All this was false, but Themistocles thought it would serve his purpose well to make the statement; for, in case he should, at any future time, in following the ordinary fate of the bravest and most successful Greek generals, be obliged to fly in exile from his country to save his life, it might be important for him to have a good understanding beforehand with the King of Persia, though a good understanding, founded on pretensions so hypocritical and empty as these, would seem to be worthy of very little reliance. In fact, for a Greek general, discomfited in the councils of his own nation, to turn to the Persian king with such prompt and cool assurance, for the purpose of gaining his friendship by tendering falsehoods so bare and professions so hollow, was an instance of audacious treachery so original and lofty as to be almost sublime.
Xerxes pressed on with the utmost diligence toward the north. The country had been ravaged and exhausted by his march through it in coming down, and now, in returning, he found infinite difficulty in obtaining supplies of food and water for his army. Forty-five days were consumed in getting back to the Hellespont. During all this time the privations and sufferings of the troops increased every day. The soldiers were spent with fatigue, exhausted with hunger, and harassed with incessant apprehensions of attacks from their enemies. Thousands of the sick and wounded that attempted at first to follow the army, gave out by degrees as the columns moved on. Some were left at the encampments; others lay down by the road-sides, in the midst of the day's march, wherever their waning strength finally failed them; and every where broken chariots, dead and dying beasts of burden, and the bodies of soldiers, that lay neglected where they fell, encumbered and choked the way. In a word, all the roads leading toward the northern provinces exhibited in full perfection those awful scenes which usually mark the track of a great army retreating from an invasion.
The men were at length reduced to extreme distress for food. They ate the roots and stems of the herbage, and finally stripped the very bark from the trees and devoured it, in the vain hope that it might afford some nutriment to re-enforce the vital principle, for a little time at least, in the dreadful struggle which it was waging within them. There are certain forms of pestilential disease which, in cases like this, always set in to hasten the work which famine alone would be too slow in performing. Accordingly, as was to have been expected, camp fevers, choleras, and other corrupt and infectious maladies, broke out with great violence as the army advanced along the northern shores of the Ægean Sea; and as every victim to these dreadful and hopeless disorders helped, by his own dissolution, to taint the air for all the rest, the wretched crowd was, in the end, reduced to the last extreme of misery and terror.