Hellespont as along a royal road; and how his army drank a whole
river dry--all of which is gravely related by Herodotus as fact,
is discredited by the Latin poet JUVENAL, who attributes these
stories to the imaginations of "browsy poets."

Old Greece a tale of Athos would make out,
Cut from the continent and sailed about;
Seas bid with navies, chariots passing o'er
The channel on a bridge from shore to shore;
Rivers, whose depths no sharp beholder sees,
Drunk, at an army's dinner, to the lees;
With a long legend of romantic things,
Which, in his cups, the browsy poet sings.
--Tenth Satire. Trans. by DRYDEN.

That Xerxes bridged the Hellespont, however, in the manner related
by Herodotus, is an accepted fact of history. As MILTON says,

Xerxes, the liberty of Greece to yoke,
From Susa, his Memnonian palace high,
Came to the sea, and over Hellespont
Bridging his way, Europe with Asia joined.
--Paradise Regained.

He crossed to Ses'tus, a city of Thrace, and entered Europe at
the head of an army the greatest the world has ever seen, and
whose numbers have been estimated at over two millions of
fighting men. Having marched along the coast through Thrace and
Macedonia, this immense force passed through Thessaly, and
arrived, without opposition, at the Pass of Thermop'ylae, a narrow