7.197.4
Hearing all this, Xerxes, when he came to the temple grove, refrained from entering it himself and bade all his army do likewise, holding the house and the precinct of Athamas' descendants alike in reverence. note
ch. 198
7.198.1
These were Xerxes' actions in Thessaly and Achaea. From here he came into Malis along a gulf of the sea, in which the tide ebbs and flows daily. note There is low-lying ground about this gulf, sometimes wide and sometimes very narrow, and around it stand high and inaccessible mountains which enclose the whole of Malis and are called the Rocks of Trachis.
7.198.2
Now the first town by the gulf on the way from Achaea is Anticyra, near to which the river Spercheus flows from the country of the Enieni and issues into the sea. About twenty furlongs from that river is another named Dyras, which is said to have risen from the ground to aid Heracles against the fire that consumed him and twenty furlongs again from that there is another river called the Black river.
ch. 199
7.199.1
The town of Trachis is five furlongs away from this Black river. Here is the greatest distance in all this region between the sea and the hills on which Trachis stands, for the plain is twenty-two thousand plethra in extent. note In the mountains which hem in the Trachinian land there is a ravine to the south of Trachis, through which the river Asopus flows past the lower slopes of the mountains.
ch. 200
7.200.1
There is another river south of the Asopus, the Phoenix, a little stream which flows from those mountains into the Asopus. Near this stream is the narrowest place; there is only space for a single cart-way. Thermopylae is fifteen furlongs away from the river Phoenix.
7.200.2
Between the river and Thermopylae there is a village named Anthele, past which the Asopus flows out into the sea, and there is a wide space around it in which stand a temple of Amphictyonid Demeter, seats for the Amphictyons, note and a temple of Amphictyon himself
ch. 201
7.201.1
King Xerxes lay encamped in Trachis in Malis and the Hellenes in the pass. note This place is called Thermopylae by most of the Hellenes, but by the natives and their neighbors Pylae. note Each lay encamped in these places. Xerxes was master of everything to the north note from Trachis, and the Hellenes of all that lay toward the south on the mainland. note
ch. 202
7.202.1
The Hellenes who awaited the Persians in that place were these: three hundred Spartan armed men; one thousand from Tegea and Mantinea, half from each place; one hundred and twenty from Orchomenus in Arcadia and one thousand from the rest of Arcadia; that many Arcadians, four hundred from Corinth, two hundred from Phlius, and eighty Mycenaeans. These were the Peloponnesians present; from Boeotia there were seven hundred Thespians and four hundred Thebans.
