roes whose deeds had consecrated the spot.

Whatever excitement and exhilaration, however, Xerxes himself may have
felt, in approaching, under these circumstances, the transit of the
stream, where the real labors and dangers of his expedition were to
commence, his miserable and helpless soldiers did not share them. Their
condition and prospects were wretched in the extreme. In the first
place, none of them went willingly. In modern times, at least in England
and America, armies are recruited by enticing the depraved and the
miserable to enlist, by tendering them a bounty, as it is called, that
is, a sum of ready money, which, as a means of temporary and often
vicious pleasure, presents a temptation they can not resist. The act of
enlistment is, however, in a sense voluntary, so that those who have
homes, and friends, and useful pursuits in which they are peacefully
engaged, are not disturbed. It was not so with the soldiers of Xerxes.
They were slaves, and had been torn from their rural homes all over the
empire by a merciless conscription, from which there was no possible
escape. Their life in camp, too, was comfortless and wretched. At the
present day, when it is so much more difficult than it then was to
obtain soldiers, and when so much more time and attention are required
to train them to their work in the modern art of war, soldiers must be
taken care of when obtained; but in Xerxes's day it was much easier to
get new supplies of recruits than to incur any great expense in
providing for the health and comfort of those already in the service.
The arms and trappings, it is true, of such troops as were in immediate
attendance on the king, were very splendid and gay, though this was only
decoration, after all, and the king's decoration too, not theirs. In
respect, however, to every thing like personal comfort, whether of food
and of clothing, or the means of shelter and repose, the common soldiers
were utterly destitute and wretched. They felt no interest in the
campaign; they had nothing to hope for from its success, but a
continuance, if their lives were spared, of the same miserable bondage
which they had always endured. There was, however, little probability
even of this; for whether, in the case of such an invasion, the
aggressor was to succeed or to fail, the destiny of the soldiers
personally was almost inevitable destruction. The mass of Xerxes's army
was thus a mere herd of slaves, driven along by the whips of