The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [165]
24. And sailing down into the midst of it, fell into their hands. The commander of this unlucky squadron was Sandoces, the son of Thamasius, governor of Cyme, in Aeolis.
25. This Sandoces was one of the royal judges, and had been crucified by Darius some time before, on the charge of taking a bribe to determine a cause wrongly;
26. But while he yet hung on the cross, Darius remembered that the good deeds of Sandoces towards the king’s house were more numerous than his evil deeds;
27. And so, realising that he had acted with more haste than wisdom, he ordered Sandoces to be taken down from the cross and set at large.
28. Thus Sandoces escaped destruction at the hands of Darius, and was alive at this time;
29. But he was not fated to come off so cheaply from his second peril; for as soon as the Greeks saw the ships making towards them, they guessed their mistake, and putting to sea, took them without difficulty.
30. Aridolis, tyrant of Alabanda in Caria, was on board one of the ships, and was made prisoner;
31. As also was the Paphian general, Penthylus, the son of Domonous, who was on board another.
32. This person had brought with him twelve ships from Paphos, and, after losing eleven in the storm off Sepias, was taken in the remaining one as he sailed towards Artemisium.
33. The Greeks, after questioning their prisoners as much as they wished concerning the forces of Xerxes, sent them away in chains to the Isthmus of Corinth.
Chapter 68
1. Xerxes meanwhile, with the land army, had proceeded through Thessaly and Achaea, and three days earlier had entered the territory of the Malians.
2. In Thessaly he matched his own horses against the Thessalian, which he heard were the best in Greece, but the Greek coursers were left far behind in the race.
3. All the rivers in this region had water enough to supply his army, except only the Onochonus;
4. But in Achaea, the largest of the streams, the Apidanus, barely held out.
5. From hence Xerxes passed into Malis, along the shores of a bay in which there is an ebb and flow of the tide daily.
6. By the side of this bay lies a piece of flat land, in one part broad, but in another very narrow indeed,
7. Around which runs a range of lofty hills, enclosing all Malis within them, and called the Trachinian cliffs after the nearby city of Trachis. Here in the Trachinia Xerxes pitched his camp.
8. On their side the Greeks occupied the narrow pass that they call Thermopylae, meaning ‘The Hot Gates’;
9. But the natives, and those who dwell in the neighbourhood, merely call them Pylae, that is, ‘The Gates’.
10. Here then the two armies took their stand; the one master of all the region lying north of Trachis,
11. The other of the country extending southward of that place to the edge of the continent.
12. The Greeks who at this spot awaited the coming of Xerxes were the following:
13. From Sparta, three hundred men-at-arms; from Arcadia, a thousand Tegeans and Mantineans, five hundred of each people;
14. A hundred and twenty Orchomenians, from the Arcadian Orchomenus; and a thousand from other cities;
15. From Corinth, four hundred men; from Phlius, two hundred; and from Mycenae eighty.
16. Such was the number from the Peloponnese. There were also present, from Boeotia, seven hundred Thespians and four hundred Thebans.
17. Besides these troops, the Locrians of Opus and the Phocians had obeyed the call of their countrymen,
18. And sent the former all the force they had, the latter a thousand men.
19. For envoys had gone from the Greeks at Thermopylae among the Locrians and Phocians, to call on them for assistance, and to say,
20. They were themselves but the vanguard of the host, sent to precede the main body, which might every day be expected to follow them.
21. The sea was in good keeping, watched by the Athenians, the Eginetans, and the rest of the fleet.
22. There was no cause why they should fear; for after all the invader was