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Xerxes, after having enumerated his armaments, pushed on with the entire army, and the whole fleet accompanied the land forces in their advance as far as the city of Acanthus, and from there the ships passed through the place where the canal had been dug into the other sea expeditiously and without loss. [2] But when Xerxes arrived at the Gulf of Melis,1 he learned that the enemy had already seized the passes. Consequently, having joined to his forces the armament there, he summoned his allies from Europe, a little less than two hundred thousand men; so that he now possessed in all not less than one million soldiers exclusive of the naval contingent.2 [3] And the sum total of the masses who served on the ships of war and who transported the food and general equipment was not less than that of those we have mentioned, so that the account usually given of the multitude of the men gathered together by Xerxes need cause no amazement; for men say that the unfailing rivers ran dry because of the unending stream of the multitude, and that the seas were hidden by the sails of the ships. However this may be, the greatest forces of which any historical record has been left were those which accompanied Xerxes. [4]

After the Persians had encamped on the Spercheius River, Xerxes dispatched envoys to Thermopylae to discover, among other things, how the Greeks felt about the war with him; and he commanded them to make this proclamation: "King Xerxes orders all to give up their arms, to depart unharmed to their native lands, and to be allies of the Persians; and to all Greeks who do this he will give more and better lands than they now possess." [5] But when Leonidas heard the commands of the envoys, he replied to them: "If we should be allies of the king we should be more useful if we kept our arms, and if we should have to wage war against him, we should fight the better for our freedom if we kept them; and as for the lands which he promises to give, the Greeks have learned from their fathers to gain lands, not by cowardice, but by valour."

1 Diodorus, in his eagerness to recount the safe passage of the fleet through the canal, has anticipated. He now returns to the march from the European side of the Hellespont.

2 The size of Xerxes' army has been often discussed. Munro (Camb. Anc. Hist. 4, pp. 271 ff.) concludes that Xerxes had one hundred and eighty thousand combatants and a fleet of some seven hundred and thirty warships.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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