08-21-2019, 07:26 PM
(08-21-2019, 10:09 AM)CaesarAugustus Wrote: in the Parthian campaigns Rome moved armies well over one hundred thousand soldiers (without counting followers), in arid or semi-desert territories.
What evidence do we have for this? As far as I know, the only figures for Parthian/Persian invasion forces are those of Galerius in AD298 (25,000 men) and Julian in AD363 (65,000) - the latter number comes from Zosimus, who quotes much higher figures for tetrarchic civil war armies operating in Europe, for example.
Contrast this with the contemporary panegyricist on Constantine, who said that emperor never led more than 40,000 men, as, in the words of Alexander the Great, a greater number than that is 'no longer an army but a mob'...
Surely the point is that we should be dubious of all our upper-range estimates for ancient armies. The higher the number, the greater the caution.
Nathan Ross
