Mark Gagnon

Even on the lower end, that's still maybe the largest military force that the ancient Mediterranean world had ever seen up until that point.

And even at 100 or 200,000 men, you're talking about a literal city of men going to kill you and destroy you and your people and take everything that you've ever had.

I mean, think about that.

The preparations for this would take years.

Now, Xerxes ordered a canal dug across the peninsula of Mount Athos in northern Greece.

This is a massive engineering project that he designed in order to try and avoid some treacherous waters that had previously wrecked one of Darius's fleets.

He also ordered two pontoon bridges to be built across the Hellespont.

Now, the Hellespont was this narrow strait separating Asia and Europe.

Today it would be between

Turkey and Greece, roughly.

And each bridge stretched roughly a mile across open water.

And then when a storm destroyed the first set of bridges, Herodotus tells us that Xerxes ordered the sea itself to be whipped 300 times and had chains thrown into the water as punishment.

He was basically trying to punish the sea or the...

god of the ocean, to send a message basically like, hey, don't mess with my stuff.

And then he had the engineers beheaded and he built a new bridge.

Now, did this actually happen?

We don't know.

Again, there is a biased record coming from Greek sources.

It's the exact kind of story that the Greeks would have loved to have told about Xerxes or any other Persian king.

Like, oh yeah, he got his bridge destroyed and he killed all his buddies.