most powerful nations of the earth. Xerxes collected a vast army
from all parts of the empire. The Phoenicians furnished him with an
enormous fleet, and he made a bridge of a double line of boats
across the Hellespont and cut a canal through the peninsula of
Mount Athos. He reached Sardis in the autumn of B.C. 481, and the
next year his army crossed the bridge of boats, taking seven days
and seven nights for the transit. The number of his fighting men
was over two millions and a half. His ships of war were twelve
hundred and seven in number, and he had three thousand smaller
vessels for carrying his land forces and supplies. At the narrow
pass of Thermopylae, in the northeast of Greece, this immense army
was checked for a while by the heroic Leonidas and his three
hundred Spartans, who, however, perished in their attempt to
prevent the Persian's attack on Athens, which city was almost
entirely destroyed by the invaders. The sea-fight of Salamis was
won by the Greeks against enormous odds; and in the battle of
Plataea, B.C. 479, the defeat of the Persians by the Greek land
forces was made more complete by the death of Mardonius, the most
renowned general of Xerxes.

The Greeks, when they arrived at the Isthmus, consulted on the message
they had received from Alexander, in what way and in what places they
should prosecute the war. The opinion which prevailed was that they
should defend the pass at Thermopylae; for it appeared to be narrower
than that into Thessaly, and at the same time nearer to their own
territories; for the path by which the Greeks who were taken at
Thermopylae were afterward surprised, they knew nothing of, till, on
their arrival at Thermopylae, they were informed of it by the
Trachinians. They accordingly resolved to guard this pass, and not
suffer the barbarian to enter Greece; and that the naval force should
sail to Artemisium, in the territory of Histiaeotis, for these places are
near one another, so that they could hear what happened to each other.
These spots are thus situated.

In the first place, Artemisium is contracted from a wide space of the
Thracian sea into a narrow frith, which lies between the island of
Sciathus and the continent of Magnesia. From the narrow frith begins the
coast of Euboea, called Artemisium, and in it is a temple of Diana. But
the entrance into Greece through Trachis, in the n