Great and capital as the victory was, there yet remained after it a sufficient portion of the Persian fleet to maintain even maritime war vigorously, not to mention the powerful land-force, as yet unshaken. And the Greeks themselves, immediately after they had collected in their island, as well as could be done, the fragments of shipping and the dead bodies, made themselves ready for a second engagement.[269] But they were relieved from this necessity by the pusillanimity[270] of the invading monarch, in whom the defeat had occasioned a sudden revulsion from contemptuous confidence, not only to rage and disappointment, but to the extreme of alarm for his own personal safety. He was possessed with a feeling of mingled wrath and mistrust against his naval force, which consisted entirely of subject nations,—Phenicians, Egyptians, Kilikians, Cyprians, Pamphylians, Ionic Greeks, etc., with a few Persians and Medes serving on board, in a capacity probably not well suited to them. None of these subjects had any interest in the success of the invasion, or any other motive for service except fear, while the sympathies of the Ionic Greeks were even decidedly against it. Xerxes now came to suspect the fidelity, or undervalue the courage, of all these naval subjects;[271] he fancied that they could make no resistance to the Greek fleet, and dreaded lest the latter should sail forthwith to the Hellespont, so as to break down the bridge and intercept his personal retreat; for, upon the maintenance of that bridge he conceived his own safety to turn, not less than that of his father Darius, when retreating from Scythia, upon the preservation of the bridge over the Danube.[272] Against the Phenicians, from whom he had expected most, his rage broke out in such fierce threats, that they stole away from the fleet in the night, and departed homeward.[273] Such a capital desertion made future naval struggle still more hopeless, and Xerxes, though at first breathing revenge, and talking about a vast mole or bridge to be thrown across the strait to Salamis, speedily ended by giving orders to the whole fleet to leave Phalêrum in the night,—not without disembarking, however, the best soldiers who served on board.[274] They were to make straight for the Hellespont, and there to guard the bridge against his arrival.[275] [269] Herodot. viii, 96. [270] The victories of the Greeks over the Persians were materially aided by the personal timidity of Xerxes, and of Darius Codomannus at Issus and Arbela (Arrian, ii, 11, 6; iii, 14, 3). [271] See this feeling especially in the language of Mardonius to Xerxes (Herodot. viii, 100), as well as in that put into the mouth of Artemisia by the historian (viii, 68), which indicates the general conception of the historian himself, derived from the various information which reached him. [272] Herodot. vii, 10.