nd had a fresh
trial to purify it, but it does not seem as if many others believed this
notion.

[Picture: View in the vicinity of Athens]

CHAP. XVII.--THE EXPEDITION OF XERXES. B.C. 480.

[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]

The Athenians had not a long breathing-time. Darius, indeed, died five
years after the battle of Marathon; but his son Xerxes was far more fiery
and ambitious, and was no sooner on the throne than he began to call
together all the vast powers of the East, not to crush Athens alone, but
all the Greeks. He was five years gathering them together, but in the
spring of 480 he set out from Sardis to march to the Hellespont, where he
had a bridge of ships chained together, made to enable his army to cross
the strait on foot. Xerxes was a hot-tempered man, not used to
resistance, and it was said that when a storm broke part of his bridge he
caused the waves to be scourged and fetters to be thrown in, to show that
he was going to bind it to his will. He sat on a throne to watch his
armies pass by. It is said that there were two million six hundred
thousand men, of every speech and dress in Asia and Egypt, with all sorts
of weapons; and as the "Great King" watched the endless number pass by,
he burst into tears to think how soon all this mighty host would be dead
men!

Xerxes had a huge fleet besides, manned by Phoenicians and Greeks of Asia
Minor, and this did not venture straight across the AEgean, because of
his father's disaster, but went creeping round the northern coast. Mount
Athos, standing out far and steep into the sea, stood in the way, and it
was dangerous to go round it; so Xerxes thought it would be an
undertaking worthy of him to have a canal dug across the neck that joins
the mountain to the land, and the Greeks declared that he wrote a letter
to the mountain god, bidding him not to put rocks in the way of the
workmen of the "Great King." Traces of this canal can still be found in
the ravine behind Mount Athos.

All the Greeks knew their danger now, and a council from every city met
at the Isthmus of Corinth to consider what was to be done. All their
ships, 271 in number, were gathered in a bay on the north of the great
island of Euboea. There the Spartan captain of the whole watched and
waited, till beacons from height to height announced that the Persians
were coming, and then he thought it safer to retreat within the Euripus,
th