Crossing the Halys river, the army entered Phrygia, and arrived at the city of Kelænæ.
At that town it was entertained by a certain Pythios, son of Atys, a Lydian, whose enormous wealth, as reported in Herodotus, recalls the series of Greek legends in which this land plays the part of Manoa, the city of pure gold of the legends of Elizabethan days.
From Kelænæ, the army journeyed past Anaua, with its salt lake, to Kolossæ, a city of Phrygia, near which the Lykos, a tributary of the Maeander, had an underground course, ten stades long. Thence by Kydrara on the Lydian border, where was an inscribed boundary pillar erected by Crœsus; and so by Kallatebos to Sardes.
H. vii. 32.
Arrived at Sardes, the king sent heralds to demand earth and water from the States of Greece, with the exception of Athens and Lacedæmon. As in the case of the Marathonian expedition, the Persian wished to form an estimate of the amount of opposition which he might expect. H. vii. 34. Meanwhile the engineers at the Hellespont were constructing their bridges at Abydos, where the strait is narrowest. Those who have seen the strong current which flows through this channel will be best able to appreciate the engineering skill of those who were responsible for their construction.
One bridge was made by the Egyptians, the other by the Phœnicians. The bridges first made were broken in a storm, and Herodotus tells several tales of the childish expressions of vexation employed by Xerxes; how he had the waters scourged; how he let fetters down into them, and would have had them branded. The engineers were beheaded, pour encourager les autres, after the simple, effective method of those days. The new bridges were more permanent structures.
H. vii. 36.
Herodotus, doubtless, had plenty of opportunity in later time of getting information as to the structural peculiarities of the bridges from the Greeks of those parts; but his actual description is somewhat obscure in respect to one important detail. The two bridges seem to have left the Asiatic side at points quite close together. The western one, that towards the Ægean, appears to have crossed the strait direct, a distance which Herodotus gives as seven stades, or somewhat over three-quarters of a mile. The other diverged in an oblique direction up the strait towards the Propontis, and reached the European shore some distance from its fellow. They were formed of triremes and pentekonters, slung on long cables of flax or papyrus, there being 314 vessels in the western and 360 in the eastern bridge. THE BRIDGE OVER THE HELLESPONT. The current flows rapidly from the Propontis; and though Herodotus only mentions the eastern bridge as being anchored up stream, it must be presumed that both were secured in that way. In the same way both would have to be anchored down stream also, by reason, as Herodotus himself mentions, of the south and south-west winds.
In both bridges the prows of the supporting vessels were placed in such a way as to meet the current, which at this point in the Hellespont, owing to a bend in the course of the strait, runs, at one place just north of Abydos, across the channel, slanting from the European to the Asiatic shore.*