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ἐπὶ τὴν Πελοπόννησον. The Persian army never reached even Megara (cf. ix. 14). Doubtless its advance was connected with the projected encircling movement of the fleet (ch. 76). Possession of the Attic shore (as of Psyttaleia; cf. ch. 76. 2) would enable the Persians to save their own stranded ships and shipwrecked men and to destroy those of the enemy.
συγχώσαντες. The word implies an artificially constructed way (cf. vii. 115. 3), but there was no carriage road till Hadrian made one, of which some traces remain (Paus. i. 44. 6), though according to Megarian legend, Sciron made a footpath for travellers. Now there is a highway and railroad, but fifty years ago the path still deserved its modern name, Kake Scala. It was indeed the shortest of the three ways across Geranea into the Peloponnese, but ‘for six miles it ran along a narrow crumbling ledge half-way up the face of an almost sheer cliff at a height of six to seven hundred feet above the sea. . . . Nothing was easier than to make such a path impassable’ (cf. Frazer, Paus. ii. 547; Strabo 391). οἰκοδόμεον ... τεῖχος (cf. Diod. xi. 16). This wall, from the materials and haste with which it was built, would seem to have been a temporary field-work. Neither Thucydides nor Xenophon alludes to any such impediment to the march of troops across the Isthmus. In 369 B. C. (Diod. xv. 68) an ineffectual attempt was made to bar the Isthmus against Epaminondas by making a palisade and trench from Cenchreae to Lechaeum. A wall seems to have protected the Peloponnese against the Gallic invasion, 279 B. C. (Paus. vii. 6. 7), and more certainly in the days of Valerian (253 A. D.) there was a wall, repaired later by Justinian, and last used by the Venetians in 1463 and 1696. It may still be traced from sea to sea running along a line of low cliffs, a little south of the modern canal, and is best preserved near the Isthmian sanctuary; cf. Frazer, Paus. iii. 5-6. ἤνετο: the work does not seem to have been finished till the following summer; cf. ix. 7. The wood would be for palisades, the sand for mortar, and also for filling up along with other rubble the spaces between the outer faces of the walls.
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