If the whole contemporary world were overawed by the vast assemblage of men and muniments of war which Xerxes thus brought together, so much transcending all past, we might even say all subsequent, experience,—they were no less astounded by two enterprises which entered into his scheme,—the bridging of the Hellespont, and the cutting of a ship-canal through the isthmus of Mount Athos. For the first of the two there had indeed been a precedent, since Darius about thirty-five years before had caused a bridge to be thrown over the Thracian Bosphorus, and crossed it in his march to Scythia; but this bridge, though constructed by the Ionians and by a Samian Greek, having had reference only to distant regions, seems to have been little known or little thought of among the Greeks generally, as we may infer from the fact, that the poet Æschylus[25] speaks as if he had never heard of it, while the bridge of Xerxes was ever remembered, both by Persians and by Greeks, as a most imposing display of Asiatic omnipotence. The bridge of boats—or rather, the two separate bridges not far removed from each other—which Xerxes caused to be thrown across the Hellespont, stretched from the neighborhood of Abydos, on the Asiatic side to the coast between Sestos and Madytus on the European, where the strait is about an English mile in breadth. The execution of the work was at first intrusted, not to Greeks, but to Phenicians and Egyptians, who had received orders long beforehand to prepare cables of extraordinary strength and size expressly for the purpose; the material used by the Phenicians was flax, that employed by the Egyptians was the fibre of the papyrus. Already had the work been completed and announced to Xerxes as available for transit, when a storm arose, so violent as altogether to ruin it. The wrath of the monarch, when apprized of this catastrophe, burst all bounds; it was directed partly against the chief-engineers, whose heads he caused to be struck off,[26] but partly also against the Hellespont itself. He commanded that the strait should be scourged with three hundred lashes, and that a set of fetters should be let down into it as a farther punishment: moreover Herodotus had heard, but does not believe, that he even sent irons for the purpose of branding it. “Thou bitter water (exclaimed the scourgers while inflicting this punishment), this is the penalty which our master inflicts upon thee, because thou hast wronged him though he hath never wronged thee. King Xerxes _will_ cross thee, whether thou wilt or not; but thou deservest not sacrifice from any man, because thou art a treacherous river of (useless) salt water.”[27] [25] Æschylus, Pers. 731, 754, 873. [26] Plutarch (De Tranquillitate Animi, p. 470), speaks of them as having had their noses and ears cut off.