Xerxes, son of Darius and of his wife Atossa, daughter of Cyrus, went
forth against Hellas, to take vengeance upon those who had defeated his
father at Marathon. But ill fortune befell the king and his army both
by land and sea; neither did it avail him that he cast a bridge over
the Hellespont and made a canal across the promontory of Mount Athos,
and brought myriads of men, by land and sea, to subdue the Greeks. For
in the strait between Athens and the island of Salamis the Persian
ships were shattered and sunk or put to flight by those of Athens and
Lacedaemon and Aegina and Corinth, and Xerxes went homewards on the way
by which he had come, leaving his general Mardonius with three hundred
thousand men to strive with the Greeks by land: but in the next year
they were destroyed near Plataea in Boeotia, by the Lacedaemonians and
Athenians and Tegeans. Such was the end of the army which Xerxes left
behind him. But the king himself had reached the bridge over the
Hellespont, and late and hardly and in sorry plight and with few
companions came home unto the Palace of Susa.