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ARRIVAL OF XERXES TX EUROPE. 29 myttium and Antandrus, and crossed the range of Ida, most part of which was on their left hand, not without some loss from stormy weather and thunder.i From hence they reached Hium and the river Skamander, the stream of which was drunk up, or probably in part trampled and rendered undrinkable, by the vast host of men and animals : in spite of the immortal interest which the Skamander derives from the Homeric poems, its magnitude is not such as to make this fact surprising. To the poems them- selves, even Xerxes did not disdain to pay tribute : he ascended the holy hill of Ilium, — reviewed the Pergamus where Priam was said to have lived and reigned, — sacrificed one thousand oxen to the patron goddess Athene, — and caused the Magian priests to make libations in honor of the heroes who had fallen on that venerated spot. He even condescended to inquire into the local details,^ abundantly supplied to visitors by the inhabi- tants of Ilium, of that great real or mythical war to which Gre- cian chronologers had hardly yet learned to assign a precise date: and doubtless when he contemplated the narrow area of that Troy which all the Greeks confederated under Agamemnon had been unable for ten years to overcome, he could not but fancy that these same Greeks would fall an easy prey before his innu- merable host. Another day's march between Rhoeteium, Ophry- neium, and Dardanus on the left-hand, and the Teukrians of Gergis on the right-hand, brought him to Abydos, where his two newly-constructed bridges over the Hellespont awaited him. On this transit from Asia into Europe Herodotus dwells with peculiar emphasis, — and well he might do so, since when we consider the bridges, the invading number, the unmeasured hopes succeeded by no less unmeasured calamity, — it will appear not only to have been the most imposing event of his century, but to rank among the most imposing events of all history. He surrounds it with much dramatic circumstance, not only mention- ing the marble throne erected for Xerxes on a hill near Abydos, from whence he surveyed both his masses of land-force covering the shore, and his ships sailing and racing in the strait (a race in • Herodot. vii, 42. ' Herodot, vii, 43. -QsTjadfievog de, Kot nvSofievog keIvuv iKiara, etc.