Xerxes Five Million Men

[floofthegoof]

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.