Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Sean Manning]

This reflects my own reservations.  On a point of detail, the figure of 120,000 comes from Dio and represents Boudica's army at the start of the revolt.  According to him, this had expanded to 230,000 by the time of the final battle.

The number 120,000 is also an Assyrian, biblical, Greek, and Roman topos for 'a vast army' ( some terrifying numbers )

Is there a precedent for 230,000 being used to denote an exceptionally large army or is that simply Dio's way of indicating that the number at the final battle was nearly twice that at the beginning of the revolt, whatever that may actually have been?

I have not done a comprehensive study of Greek and Roman numbers for barbarian armies but I would not put it past Dio's sources (or the full unepitomized text of Dio? not sure of the state of book 62) thinking "I wrote about how Boudicca's army was defeated here but got reinforcements there, so lets say twice as big less one myriad."

People often want to believe that ancient numbers for barbarian armies were based on counting something, but I think often they were based on other famous numbers (eg. Herodotus' number for Xerxes' fleet is based on a dubious interpretation of a line in Aeschylus' Persai which is based on the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad). When someone says they have a thousand and one things to do, nobody today thinks they counted 1,001 tasks. When we hear a number, we normally sanity check it by comparing other numbers we have heard of. We rarely do our own count because that is a lot of work if its possible at all (Dio did not have a time machine to go back to 61 CE, dress up like a Briton, and count them!) The numbers which educated Greeks or Romans would think of when they heard a number for a barbarian army were not very trustworthy. When we have multiple sources they usually give wildly different numbers, and they can't have all been right.

For the footnoted nuanced version see Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire §6.6.1 or “The Armies of the Teispids and Achaemenids: The Armies of an Ancient World Empire”