Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/58

 34 fflSTORY OF GREECE. the fight to entangle an antagonist. The Ethiopians from the Upper Nile had their bodies painted half red and half white, wore the skins of lions and panthers, and carried, besides the javelin, a long bow with arrows of reed, tipped with a point of sharp stone. It was at Doriskus that the fighting men of the entire land- army were first numbered; for Herodotus expressly informs us that the various contingents had never been numbered separate- ly, and avows his own ignorance of the amount of each. The means employed for numeration were remarkable. Ten thou- sand men were counted,^ and packed together as closely as possi- ble : a line was drawn, and a wall of inclosure built around the space which they had occupied, into which all the army was directed to enter successively, so that the aggregate number of divisions, comprising ten thousand each, was thus ascertained. One hundred and seventy of these divisions were affirmed by the informants of Herodotus to have been thus numbered, con- stituting a total of one million seven hundred thousand foot, besides eighty thousand horse, many war-chariots from Libya and camels from Arabia, with a presumed total of twenty thou- sand additional men.2 Such was the vast land-force of the Per- sian monarch : his naval equipments were of corresponding magnitude, comprising not only the twelve hundred and seven triremes,^ or war-ships, of three banks of oars, but also three thousand smaller vessels of war and transports. The crew of each trireme comprised two hundred rowers, and thirty fighting- men, Persians or Sakas ; that of each of the accompanying ves- sels included eighty meiv according to an average which Herodo- tus supposes not far from the truth. If we sum up these items, the total numbers brought by Xerxes from Asia to the plain and to the coast of Doriskus would reach the astounding figure of ' The army which Darius had conducted against Scythia is said to have heen counted by divisions of ten thousand each, but the process is not de- Bcribed in detail (Herodot. iv, 87). ' Herodot. vii, 60, 87, 184. This same rude mode of enumeration was employed by Darius Codomannus a century and a half afterwards, before he marched his army to the field of Issus (Quintus Cortius, iii, 2, 3, p. 24, Mutzel). • Herodot. vii, 89-97.