compensate for the expense, the difficulties, and
the dangers of it. My counsels were, however, overruled. Your father
proceeded on the enterprise. He crossed the Bosporus, traversed Thrace,
and then crossed the Danube; but, after a long and weary contest with
the hordes of savages which he found in those trackless wilds, he was
forced to abandon the undertaking, and return, with the loss of half his
army. The plan which you propose seems to me to be liable to the same
dangers, and I fear very much that it will lead to the same results.

"The Greeks have the name of being a valiant and formidable foe. It may
prove in the end that they are so. They certainly repulsed Datis and all
his forces, vast as they were, and compelled them to retire with an
enormous loss. Your invasion, I grant, will be more formidable than his.
You will throw a bridge across the Hellespont, so as to take your troops
round through the northern parts of Europe into Greece, and you will
also, at the same time, have a powerful fleet in the AEgean Sea. But it
must be remembered that the naval armaments of the Greeks in all those
waters are very formidable. They may attack and destroy your fleet.
Suppose that they should do so, and that then, proceeding to the
northward in triumph, they should enter the Hellespont and destroy your
bridge? Your retreat would be cut off, and, in case of a reverse of
fortune, your army would be exposed to total ruin.

"Your father, in fact, very narrowly escaped precisely this fate. The
Scythians came to destroy his bridge across the Danube while his forces
were still beyond the river, and, had it not been for the very
extraordinary fidelity and zeal of Histiaeus, who had been left to guard
the post, they would have succeeded in doing it. It is frightful to
think that the whole Persian army, with the sovereign of the empire at
their head, were placed in a position where their being saved from
overwhelming and total destruction depended solely on the fidelity and
firmness of a single man! Should you place your forces and your own
person in the same danger, can you safely calculate upon the same
fortunate escape?

"Even the very vastness of your force may be the means of insuring and
accelerating its destruction, since whatever rises to extraordinary
elevation and greatness is always exposed to dangers correspondingly
extraordinary and great. Thus tall trees and lofty towers seem always
specially to invite the thunderbol