redoubled the haste of their flight as if an enemy were after them, — a story which we can treat as nothing better than silly exaggeration in the Athenian informants of Herodotus. Ktesias, Pers. c. xxvi ; Strabo, ix, p. 395; the two latter talk about the intention to carry a mole across from Attica to Salamis, as if it had been conceived before the battle.