Persia from the Earliest Period to the Arab

HISTORY OF PERSIA. 53
some places full of water. The modern name of
the peninsula, Provlaka, in fact, confirms the general
evidence for the truth of the story, as this name is
evidently from irpoavXag, " in front of the furrow or
canal." That the sea was an enemy with which Persian
ships could not as is yet satisfactorily cope, no less clear
from the losses Xerxes sustained, in spite of his canal,
along the opposite coast of Magnesia in Asia Minor.
Nor, indeed, need either the canal or the bridge be
cited, as they have been sometimes, as though they
were instances of mere vain-glory; on the contrary,
both were certainly suggested by previously acquired
experience. The bridge must have been of great
strength to allow of such a host passing
over it in
seven days ; indeed, Aeschylus calls it 08107*0, a solid
road, rather than a bridge.
The builders, however, of
the mounds of Susa, would have thought little enough
of either wcrk. "
Nor, indeed, is there any reason for
suspecting any essential error in the narrative of Herodotus,
and the account he gives may b^ taken as sub-
must have been alive
stantially true : for many persons
when he wrote, only forty years after these events, who
could and would have contradicted him, had his history
been grossly inaccurate.
Xerxes, after passing the winter at Sardis, advanced
to the Hellespont, whither he had already directed the
different contingents of his vast army to converge.
Though the numbers given by Herodotus doubtless
exceed th3 reality, the actual contributions of fortyseven
or forty-nine associated provinces must have
produced an enormous multitude. Moreover, this
estimate no doubt includes every one; not merely