hundred thousand men; which made all his land forces together amount to two millions one hundred thousand men.
His fleet, as it was when it set out from Asia, consisted of twelve hundred and seven vessels, or galleys, all of three banks of oars, and intended for fighting. Each vessel carried two hundred men, natives of the country that fitted them out, besides thirty more, that were either Persians or Medes, or of the Sacæ: which made in all two hundred and seventy-seven thousand six hundred and ten men. The European nations augmented his fleet with an hundred and twenty vessels, each of which carried two hundred men, in all four and twenty thousand: these added to the other amount make three hundred and one thousand six hundred and ten men.
Besides this fleet, which consisted all of large vessels, the small galleys of thirty and fifty oars, the transport ships, the vessels that carried the provisions and those that were employed in other uses, amounted to three thousand. If we reckon but eighty men in each of these vessels, one with another, that made in the whole two
hundred and forty thousand men.
Thus when Xerxes arrived at Thermopylæ, his land and sea-forces together made up the number of two millions, six hundred and forty-one thousand, six hundred and ten men, without including servants, eunuchs, women, sutlers, and other people of that sort, which usually
follow an army, and of which the number at this time was equal to that of the forces: so that the whole number of souls that followed Xerxes in this expedition, amounted to five millions, two hundred eighty-three thousand two hundred and twenty. This is the computation which
Herodotus makes of them, and in which Plutarch and Isocrates agree with him. Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Æ ian and others, fall very short of this number in their calculation: but their accounts of the matter appear to be less authentic than that of Herodotus, who lived in the same age this expedition was made, and who repeats the inscription engraved by the order of the Amphictyons, upon the monument of those Grecians who were killed at Thermopylæ, which expressed that they fought against three millions of men.
