Funeral Oration (26-30)

past the frontiers of their land; and so swiftly did they surmount their ordeal that by the same messengers information reached the other Greeks both of the barbarians’ arrival here and of our ancestors’ triumph. For indeed none of the other Greeks knew fear for the peril to come; they only heard the news and rejoiced over their own liberation. No wonder, then, that these deeds performed long ago should be as though they were new, and that even to this day the valor of that band should be envied by all mankind.

But the surest evidence of their numbers is this: although he had a thousand ships to spare for transporting his land army over the most narrow part of the Hellespont, he decided against it, for he judged that it would cause him a great waste of time:

despising alike the effects of nature, the dispositions of Heaven and the purposes of men, he made him a road across the sea, and forced a passage for ships through the land, by spanning the Hellespont and trenching Athos; none withstood him, for the unwilling submitted, and the willing chose to be traitors. The former were not capable of resisting, and the latter were corrupted by bribes: they were under the double persuasion of gain and dread.

But while Greece showed these inclinations, the Athenians, for their part, embarked in their ships and hastened to the defence of Artemisium; while the Lacedaemonians and some of their allies went off to make a stand at Thermopylae, judging that the narrowness of the ground would enable them to secure the passage.