Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

till 19th century Uk Officers were taught how to estimate troop numbers in the field as part of their field craft and were pretty good at it

I was pretty sure I'd read of Roman officers doing a similar sort of thing, but a quick search yields no results! Maybe it's in Frontinus, or Vegetius? They count the number in one small area and then multiply, I think. Austen's Exploratio doesn't seem to have anything to say about it.

There's an interesting note in Caesar (Gallic War 1.29), which I've mentioned before in the depths of this thread. After the defeat of the Helvetii 'records written out in Greek' were found (conveniently!) in the enemy camp, giving a full register of all the tribal groups, both combatants and non-combatants. The total was 368,000, of whom 92,000 were able to bear arms - 1 person in 4, in other words - the rest being 'children, old men and women' (as Caesar puts it; we might be suspicious of the neatness of this calculation).

Using the same ratio on the figures given by Dio - assuming they are based on something genuine-ish, and also assuming (as Tacitus has Paulinus suggest in his pre-battle speech) that the Britons were all mixed up, unarmed women among the warriors - this would give 30,000 Iceni and Trinovante warriors at the start of the revolt, and 57,500 warriors by the final battle. That sounds at least plausible, although we have no way of judging its accuracy.

(on the numbers of Britons slain, it would be tempting to assume that whoever came up with 70-80K dead Britons just took the figure from whatever source Dio was using for the complete army and divided it roughly by three...)