ian army was the first
step towards that invasion of Greece by the Persians which proved such a
vital element in the history of the Hellenic people. The next step was
taken in the reign of Darius, the first of Asiatic monarchs to invade
Europe. This ambitious warrior attempted to win fame by conquering the
country of the Scythian barbarians,--now Southern Russia,--and was
taught such a lesson that for centuries thereafter the perilous
enterprise was not repeated.

It was about the year 516 B.C. that the Persian king, with the
ostensible purpose--invented to excuse his invasion--of punishing the
Scythians for a raid into Asia a century before, but really moved only
by the thirst for conquest, reached the Bosphorus, the strait that here
divides Europe from Asia. He had with him an army said to have numbered
seven hundred thousand men, and on the seas was a fleet of six hundred
ships. A bridge of boats was thrown across this arm of the sea,--on
which Constantinople now stands,--and the great Persian host reached
European soil in the country of Thrace.

Happy was it for Greece that the ambitious Persian did not then seek
its conquest, as Democedes, his physician, had suggested. The Athenians,
then under the rule of the tyrant Pisistratus, were not the free and
bold people they afterwards became, and had Darius sought their conquest
at that time, the land of Greece would probably have become a part of
the overgrown Persian empire. Fortunately, he was bent on conquering the
barbarians of the north, and left Greece to grow in valor and
patriotism.

While the army marched from Asia into Europe across its bridge of boats,
the fleet was sent into the Euxine, or Black Sea, with orders to sail
for two days up the Danube River, which empties into that sea, and build
there also a bridge of boats. When Darius with his army reached the
Danube, he found the bridge ready, and on its swaying length crossed
what was then believed to be the greatest river on the earth. Reaching
the northern bank, he marched onward into the unknown country of the
barbarous Scythians, with visions of conquest and glory in his mind.

What happened to the great Persian army and its ambitious leader in
Scythia we do not very well know. Two historians tell us the story, but
probably their history is more imagination than fact. Ctesias tells the
fairy-tale that Darius marched northward for fifteen days, that he then
exchanged bows with the Scythian king, and t