Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/92

 68 HISTORY OF GREECE. command of the Spartan Euaenetus and the Athenian Themis- tokles, were despatched by sea to Halus in Achsea PhthiOtis, where they disembarked and marched by land across Achsea and Thessaly.i Being joined by the Thessahan horse, they occupied the defile of Tempe, through which the river Peneius makes its way to the sea, by a cleft between the mountains Olympus and Ossa. The long, narrow, and winding defile of Tempe, formed then, and forms still, the single entrance, open throughout winter as well as summer, from lower or maritime Macedonia into Thes- saly : the lofty mountain precipices approach so closely as to leave hardly room enough in some places for a road : it is thus eminently defensible, and a few resolute men would be sufiicient to arrest in it the progress of the most numerous host.2 But the Greeks soon discovered that the position was such as they could not hold, — first, because the powerful fleet of Xerxes would be able to land troops in their rear ; secondly, because there was also a second entrance passable in summer, from upper Macedo« nia into Thessaly, by the mountain-passes over the range of Olympus ; an entrance which traversed the country of the Perr- haebians and came into Thessaly near Gonnus, about the spot where the defile of Tempe begins to narrow. It was in fact by th:>3 second pass, evading the insurmountable diflSculties of Tempe, ' Herodot. vii, 173. ^ Herodot. A-ii, 172. r;;v iOj3o7iyv ttjv ^Olvfi-iziKiiv. See the description and plan of Tempe in Dr. Clarke's Travels, vol. iv, ch. ix, p. 280 ; and the Dissertation of Kriegk, in which all the facts about this interesting defile are collected and compared (Das Thessalische Tempe. Frankfort, 1834). The description of Tempe in Livy (xliii, 18; xliv, 6) seems more accu- rate than that in Pliny (H. N. iv, 8). We may remark that both the one and the other belong to times subsequent to the formation and organiza- tion of the Macedonian empire, when it came to hold Greece in a species of dependence. The Macedonian princes after ^Uexander the Great, while they added to the natural difficulties of Tempe by fortifications, at the same time made the road more convenient as a militaiy communication. In the time of Xerxes, these natural difficulties had never been approached by the hand of art, and were doubtless much greater. The present road through the pass is about thirteen feet broad in its narrowest part, and between fifteen and twenty feet broad elsewhere, — tht pass is about five English miles iu length (Kriegk, pp. 21-33).