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τοῦ μαχίμου: collective neuter; cp. αἱ μάχιμοι μυριάδες just above. and τῶν μαχίμων ἀνδρῶν below; the fleet is of course included. τὴν θεραπηίην, ‘the attendance,’ in collective sense; cp. 1. 199, 5. 21. Hdt. allows one attendant for each combatant, but of course does not suppose that for the naval combatants the attendance was carried in the fighting ships; on the contrary, he expressly confines the naval θεραπηίη to the crews and followers in the commissariat fleet.
ἀκάτοισι: the word is generally feminine; cp. App. Crit. As Thucydides (and others) used a diminutive, ἀκάτιον, perhaps the ἄκατος (masc. or fem.), though relatively light, was not necessarily a small boat. Hdt. seems to reckon the ἄκατοι as most prominently θεραπηίη. καὶ μάλα might perhaps be rendered ‘and of course,’ ‘and indeed’; cp. c. 11 supra.
καὶ δή σφεας ποιέω ἴσους: a good instance of the concessive καὶ δή: with ποιέω cp. ποιήσας (bis), c. 184. Grote iv. 136, followed by Rawlinson, thought it necessary to make hardly any addition to the estimates for non-combatants; but surely that view is unreasonable. Figures and facts are (in a sense) different things, and Hdt. no doubt follows a tradition in regard to an immense armyservice train in the Persian war. Had the force of Xerxes been really composed of Libyans, Aithiopians, and all the other forty-six nations, to the tune of millions, no doubt the combatants would have had to wait on themselves; nor does Hdt. mean that each particular combatant had a body-servant, but that the commissariat and service generally outnumbered the combatants. That seems a sound view; the absurdity and impossibility come in with the extravagant exaggeration of the numbers of combatants. On that subject see further, Appendix II. § 4.
οὕτω ... ἀνδρῶν. Besides the 5,283,220 ἄνδρες there were women of various kinds and eunuchs; see next chapter.
Ξέρξης ὁ Δαρείου: the use of the patronymic here is clearly rhetorical, stylistic, and serves to bar extreme inferences regarding source, date of composition, and so on, in other cases more open to dispute; cp. c. 1 supra. At the same time it must be remembered that the style would not gain point, there would be nothing rhetorical, in this use of the patronymic, but that it is an exception to a rule.
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