Xerxes Five Million Men

[floofthegoof]

"Through out history troops that loose all hope to survival simply die".
That sentence caught my attention, because there is another disparity I have noticed long ago, when we read literary sources, casualties are given in many thousands, normally there are no details of wounded or missing in action, however in battles in which we have detailed accounts of casualties we see that in fact there are much more wounded and missing soldiers than killed, for example.Lee at Antietam had 13.724 casualties, but from this number only 2.700 were killed, 9.024 wounded and 2.000 missing, in Napoleonic and XVIII century battle the numbers are consistent, there is a ratio 5 to 10 wounded to 1 killed, and in a routed army missing in action and prisoners many times are most of the casualties. And of course, the 2 main source of casualties for any army in campaign were disease and desertions. I don´t believe in those numbers of hundreds or ten of thousands killed in battle.

This is true, ancient sources are always very absolute that way. When I was reading Livy, I noticed that certain of their early enemies, like the Veii or the Volcians would attack every single year, and every single year their troops would be supposedly anhilated and their city burned to the ground, yet they would always be back the following year. That can't be right.

After thinking a bit, I think I am going to adjust my estimate closer to hoplite14's 500,000. Xerxes clearly wanted to make conquests by putting on a big show, and this worked for the whole northern half of Greece. That really makes many of the observations about the huge size very suspect, since that was exactly what Xerxes wanted to be known about his army. The only thing we can trust from that evidence is what did not serve Xerxes, which is that northern Greece could not support the army. I think that 500,000 would be a good number that might also meet the condition that is was way too big for a sustainable campaign. I still think that would be a minimum though, as I do believe that the Greek cities would be able to field 100,000.