MUSTER OF THE ARMY OF XERXES. 35 two million three hundred and seventeen thousand men. Nor is this all. In the farther march from Doriskus to Thermopylae, Xerxes pressed into his service men and ships from all the people whose territory he traversed : deriving from hence a rein- forcement of one hundred and twenty triremes with aggregate crews of twenty-four thousand men, and of three hundred thou- sand new land troops, so that the aggregate of his force when he appeared at Thermopylae was two million six hundred and forty thousand men. To this we are to add, according to the conject- ure of Herodotus, a number not at all inferior, as attendants, slaves, sutlers, crews of the provision-craft and ships of burden, etc., so that the male persons accompanying the Persian king when he reached his first point of Grecian resistance amounted to five million two hundred and eighty-three thousand two hun- dred and twenty ! So stands the prodigious estimate of this army, the whole strength of the Eastern world, in clear and express figures of Herodotus,' who himself evidently supposes the number to have been even greater; for he conceives the number of " camp followers " as not only equal to, but consider- ably larger than, that of fighting-men. We are to reckon, besides, the eunuchs, concubines, and female cooks, at whose number Herodotus does not pretend to guess : together with cattle, beasts of burden, and Indian dogs, in indefinite multi- tude, increasing the consumption of the regular army. To admit this overwhelming total, or anything near to it, is obviously impossible : yet the disparaging remarks which it has drawn down upon Herodotus are noway merited.^ He takes pains to distinguish that which informants told him, from that which he merely guessed. His descrijDtion of the review at Doriskus is so detailed, that he had evidently conversed with persons who were present at it, and had learned the separate totals promulgated by the enumerators, — infantry, cavalry, and ships of war, great and small. As to the number of triremes, ' Herodot. vii, 185-186. ETruyuv navra rbv ijuov arparbv in r^g 'A(Ti??f (-ii, 157). " Vires Orientis et ultima secum Bactra ferens," to use the Ian guage of Virgil about Antony at Actiura.
- Even Dahlmann, who has many good remarks in defence of Herodotus,
hardly does him justice (Herodot, Aus seinem Buche sein Leben, ch. xxxir p. 176).
