02-17-2012, 11:38 PM
Quote:Hi Robert, thanks for the commentsBefore we start citing the Grand Armee, I think we need to study it and make sure we understand it. From what I have read, it was divided into several columns which marched hundreds of miles apart, and was intended to establish Napoleon's dominance of Europe indefinitely. Despite the Greek feeling that it was the most important thing ever, Xerxes' Yauna campaign was just an attempt to conquer another province and punish those who loved the Lie by supporting rebels and burning temples. The French had fought Russia with mixed success for twenty years; Darius and Xerxes had been generally successful in their Yauna wars, excepting the shock of the Yauna Revolt and the setback at Marathon. And Napoleon had a little thing called a general staff ...
Robert Vermaat post=307084 Wrote:Nikos, when you are reacting to a post, please take care not to 'lecture' or to stray from the text you are reacting to. I can't recall anybody (including myself advocating the statement that the Persians could not mobilise a million men more than 1 million people just because they were "ancient" or... "Asian". Why are you claiming this?
Apologies, I do like to write. But then even when I do play the "specialist" and not the "average layman" and do present facts as written in ancient texts people miss it and concentrate on the rest of debatable things.
I am claiming this because we are ready to accept the size of Grand Armee and we jump on every supposed reason to present objections for the case of Xerxes and his army simply because people are ready to believe Napoleontian records and to dismiss ancient Greek records as if Napoleontian records cannot be wrong or falsified for any given propagandist reason or any common error (i,e. mixing non-combattants and logistics, assuming platoons had the standard number, accepting accounts of allies etc.)... or as if ancient Greeks could not do rough calculations sorting out 100,000 from 1,000,000. If Herodotus a few decades later speaks in the region of 2 million for the overall mobilisation I do accept that he certainly includes all, i.e. land, marine, logistics. Why not? Why would I jump to call him way-off reality?
Historically the only reason that writers jumped to call him erroneous were the reasons I explained above. When seen in details, we have absolutely no valid single reason to dismiss his numbers.
It is naturally to have more documentation and papers and thus establishing better the numbers for the Grand Armee than for an army 2500 years ago that came from a different continent whose culture and historic record was extensively levelled by islamic expansion and it is for this reason we have to employ indirect methods. But that does not mean we have nothing in hands. We have everything in place to have a rough idea of the numbers implicated and everything points that ancient writers' overall calculations referring in the region of millions and not 100,000s like modern ones, were more realistic.