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Xerxes Five Million Men - floofthegoof - 05-19-2005
This huge number is an estimate by Herodotus, but modern scholars tend to look at this number as outragiuosly inflated. I've read many times the modern estimate of 300,000, which is drastically different.
Herodotus gives the numbers from each country in the Persian empire, and for each country individually, the number of troops raised seems reasonable. The total adds up to about a million actual fighting men, the other four million are estimates by H. of troops joined along the way plus hangers on (cooks, people selling things to the troops, women etc.). This estimate of non-fighting people is of course very speculative, but the one million fighting men seems to come from a more concrete source.
What are the specific arguments against Herodotus's numbers? Since he is the only source, it would seem that the burden of proof would be on the detractors.
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - Aryaman2 - 05-19-2005
Numbers in Ancient armies is a very interesting subject that I have studied with some detail. As you say, Herodotus was the only source, so we don´t have any way to measure his reliability on numbers, other than common sense, and that is why I think the million men, or even the 300.000 men army is grossly exagerated.
It is the same as the numbers in medieval armies, you find armies in the hundreds of thousands in the sources, however once you get reliable documents on numbers, they are extremely low. Think about it, the "military revolution" of the XVII century meant that Louis XIV could raise an army of around 450.000, but even that number could be inflated as much as 1/3 by "ghost" soldiers. add to that this is not a field army, like the one of Xerxes, but most of it were garrisons, the largest field armies were around 100.000, and that is only in the Low Countries, where the high density of population and maritime traffic allowed the building of huge depots from where supply lines could support large concentration of troops. Because all this comparations, common sense tells me that herodotus numbers are highly inflated.
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - hoplite14gr - 05-19-2005
Herodotus was accused even by Plutarchos for exaggeration.
The large Asiatic plains would be able to support big populations compared to Europe an therefore bigger armies. 5 million is certainly too much though!!
An Army of 450 000 would be possible for Xerxes to raise but his first problem would be how to supply it after he entered the smaller plains of Europe and second the quality of the army. It was possible to field 1000 ships including boats and transport ships and have another 200.000 people there but I doubt if more than 60 to 70 000 of them were combatants.
Various mobs and camp followers were attaching themselves to armies from the dawn of time but they were almost always a liability.
No chance that he would raise millions!
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - Carlton Bach - 05-19-2005
Hans Delbrück made an interesting estimate. Had Herodotus been right the tail of Xerxes' army would have been leaving Persepolis the day the van arrived at Thermophylae. Yes, this is based on late 19th century practises and ancient armies may have 'bunched' considerably more, but even if you cut it in half it still shows the idea of millions of Persians is ridiculous.
In fact I'm dubious enough about hundreds of thousands.
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - floofthegoof - 05-19-2005
I don't have the book with me as I am at work right now, but I want to point out some things I remember from it.
This expedition by Xerxes, looks very much like a gigantic logistical failure. This army he raised (not including Mardonius's 300,000 picked men who fought at Platea) fought one tiny battle against a few guys at Thermopylae, yet almost none of them made it home. Herodotus mentions that the produce of the land could not support them. They ate all the bark off the trees as they marched back, and that many died of disease.
Another indication of the pathetic state they were in was the story given to Herodotus by Thersandrus, who was present at a feast given to Mardonius and some leading Persians by a wealthy Theban man. This was after Mardonius and Xerxes split their forces so Xerxes could go home. One of the Persians, presumably an officer or part of Mardonius's bodyguard, with tears in his eyes, told Thersandrus that he was certain that all the Persians would be dead soon. This is from one of Xerxes very best troops that Mardonius judged worthy of keeping in Greece! If he felt this way, you could imagine that the rest of the army was having a very rough going for some long time.
From what I can gather about Xerxes character, this was a man who had big ideas, and fully expected his subordinates to take care of the details. Informing Xerxes that something he wanted was not possible was a very delicate matter. Artabazus was the only one to openly cast doubt on the expedition, and Xerxes patience was wearing thin with his defeatism. I wouldn't be surprised if there were many who shard Artabazus's opinion, who decided to keep quiet.
One question I would like to answer is this; what size army would be required, having full control of the resources north of the Pelopennese, to utterly starve to death in one season?
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - floofthegoof - 05-19-2005
Quote:Hans Delbrück made an interesting estimate. Had Herodotus been right the tail of Xerxes' army would have been leaving Persepolis the day the van arrived at Thermophylae. Yes, this is based on late 19th century practises and ancient armies may have 'bunched' considerably more, but even if you cut it in half it still shows the idea of millions of Persians is ridiculous.
