ssary reductions in the numbers of ships and men in the army and fleet of Xerxes it is still true that to any Greek, whose island or city-state counted its inhabitants in a few thousands, the host of the Great King seemed so prodigious as to invite a terrified response. The Persian army justified the lines written by
A. E. Housman:
The King with half the East at heels Is marched from lands of morning.
His fighters drink the rivers up,
Their shafts benight the air… .
Before the invasion of Europe began and the army started to cross the Hellespont bridges Xerxes decided to hold a review of his forces. Herodotus implies that he reviewed the whole army and navy in a day, but this is clearly impossible. The army itself, when it was on the march, moved in columns, baggage train ahead, with half the infantry as escort; then came two brigades of Xerxes’ noble guards, the Immortals; the sacred chariot of Ahuramazda drawn by ten stallions, then the Great King, followed by two further brigades of crack infantry and cavalry; the rest of the Immortals; and finally all the other infantry divisions. The whole array, it has been calculated, would have taken seven days to cross the bridges from Asia Minor into Europe. It is clear that what Xerxes witnessed was a selection of the host, together with a few picked squadrons of
ships which put on a display of nautical skills just offshore. The throne of white marble, from which he witnessed this evidence of his power and might, was set up at Abydos on the eastern side of the Dardanelles. Here, on a day early in May, while the main body of the army together with all the animals was assembling for the crossing, Xerxes ‘saw the whole Hellespont covered in ships, and all the beaches and plains of Abydos filled with men’.
Xerxes, not unnaturally, was filled with exultation at the sight before him - the strait studded with ships, the great bridges, the dust cloud of the assembling army, the brilliant march past of the Immortals and other selected troops, the gleam of spring sunlight on cavalry and armoured men, and all the panoply of war. He then sent orders for some of the ships in his navy to give an exhibition of their prowess. A race was arranged between picked squadrons, the final heat of which was won by the Phoenicians of Sidon. (Sidon, along with Tyre and Arvad, produced the greatest mariners and pilots of antiquity.) ‘Xerxes was as pleased with the race as with the sight of his army … He congratulated himself - and the next moment burst into tears.5 His uncle Artabanus, who had tried from the very beginning to dissuade him from ‘Operation Europe’, said to him: ‘My lord, there is surely some contradiction between this behaviour and that of a minute ago. Then you called yourself a fortunate man - and yet now you weep.’
Xerxes answered him: ‘I paused for thought, and it occurred to me that human life is so sadly short. Out of all these thousands of men, not one will be alive in a hundred years.’
Artabanus was quick to seize the chance, while his monarch was temporarily out of spirits, to point out the dangers of the expedition. He was wise for his time. He realised that logistics very largely governed the success or failure of a campaign such as this. The farther the army advanced, the longer its lines of communications, and the greater the difficulty of food supplies. The land itself and the sea, he warned, were the king’s greatest enemies. The land that they were now invading would prove hostile and would not afford enough supplies for an army which, he admitted, was quite large enough for the task of subduing the Greeks. The sea was ever a treacherous element and there was no harbour on the Greek coast large enough to accommodate all the fleet in the event of bad weather. Xerxes, his serenity restored by the glory of the hour, was
not prepared to listen to the older man. He was determined to succeed where the great Darius had failed, and he had every confidence in the careful preparations that had been made to ensure the Persian success.
‘We are following’, he said, ‘in the footsteps of o