Quote:Its also worth noting that the there were 30,000 light troops with the Spartans to help protect them against trouble as well...
...actually Herodotus records that each of the 5,000 Spartan Hoplites was accompanied by no less than 7 "light armed helots"(serfs), making 35,000. He records that each Hoplite from every other state was accompanied by a single 'auxiliary' - probably a reference to the Hoplite's usual batman/servant/shield-bearer (
skeuophoros). On this basis he gives the incredible total of 69,500 'light troops', and the Greek army totalling an unlikely 110,000 ! This is the
only time we hear of Spartans being accompanied by so many Helots, and the number is clearly suspect - more likely, each Spartan had one Helot batman. This force, if the number is correct, of 38,700 Hoplites is incidently the largest such army ever assembled. Herodotus' numbers are even more unbelievable for the Persians, whom he says totalled 300,000 and were accompanied by 50,000 Greeks ! ( Earlier he gave equally unbelievable totals for Xerxes invasion force of 1,700,000 soldiers and a further 517,610 men with the fleet !! This excludes an equal number of servants etc. To this, Xerxes adds Thracians and others collected en route - 300,000 - and comes up with a Grand Total of 5,283,320 men !! Then there were even more eunuchs, sutlers, camp followers and soldier's women)
We can only guess at the real size of the armies, but one clue is that Herodotus describes the Persian camp/stockade as having sides 10 stades long ( 2,000 yards). If correct, such a camp would hold around 100,000 men maximum, implying that the Persian Army including perhaps 10,000 or so Medising Greeks numbered around 50,000,plus an equal number of servants etc who like the Greeks may have had some function as 'light troops'.
Nevertheless, despite Herodotus' notorious innacuracy over numbers, Nikolaos/'Cole's point that Pausanias' Greek army had plenty of light troops to cover it's flanks if need be is quite correct, though generally they skirmished ahead of the phalanx, falling back through the open-ordered ranks as the armies closed. These 'light troops' (
psiloi/gymnetes) were not organised, did not have shields or armour, and were armed with javelins and slings, or quite often just threw stones!
From the Peloponnesian War onward, they would be augmented/replaced by better organised and more efficient 'light troops' in the form of Thracian mercenary Peltasts ( armed with a light shield -
pelta -and javelins), and eventually Greek imitation Peltasts, usually mercenaries........