In fact I'm dubious enough about hundreds of thousands.
I have to disagree with him on this one, as we know that Athens today can pack 3.7 million people into it's limits, who actually live there, and can hold many more visiters. 1 million fighting men would have to stand probably 50 meters apart to go from thermopylae to persopolis.
Edit: that's a wild guess on my part BTW :lol:
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - Aryaman2 - 05-19-2005
Quote:One question I would like to answer is this; what size army would be required, having full control of the resources north of the Pelopennese, to utterly starve to death in one season?That is of course impossible to answer, as we don´t really know what were those resources, and the Greek themselves didn´t know, as they could wildly oscillate from one year harvest to another.
In general, I am a "minimalist" on the size of armies when the only source we have is a literary one, because I have had the chance to compare medieval literary and reliable documentary sources about the same army, and the literary sourcess inflate the numbers as much as 10 times, and that is in late medieval times, when numbers are not hundreds of thousnads, but tens of thousands. Think that, how did Herodotus get his number? For sure, the Persians themselves didn´t knoe the number of their forces (That was very common for premodern armies, as numbers were changing everyday, there were no accurate records). I remember that Polybius writes about the numbers of Carthage forces at the start of the Second Punic War, and he says he is quoting an old punic inscription. Then the numbers are very detailed for the forces in Africa and Spain, and all of them are around 10.000, then he says that the army of Hannibal were 90.000, a round figure without details, very suspicious to me.
Another comparative exercise, ancient armies, and Europeans armies until mid XVII century relied mainly on foraging rather than on supply lines, that is another limiting factor, as they have to be continually on the move once they eat up the resources of 1 area, that would be the method used by Xerxes army. Thta this is a limiting factor is clear from the evolution of European armies, before 1650 the largest field armies (numbers from reliable sources) were about 30.000 maximum, after that field armies steadily increase in size, to reach a size of around 120.000.
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - floofthegoof - 05-19-2005
Quote:Think that, how did Herodotus get his number?
He may very well have guessed. I have seen that H. is not the best guesser. There is one fascinating passage regarding the Egyptians. In H's time, the Egyptians knew the names of 333 of their previous kings. (Side Note: It's amazing to me, how the Egyptians could keep such excellent historic records for so long, only for it to be almost completely lost soon after, waiting to be partially rediscovered in modern times!)
From this Herodotus calculated that the regime went back 11,000 years! Assuming that the average reign was 33 years long. If you think about it though, 33 years is really a very long reign for a king. 10 years is probably much more like it as an average, which results in 3330 years, which is pretty close to what we believe today.
When it comes to math, it doesn't take much to get the final result very wrong. If H. had used this kind of estimating for each component of the Persian army, things could easily get out of hand. Although, that doesn't actually prove that he was as far off as people think.
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - floofthegoof - 05-19-2005
The biggest mistake I think he is making concerns the number of army followers. This number is very suspicious. I think H. is assuming that the number of followers would scale up evenly with the number of troops. It would seem to me that any army, so long as it was large enough to cause a commotion, would attract the same number of followers from the lands it passed through as any other army. A 3000 man army might well attract 12,000 followers on it's march, but that in no way indicates that there are 4 million people in those same lands waiting around for a milion man army to come along. The amount of followers would seem to me to be completely dependent on the number of people who were actually watching when the army passed through their territory. I'm sure all the people who wanted to follow would do so, no matter the size of the army.
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - floofthegoof - 05-19-2005
Ok, now I'm home with my book and I can see that I made a mistake. H. does *not* give a number for each individual nation. I must have confused it for something else I read. In fact, this is what is said about the numbers.
Quote:What the exact number of the troops of each nation was I cannot say with certainty - for it is not mentioned by any one - but the whole land army together was found to amount to one million seven hundred thousand men. The manner in which the numbering took place was the following. A body of ten thousand men was brought to a certain place, and the men were made to stand as close together as possible; after which a circle was drawn around them, and the men were let go. Then where the circle had been, a fence was built about the height of a man's middle, and the enclosure was filled continually with fresh troops, till the whole army had in this way been numbered. When the numbering was over, the troops were drawn up according to their several nations.
That does sound like a fairly accurate way to measure! Anyone have any doubts about this method? Can anyone read the actual greek text to see how H. says 1,700,000?
