Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/39

PREPARATIONS AND MARCH OF XERXES. 15 and Ionia; moreover, Xerxes, with a degree of forethought much exceeding that which his father Darius had displayed in the Scythian expedition, had directed the formation of large mag- azines of provisions at suitable maritime stations along the line of march, from the Hellespont to the Strymonic gulf. During the four years of military preparation, there had been time to bring together great quantities of flour and other essential articles from Asia and Egypt.' If the whole contemporary world were overawed by the vast assemblage of men and muniments of war which Xerxes thus brought together, so much transcending all past, we might even say all subsequent, experience, — they were no less astounded by two enterprises which entered into his scheme, — the bridging of the Hellespont, and the cutting of a ship-canal through the isthmus of Mount Athos. For the first of the two there had indeed been a precedent, since Darius about thirty-five years be- fore had caused a bridge to be thrown over the Thracian Bos- phorus, and crossed it in his march to Scythia; but this bridge, though constructed by the lonians and by a Samian Greek, hav- ing had reference only to distant regions, seems to have been little known or little thought of among the Greeks generally, as we may infer from the fact, that the poet ^schylus^ speaks as if he had never heard of it, while the bridge of Xerxes was ever remembered, both by Persians and by Greeks, as a most impos- ing display of Asiatic omnipotence. The bridge of boats — or rather, the two separate bridges not far removed from each other — which Xerxes caused to be thrown across the Hellespont, stretched from the neighborhood of Abydos, on the Asiatic side to the coast between Sestos and Madytus on the European, where the strait is about an English mile in breadth. The execution of the work was at first intrusted, not to Greeks, but to Phe- nicians and Egyptians, who had received orders long beforehand to prepare cables of extraordinary strength and size expressly for the purpose ; the material used by the Phenicians was flax, that employed by the Egyptians was the fibre of the papyrus. Already had the work been completed and announced to Xerxes as available for transit, when a storm arose, so violent as alto- ' Herodot. vii, 23-25. • iEschylus, Pers. 731, 754, 873.