It was a triumphal victory march like none before or since even up to today, when Xerxes set out to conquer Greece, the whole of Europe even.

John Lewis Gaddis, Professor of History at Yale University, founding director of the Brady-Johnson Programme in Grand Strategy, and 2012 Pullitzer Prize Winner for his biography of George F Kennan, an American diplomat who advocated a containment policy of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, had this to say about Xerxes, on the brink of crossing over from Asia to Europe to conquer everything that stood in his way without submitting.

The date is 480 B.C.E. The place is Abydos, the town on the Asian side of the Hellespont where it narrows to just over a mile in width. The scene is worthy of Hollywood in its heyday. Xerxes, Persia's King of Kings, ascends a throne on a promontory from which he can see armies assembled, the historian Herodotus tells us, of over a million and a half men. Had the number been only a tenth of that, as is more likely, it would still have approximated the size of Eisenhower's forces on D-day in 1944. The Hellespont has no bridge now, but Xerxes had two then: one rested on 360 boats lashed together, the other on 314, both curved to accommodate winds and currents. For after an earlier bridge had broken apart in a storm, the furious king beheaded the builders and ordered the waters themselves whipped and branded. Somewhere on the bottom there presumably lie, to this day, the iron fetters he had thrown in for good.

This is a part of the story of Xerxes invasion that, like everything about his invasion is remarkable, recounted in such vivid and memorable colour by the Greek historian Herodotus.

Tag words: Xerxes; Greece; John Lewis Gaddis; On Grand Strategy; Hellespont; Artabanus; the Magi; Darius; Herodotus; The Histories; Pythius;

DZ Season 63 Part 5. 300 Spartans and All That – Triumphal Procession to the Bosphorous.

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