Let us now attend a little to the landforces. As for the bridge over the Hellespont, every reader of Homer must be aware, that there was a very snug communication by land; for otherwise, how could Rhesus and his Thracians have arrived on the field of battle, without the knowledge of the Greeks? As for drinking up rivers, the little progress which the Londoners have hitherto made in drinking up the New River, shews that it is not very practicable to drink up water faster than it is supplied by the parent stream'; and, as far as the parent streams were concerned, what did it signify whether the water flowed down the throats of the Persians, or in its usual channel? As for bread, Herodotus

a The New River is said to supply thirteen millions of gallons of water daily. Could the hosts of Xerxes have wanted more? But as his cattle drank up a salt lake, we must not compare old times with the present.

b" There likewise is a copper skillet,

Which runs as fast out, as you fill it.”

This, though poetical, is possible; but the hydraulics of Herodotus require that the skillet should run out faster than you fill it.

PART II.

C

himself professes that he cannot tell how the Persian army could have been provided with that essential article; so that the wonderful Xerxes may have resembled Cowper's Katerfelto,

"With his hair on end

At his own wonders, wondering for his bread."

But Mardonius:-if Mardonius was naturally disposed to do extraordinary things, Herodotus was disposed to relate them, and Mitford to believe them; but neither the one nor the other has done justice to the ability with which Mardonius supplied all the wants of his numerous army. Observe what happened in the retreat of Xerxes," The invasion alone had been considered, the retreat was unprovided for. The disorderly multitude, therefore, lived by rapine, from friends equally and from foes; but all was insufficient. Other sustenance failing, they ate the very grass from the ground, and the bark, and even leaves from the trees; and as the historian, with emphatical simplicity, says, 'they left

nothing.' Dysenteries and pestilential fevers seized whom famine spared. Numbers were left sick in the towns of Thessaly, Pæonia, Macedonia, and Thrace, with arbitrary orders, little likely to be diligently obeyed, that support and attendance should be provided for them.”a

Yet in Thessaly Mardonius remained all the winter; the chief instigator of an expedition, which had ended so disgracefully, and hated on that account by the living; surrounded by the dead and dying, separated from the fleet, having before him the countries which Xerxes had either wasted with fire and sword, or at least distressed and drained of all supplies by his multitudes; having behind him the countries, in which the miserable fugitives had consumed the grass, the bark, and the leaves of the trees; having much to apprehend from the accounts which Artabazus and his defeated troops would naturally give on their return, and from the

a Mitford.

contrast of the situation of his army with that of the triumphant and rejoicing Greeks. Mardonius, nevertheless, maintained so strict a discipline, that although the Athenians had returned to Attica, and the temple of Delphi was receiving the spoils of his countrymen, no hostilities of any kind took place. "Spring," says the historian," and the recollection that Mardonius was in Thessaly, awakened the Greeks. And yet Thessaly is near to Attica, and 300,000 selected soldiers were with Mardonius.

According to Eschylus, the very country of the Greeks fought on their side and starved the haughty foes. Had Xerxes

a. That the Isthmus was the scene of triumph and rejoicing must be allowed, if we believe the account of what passed there after the retreat of Xerxes. But that it was so is very extraordinary. Xerxes, in his advance, burnt the towns of Drymus, Charadra, Erochus, Tethronium, Amphicæa, Neon, Pedieæ, Triteæ, Elateia, Hyampolis, Paropotamii, Abæ, with their temples; Thespiæ, also, and Platæa; and, as Herodotus mentions in two places, he ravaged Attica. How were the wretched inhabitants of these places to procure food and shelter during the winter?

b See the dialogue between Darius and the Chorus in the Persæ.

chosen to dine as he had supped over night, there would have been an end of Abdera. The vessels, therefore, that were carrying corn from the Euxine to Ægina and Peloponnesus, might easily have found a market without crossing the dangerous Ægean, and we may infer from this, and many other circumstances, that Greece did not produce enough for the consumption of its natives. In June, according to Mitford, Mardonius retook possession of Athens. While he "had any hope of

a Herodotus.

b What is the literal meaning of sycophant? Why were the enlightened Athenians so fearful of not having enough figs? Without thinking, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, that our lives consist in eating and drinking, I may assert that attention to these matters makes one great difference between romance and real life. The Janizaries were fatalists and fanatics, yet the following extract shews that their stomachs were not neglected. "The colonel, or head of a regiment, was called the tshorbadgi, or soup-maker; the officers next in rank were chief cooks and water-drawers; the soldiers carried a wooden spoon in front of their instead of a tuft, or feather, and the kettle, or cauldron, was the sacred standard and rallying point of every regiment." Foreign Quarterly Review. (Von Hammer's History of the Ottoman Empire.)

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