[32] Herodot. vii, 36. The language in which Herodotus describes the position of these ships which formed the two bridges, seems to me to have been erroneously or imperfectly apprehended by most of the commentators: see the notes of Bähr, Kruse, Wesseling, Rennell, and especially Larcher: Schweighäuser is the most satisfactory—τοῦ μὲν Πόντου ἐπικαρσίας, τοῦ δὲ Ἑλλησπόντου κατὰ ῥόον. The explanation given by Tzetzes of ἐπικαρσίας by the word πλαγίας seems to me hardly exact: it means, not _oblique_, but _at right angles with_. The course of the Bosphorus and Hellespont, flowing out of the Euxine sea, is conceived by the historian as meeting that sea at right angles; and the ships, which were moored near together along the current of the strait, taking the line of each from head to stern, were therefore also at right angles with the Euxine sea. Moreover, Herodotus does not mean to distinguish the two bridges hereby, and to say that the ships of the one bridge were τοῦ Πόντου ἐπικαρσίας, and those of the other bridge τοῦ Ἑλλησπόντου κατὰ ῥόον, as Bähr and other commentators suppose: _both_ the predicates apply alike to _both_ the bridges,—as indeed it stands to reason that the arrangement of ships best for one bridge must also have been best for the other. Respecting the meaning of ἐπικάρσιος in Herodotus, see iv, 101; i, 180. In the Odyssey (ix, 70: compare Eustath. ad loc.) ἐπικάρσιαι does not mean oblique, but headlong before the wind: compare ἐπίκαρ, Iliad, xviii, 392. The circumstance stated by Herodotus—that in the bridge higher up the stream, or nearest to the Euxine, there were in all three hundred and sixty vessels, while in the other bridge there were no more than three hundred and fourteen—has perplexed the commentators, and induced them to resort to inconvenient explanations,—as that of saying, that in the higher bridge the vessels were moored not in a direct line across, but in a line slanting, so that the extreme vessel on the European side was lower down the stream than the extreme vessel on the Asiatic side. This is one of the false explanations given of ἐπικαρσίας (_slanting_, _schräg_): while the idea of Gronovius and Larcher, that the vessels in the higher bridge presented _their broadside_ to the current, is still more inadmissible. But the difference in the number of ships employed in the one bridge compared with the other seems to admit of an easier explanation. We need not suppose, nor does Herodotus say, that the two bridges were quite close together: considering the multitude which had to cross them, it would be convenient that they should be placed at a certain distance from each other. If they were a mile or two apart, we may well suppose that the breadth of the strait was not exactly the same in the two places chosen, and that it may have been broader at the point of the upper bridge,—which, moreover,