The method which Herodotus employed to bring the two series of events into connection with one another is natural; but the result is curious. His narrative of this part of the war is in the form of a twofold diary of the incidents at Thermopylæ and at Artemisium respectively. There are two points of contact between the two diaries—at their beginning, the departure from Therma, and at their end, the disaster at Thermopylæ. It is notable, however, that there is a discrepancy of two days between them. It is probable that two days have somehow been omitted from the Artemisium diary. A close examination of its narrative makes it evident that the historian, either owing to his own miscalculation, or to some error in his source of information, has attributed to one period of twenty-four hours events which could not conceivably have happened within so brief a space of time. That it is a case of pure miscalculation, either on his own part or on that of his authority, ◆H. viii. 15.◆ is further evident from his own statement that the naval battles at Artemisium took place on the same days as the battles in the pass at Thermopylæ; in other words, that the events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth days of the Thermopylæ narrative were synchronous with those of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth days in the record of the Artemisium journal as it stands in his work.[129] ◆H. viii. 1.◆ The fleet which the Greeks despatched to Artemisium was a large one, composed of the following contingents:— Athenians, 127 triremes, part of the crews of which were Platæans; Corinthians, 40 triremes; Megareans, 20 triremes; Chalkidians, (probably Athenian kleruchs from Chalkis,) manned 20 triremes provided by Athens; Æginetans, 18 triremes; Sikyonians, 12 triremes; Lacedæmonians, 10 triremes; Epidaurians, 8 triremes; Eretrians, 7 triremes; Trœzenians, 5 triremes; Styreans, 2 triremes; Keians, 2 triremes and 2 pentekonters: Opuntian Locrians, 7 pentekonters.