and oil to Africa, which, at that time, had none of these commodities.
Ptolemy, says Theocritus, commanded 33,339 cities. I suppose the singularity of the number was the reason of assigning it. Diodorus Siculus assigns three millions of inhabitants to Egypt, a very small number; but then he makes the number of their cities amount to 18,000—an evident contradiction.
He says the people were formerly seven millions. Thus remote times are always most envied and admired.
That Xerxes’s army was extremely numerous I can readily believe, both from the great extent of his empire and from the foolish practice of the Eastern nations of encumbering their camp with a superfluous multitude; but will any rational man cite Herodotus’s wonderful narrations as an authority? There is something very rational, I own, in Lysias’s argument upon this subject. Had not Xerxes’ army been incredibly numerous, says he, he had never built a bridge over the Hellespont: it had been much easier to have transported his men over so short a passage, with the numerous shipping of which he was master.