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τέσσερας μὲν δὴ παρεξῆκε ἡμέρας: these four days have to be reckoned with in the Dialy of ArtemisionThermopylai. Hdt's. reason for the delay is to be noted: Xerxes was waiting to allow the Greeks to run away (ἀποδρήσεσθαι): that is absurd. Diodoros 11. 5 makes the king send for reinforcements, and inserts overtures to Leonidas here, in rhetorical style; but negotiations there may have been. Rawlinson suggests, as the real reason of the delay, that the king was looking to obtain “the co-operation of his fleet, and only began the attack when that hope failed him”—an extraordinary oversight, for, as recent students have generally perceived, the Persian fleet and army were co-operating, and Hdt. himself makes the three engagements by sea synchronous with the three days' fighting on land; cp. further, Appendix V. § 4.
πέμπτῃ: the first day of actual fighting; cp. 8. 9-11
Μήδους τε καὶ Κισσίους: cp. cc. 62, 86. Were these infantry, and infantry only? The terrain would not lend itself to cavalry (cp. c. 176 supra), though the word ἀπηλαύνοντο just below might suggest mounted men. Diodoros (in a very rhetorical passage, 11. 6, 7) makes the Medes advance first, and on their defeat, the Kissians and Sakai.
θυμωθείς: cp. c. 11 supra, c. 238 infra. It can hardly be taken seriously here.
ὡς δ᾽ ἐσέπεσον ... ἔπιπτον: not very elegant. The protasis, too, is less Herodotean than ὅκως ἐσπέσοιεν would have been (Stein).
πολλοὶ μὲν ἄνθρωποι ... ὀλίγοι δὲ ἄνδρες: it seems most forcible to take ἄνθ. and ἄνδρες as predicative. The antithesis is unfair to the ‘barbarians’ on Hdt's. own showing. For the matter cp. 8. 68. The form of the antithesis is common: πολλοὶ μὲν ναρθηκοφόροι παῦροι δέ τε βακχοί Plato, Phaedo 69; πολλοὶ γάρ εἰσιν κλητοί, ὀλίγοι δὲ ἐκλεκτοί S. Matth. 22. 14. The subject of ἐποίευν is rather vague. Stein regards the remark as an insertion, and mal à propos (“an nicht eben passender Stelle”).
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