Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/363

 THE PLAT^EANS JOIN THE ATHENIANS 345 ment in itself improbable, though it does not come from Herodo- tus, who is our only really valuable authority on the case, and who mentions no numerical total. Indeed, the number named seems smaller than we should have expected, considering that no less than four thousand kleruchs, or out-settled citizens, had just come over from Euboea. A sufficient force of citizens must of course have been left behind to defend the city. The aumbera of the Persians we cannot be said to know at all, nor is there anything certain except that they were greatly superior to the Greeks. "We hear from Herodotus that their armament ori^i- o nally consisted of six hundred ships of war, but we are not told how many separate transports there were ; and, moreover, rein- forcements had been procured as they came across the ^Egean from the islands successively conquered. The aggregate crews on board of all their ships must have been between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred thousand men ; but what propor- tion of these were fighting men, or how many actually did fight at Marathon, we have no means of determining.! There were a 1 Justin (ii, 9) says that the total of the Persian army was six hundred thousand, and that two hundred thousand perished. Plato (Menexen. p. 240) and Lysias (Orat. Funebr. c. 7) speak of the Persian total as five hundred thousand men. Valerius Maximus (v, 3), Pausanias (iv, 25), and Plutarch (Parallel. Graec. ad init.), give three hundred thousand men. Cornelius Nepos (Miltiades, t. 5) gives the more moderate total of one hundred and ten thousand men. See the observations on the battle of Marathon, made both by Colonel Leake and by Mr. Finlay, who have examined and described the locality ; Leake, on the Demi of Attica, in Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. ii, p. 1 60, seq. ; and Finlay, on the Battle of Marathon, in the same Transactions, vol. iii, pp. 360-380, etc. Both have given remarks on the probable numbers of the armies assem- bled ; but there are really no materials, even for a probable guess, in respect to the Persians. The silence of Herodotus (whom we shall find hereafter very circumstantial as to the numbers of the army under Xerxes) seems to show that he had no information which he could trust. His account of the battle of Marathon presents him in honorable contrast with the loose and boastful assertors who followed him ; for though he does not tell us much, and falls lamentably short of what we should like to know, yet all that he does say is reasonable and probable as to the proceedings of both armies and the little which he states becomes more trustworthy on that very ac- count, because it is so little, showing that he keeps strictly within hit rathorities. 15*