Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Sean Manning]

It strikes me that 230,000 is on the close order of modern estimates of the total young adult male population of Britain in the first century CE!

I wonder if the '70,000 citizens and allies' apparently killed at London and Colchester (14.33), and the 'little less than 80,000 Britons' reportedly slain at the final battle (14.37) also represent significant numbers? The first number is probably far in excess of the total citizen population of the province; the second is also highly unlikely. Could there be a connection between them?

Valerius Maximus 9.2.4 ext. 3 has Mithridates order the massacre of 80,000 Romans in Asia (Plutarch, Sulla 24.4, says 150,000)

Greek and Roman historians could absolutely use counts (surely Caesar had access to the daily strength of his own legions) and absolutely perform arithmetic on counts to estimate things (Herodotus and Thucydides and Polybius all walk readers through such calculations) but I think this is a good alternative way to think about numbers for barbarian armies.

Xenophon's account of Leuctra (Xen. Hellenica 6.4.9) complains that the Peloponesian peltasts and cavalry attacked too soon and the merchants and the baggage carriers were not able to leave the Boeotian army so it looked bigger than it really was. So its not just a trope that it was hard to estimate the size of an army with lots of hangers-on.