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Updated: June 26, 2025
The slender promontory which this magnificent mountain terminates is forty miles long and has only an average breadth of four miles. The ancient canal of Xerxes quite severed it from the mainland. The entire promontory is, and has been since the time of Constantine, ecclesiastic ground; every mountain and valley has its convent; besides the twenty great monasteries are many pious retreats.
From the wanderers whom misfortune drove to his realms, he learned to wonder at the arts, the genius, the energies of the people of Hellas. He desired less to win their territories than to gain such subjects. Too vast, alas, was the work he bequeathed to Xerxes." "He should not have trusted to force alone," returned Pausanias.
We say nothing of Themistocles, who, in the war between Xerxes and the Athenians, despairing to prevail upon his countrymen by force of reasoning to quit their city, and betake themselves to sea, set all the engines of religion to work; forged oracles, and procured the priests to circulate among the people, that Minerva had fled from Athens, and had taken the way which led to the port.
Delay not that aid by such vast and profitless recruits as swelled the pomp, but embarrassed the arms, of Xerxes. Armies too large rot by their own unwieldiness into decay. A band of 50,000, composed solely of the Medes and Persians, will more than suffice. With such an army, if my command be undisputed, I will win a second Plataea, but against the Greek." "Your suggestions shall be law.
She declared, that she was fully repaid for all the hardships which she had undergone while travelling through Asia with the army, now that she was able to revel in the palace of the haughty Kings of Persia; but that it would be yet sweeter to her to burn the house of Xerxes, who burned her native Athens, and to apply the torch with her own hand in the presence of Alexander, that it might be told among men that a woman who followed Alexander's camp had taken a more noble revenge upon the Persians for the wrongs of Greece, than all the admirals and generals of former times had been able to do.
XXIL Taking possession of the tent of Mardonius, which had formerly been that of Xerxes, Pausanias directed the oriental slaves who had escaped the massacre to prepare a banquet after the fashion of the Persians, and as if served to Mardonius.
Let us cite, for example, the account which Herodotus gives us of the actions of the Greeks at Plataea, when their army confronted the remnant of the army of Xerxes, in the year 479 B.C. Here we see each side hesitating to attack the other, merely because the oracle had declared that whichever side struck the first blow would lose the conflict.
The cultivation of magic, carried at that day to a singular height among the would-be wise, was especially Eastern in its origin; it was alien to the early philosophy of the Greeks; nor had it been received by them with favor until Ostanes, who accompanied the army of Xerxes, introduced, amongst the simple credulities of Hellas, the solemn superstitions of Zoroaster.
The young conqueror spent one month in Babylon, and then went on to Su´sa. There he found the brazen statue of Athene which Xerxes had carried off to Persia; and he sent it back to the Athenians, who received it with much joy. The Persian queen now became very ill, and, in spite of the utmost care, she soon died.
Is it not better to be a leader of one city of freemen than a Xerxes, master of a hundred million slaves? How they greeted me, as if I were Apollo the Saviour, when I returned to Peiræus!
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