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - Kevin J. Aschenmeier - 05-20-2005
Herodotus 7.60.1 writes
"hebdomekonta kai hekaton muriades" this translates literally as 70 and 100 muriades. most people take muriade to be 10,000. So I gues 1,700,000. Does anyone know how to get this computer to type real greek? It would be a lot easier to deal with.
Kevin
Xerces millions - Anonymous - 05-20-2005
Most authorities think Xerxes' army needs scaling-down. I think the question is, how far? I don't think that the chroniclers of the Classical Age were anywhere near as lax in their estimation of numbers as Medieval ones. This is just a feeling I get from the different styles, coupled with what seems a universal distrust, among the experts, of Medieval calculation.
Perhaps I just want to believe in the story of the valiant stand against truly hopeless odds, but I think there must have been a huge disproportion between the two forces at Thermopylae. Xerxes himself appears to have thought the outcome so clearly inevitable, that he sat and waited for several days for the Greeks' nerve to break.
Estimates for Greek numbers from Connolly and Hanson seem to be 6,100 at Thermopylae and 1,000 Phocians on "detached duty". "Greece and Rome at War" lists the traditional 300 Spartans, plus 900 Helots; 2,800 "other Peloponesians"; 1,000 Phocians; the "whole army" of Locris; 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans.
What could we say is the size of an army that would guarantee the annihilation of 6,000 men in a highly defensible position? Are there any standard calculations for this? I've heard that 20th Century strategists considered 3-1 odds necessary for a decisive victory between similarly-equipped land armies in open terrain. I would have thought that Thermopylae was expected to enable the defenders to face much heavier odds than this. I wonder whether the Greeks and Persians themselves actually considered the numbers ( and the Greeks were just the kind of lovers of theory to do just that) - "Yes, Sir, I can hold an army ten times the size of ours in this position." "Ah, jolly good, old chap.... Um... Just one thing...Our observers estimate the enemy has an army one hundred times the size of ours... " "Oh."
Or, on the Persian side, "Great King, we outnumber the enemy fifty-to-one; we shall brush their contemptible little army* aside with one sweep of our armoured sleeve!"* "Yes, well, don't bother me with the arithmetic, old chap, just get on with it, there's a good fellow..."
I also wonder what experience might have taught them about the effectiveness of defensive positions like Thermopylae and the relative merits of each side's equipment. We know the two sides had experience of fighting each other and each must have been aware of the other's "track record" against other peoples. Did the Greeks believe in the Hoplite panoply and the phalanx in the way that the British at Rorke's Drift believed in their rifles? Did the Persians believe in the power of numbers in the way that Boudicca did against Suetonius?
There is another consideration: Xerxes (and some Greeks) considered his army to represent awesome force* as compared to ALL THE FORCES Greece could field. Again according to Connolly, the Greeks sent over 100,000 men to Plataea. If the two sides had any realistic idea of their own and each other's numbers, the Persians must, I think, have had between 300,000 and 1,000,000 SOLDIERS (at odds from 3-1 to 10-1) to have been so arrogantly confident of their success.
How would this army be supplied? I don't accept that the Persians would have relied on foraging, as later armies did. The empire had been around a long time and was accustomed to moving large armies over great distances. Persia controlled the breadbasket of the Mediterranean world, Egypt, and the seas which separated it from Greece. I don't see why the commander of an army which built a pontoon bridge to cross from Asia Minor into Europe, would not have had the wit to re-supply his forces from a base far behind his front line.
Why, then, did Persians starve on the way home? I don't know. I wonder how far we can trust reports that they did so, and, if so, in what numbers. What evidence is there , that very few ever reached home? I would accept that the retreat could easily have become a nightmare, like Napoleon's from Moscow, with the army having been broken at Plataea, but this is not evidence that the Persians were not well-supplied and supported on the way in, when the Great King was actively involved and interested in what happened to them, and has no bearing on his ability to support a truly huge army.
I have no idea what evidence there is for or against the notion that Xerxes supplied his army from beyond Greece. No doubt some of you will inform me on this. Connolly posits an army of 250, 000, of whom 75% were effectives. This number is extrapolated from figures given by General Sir Frederick Maurice. He may be right, but he was of the generation which asserted that Singapore could not be taken by land because no army of sufficient size would be able to get through the jungle.
*Play "Spot the Source" for fun and... well, amusement.
Numbers - Aryaman2 - 05-20-2005
1) as for the counting method decribed by Herodotus, just common sense again, isns that easier to deploy forces in regular lines and ranks, and count them, that build any fence? As a side note, in Medieval writers those tales are not unknown, like "They passed through a defile, and only 10 abreast can be pass" and so on. I think those are simply ways to say "look, I don´t have any documentary evidence, but i hear they did that" so the entire problem is, is Herodotus reliable? and would you trust him on this or your commomn sense instead?
2) Another matter is that we are looking to the entire thing from only one point of view, that of the Greeks. Historians usually write about masses of Ottoman Turks crushing small Christian armies just because they only take into account Christian sources. For instance, at the battle of Kerestes (1596) the Christians say they faced 150.000 Ottomans, an enormous force, but if you read Ottoman sources, they say the Christians were 300.000!! maybe If we had Persian registers we would learn thet Xerxes army was hopelessly outnumbered by huge Greek armies
3) As for Ancient writers being more reliable than Medieval writers, I think you can´t generalize, I wouldn´t trust Arrianus any more than Arnold of Lübeck. I think the more reliable are those who participated in the campaigns they are describing, but only for his own forces, I trust Ammianus when he says the Romans were 13.000 at Argentoratum, I don´t trust him when he says the Barbarians were 35.000.
4) I think it is possible the Persian received supplies by sea, forage and supply lines could be complementary. I think they could also had built depots previously to the campaign at points in the route of the army. I doubt they could move a field army of hundreds of thousands, however. It is just common sense, European powers in XVIII century could not supply an army larger than 120.000 in the Lower Countries, and the limit was much smaller in other less developed and well comunicated regions. If the Persians really could, so they achieved the military revolution 2.300 years before modern Europe, which sounds odd to me.
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - hoplite14gr - 05-20-2005
Herodotus certainly need scaling down.
But it is possible possible to field a large army for a limited period of time.
Persians ans Ottomans could start with 50-60000 men and collecting from their vassals other forces on the way reaching 100 to 120000 especially at the place that they expect to give battle.
Yes historians show favoritism but Xerxes started a grandiose plan based on faulty intelligence partly because of the limitations of his time and partly because he was misled by allies who served their own interests.
It it not the first and I am afraid not the last case of misjudgment in History.
It is possible for Xerxes to have created supply bases but perhaps the system collapsed just like with Napoleon in Russia. After all the best of plans collapse in the first contact with the enemy.
As for armies effectiveness -the fiasco of Marathon could have been blamed on the Generals-and Xerxes constantly be reminded especially by Mardonious of the victory of Sardeis where the Greeks panicked by the numbers and were overwhelmed and Mardonio´s success(?) in Trace. His argument would be that the large armies will succeed over the small ones.
And taking into account the logistical nightmare that followed for those who stayed in Platea the prospects would look grim.
Most likely to justify his defeat Xerxes would have talk of traitors and large Greek armies but why nothing came to light yet?.
Athenians could field 15000 troops and Spartans 20000 Most of the Greek cities south of Thessaly could field between 1000 to 5000 base on the size of city population and the excavations data
If 100000 is possible for the Greek in Platea (we talk only of Peloponessian and Athenian allies) then why the vast plains of Asia the nations under the Shah an Shah (King of kings9 couldn't field between 30000 to 50000 if an egoist would like to stretch their limits only because he could!
Kind regards
Re: Xerxes Five Million Men - floofthegoof - 05-20-2005
I can easily imagine the counting process becoming sloppy towards the end. That's alot of repetitive work to shuffle all those men, many of whom probably didn't know what was going on, over and over into that corral. I guess that could easily inflate the count.
I still think 1 million is a reasonable number.
Here are the major nations joining the land army. I left some out as they were either ruled by the same person as a major nation or had the same equipment. Egypt joined the fleet in case your wondering why they are not in the land army.
Persians
Medes
Assyrians
Bactrians
Indians
Arians
Caspians
Outians
Arabians
2 different Ethiopians(interesting, H. says one with straight hair from the east, wooly hair from the west.)
Libyans
Paphlogonians
Phrygians
Lydians
Thracians
Moschians
Marians
If Greece could raise 100,000 for platea, and I think they could, then all of these nations could easily scrabble together one million. We know that Mardonius had the 300,000 Persians at Platea, so the rest need only to fill 700,000. India, Ethopia(both of them lol) and Libya are fairly large nations. Each one could probably match, if not exceed, Greece in numbers. This is a gigantic empire, one of the largest ever.